Happy New Years! With the start of 2025 comes the usual onslaught of New Years resolutions, usually tied around things like finances, personal health, and employment. But if you’re lost in a sea of potential resolutions, might we suggest one that doesn’t require the gym or counting calories and consider taking part in reskilling?
What is Reskilling?
If you’ve drifted around here before (or other job search/vocational blogs), you’ve probably seen upskilling before. (It was kind of a buzzword a few years ago). Upskilling is improving your existing skill set to become more effective at work and it includes both soft skills and technical skills. But the word fell out of favour, so to speak, and has been rebranded as reskilling.
You know you’re in the corporate world when words get rebranded. Oy.
Ok, but reskilling is a little different from upskilling. The focus on upskilling is to improve existing skills to prepare for major changes in their current role. For example, retail workers may be upskilled to handle different point-of-sales technology or digital marketing. Reskilling on the other hand is meant to help people learn the skills for a new role in a company. Upskilling is considered a subset of reskilling.
Shake it off readers, shake it off.
The goal of reskilling is to prepare people to pivot into a new role, rather than improve on their current role. That’s the main difference.
Why is Reskilling Popular?
From both the perspective of the employers and the employees (both current and prospective), reskilling has a number of advantages.
For the employer, it’s cheaper to train existing staff on new skills rather than hiring new staff with those skills. As we’ve discussed before, the cost of training all new staff is quite high, making it far more desirable to keep existing staff as much as possible. Reskilling also helps to keep current staff engaged and working as many people don’t want to work in a role where they will be doing the same thing all day, every day for their entire career. This also makes the employer more attractive to prospective employees, attracting more talent.
But it’s also beneficial for the employee. Reskilling makes you more valuable since you have the ability to work in new roles as well as old ones and can train others in how to do different jobs. Reskilling makes the job more interesting, which is always a good thing. And for job seekers, reskilling opens out the job market, letting you cast a wider net and having more up to date skills.
(Re)Skills that are Worth Learning
The concept of reskilling has been around for a few years now, but it’s just as important in 2025 as it was in 2020, especially with the advent of large language models in businesses (ie, AI, but for various reasons, it really shouldn’t be called that). Technology is progressing very quickly and businesses that don’t keep up with it run the very real risk of being left far behind. Furthermore, things like social media are still critically important, as are soft skills like critical thinking, communication, and being able to work with a variety of people of all age groups and ethnicities. So, businesses that want to keep up or even get ahead of things have to make sure that they have employees who can work with computers, social media, other people, and AI.
With that in mind, here are some reskills that are worth learning to make the transition from an old role into a new one, easier:
- AI. Love it, hate it or indifferent, large language models are growing and getting more entrenched in the way we do things now. Even if you hate the idea, employers might not and you could end up losing out on opportunities if you don’t have at least some idea of how the systems work. It’s predicted that many roles will be phased out due to the advent of this technology, so it’s very important to stay ahead of that wave. Besides, there are still people behind the system and knowing how to maneuver it all makes you more employable.
- Logistics, programming, or machine oversight.
- Digital customer service
- Auditing
- Technology in general: software, hardware, cyber security, programming, computer repair – pick your favorite(s) and go!
One of the major trends of the last decade has been the importance of being adaptable and ready to learn, whether you’re employed or searching for work. It’s become even more important in the last few years with new technologies exploding onto the scene and more generations crowding into the workplace. Reskilling isn’t just a buzzword; it’s an important part of a successful job search and career.
Keep learning!
