Business management
backwards. In the UK, the Office of National Statistics found the unemployment rate at the end of 2022 was estimated at 3.7%, 0.3 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels. All the same, you shouldn’t be fooled into thinking the Covid season has reached its finale just yet.
There are plenty of depressing reasons why workers might be reluctant to call it quits: layoffs making headlines and warnings that AI is going to take all our jobs are just two. Perhaps, though, a more optimistic reason for the lack of quitters could be because people simply want to leave less.
“Upskilling supports employee engagement and retention, it helps develop skills internally to support business growth and profitability, it helps us attract talent, develop future leaders; the list goes on.”
Jennifer Curtis 65%
The percentage of surveyed UK workers that are prioritising work-life balance when looking for a new job.
Randstad 32% Visier 38
The percentage of workers that report the desire to learn new skills as the top reason for looking for a new job.
Job satisfaction is now higher than it’s been in nearly four decades, according to survey data from The Conference Board, a non-profit think tank that has tracked job satisfaction in the US since 1987. In a late 2022 survey of nearly 2,000 workers, more than 60% reported being content with their jobs, while some of the most satisfied are those who quit one job for another during the pandemic. But it would be disingenuous to suggest this trend of resignations was ever consistent across all Western countries. As BlackRock reports, the labour supply may have been constrained in the US and UK, but it wasn’t so much felt in the eurozone. Instead, it seems that government policies, such as job retention schemes, recent pension and labour market reforms, alongside actions from employers themselves, helped contain labour force exits for permanent workers in Europe. As far as corporate action was concerned, companies tended to provide better and more learning and development opportunities for their employees, rather than necessarily paying them extra.
Calling quits on quitting
Of course, transactional factors such as compensation will always continue to matter. However, as a 2021 survey of UK workers by Randstad showed, employees are increasingly prioritising relational factors of their jobs such as work-life balance, career development and corporate culture over pay and benefits (65%). Furthermore, another 2021 survey from Visier found the desire to learn new skills was reported as a top reason for leaving (32%), followed by a desire for better and more frequent training opportunities (26%).
The point, says Nicki Hay, senior vice-president HR for UK and Ireland at DHL Supply Chain, is that “employees need reassurance that there is flexibility within the business”, adding that upskilling is a vital way forward here. Jennifer Curtis agrees. As the director of employer branding and early career recruiting at Schneider Electric explains, the benefits of upskilling here are virtually endless. As Curtis puts it: “It supports employee engagement and retention, it helps develop skills internally to support business growth and profitability, it helps us attract talent, develop future leaders; the list goes on.”
And, as Hay explains, upskilling not only provides employees with new challenges and skills, it also demonstrates a long-term commitment from the employer to invest in their employee’s advancement potential. Everyone knows it is vital to be able to retain talent and keep colleagues within a business, but to do so, companies “need to be able to demonstrate that there are growth opportunities and clear steps to achieve them”.
Of course, ‘upskilling’ is hardly a new addition to the corporate lexicon. Before the pandemic, it was more commonly heard when referring to training employees to use new or developing technologies. And while this usage continues to be relevant – Hay explains how DHL is seeing an increasing number of colleagues upskilling in data and digitalisation, “where roles relying on these skills simply didn’t exist before” – upskilling has more recently become a vital tool to manage the widening skills gap caused, in large part, by the Great Resignation. You see, those record numbers of quitters in 2021–22 were primarily from the same demographic: middle-aged and older workers, and longer-tenured employees. BlackRock’s ‘After the Great Resignation’ report suggests resignation rates in 2019–22 increased by more than 60% among workers who had been with a company for more than 15 years, and 40% for employees with five to 15 years of service. The upshot? The remaining labour gap is almost predominately made from a lack of middle and upper management – which is where upskilling comes in.
“When it comes to the talent shortage affecting the need for upskilling, absolutely, it is an issue,” Curtis emphasises. “The way that we’re treating upskilling, or the way that we think about it, is the process of training employees to acquire new skills or enhance existing ones.” With surplus management positions and increasing numbers of younger workers, upskilling allows one to promote junior or early staff straight into management roles. “By investing in upskilling,” Curtis adds, “Schneider aims to make our
Chief Executive Officer /
www.ns-businesshub.com
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