Level up your L&D: Tactical, strategic, and transformational upskilling

In today’s constantly changing tech world, upskilling your teams is critical to innovation and delivering business outcomes. But a culture of learning and development doesn’t spring up on its own. It takes time. 

Think about it this way: You don’t start at a run—you start by crawling, and then walking, before gradually working up speed.

Building a learning culture is the same. Rather than try to build a “culture” from the ground up, work in stages to grow and scale upskilling throughout your organization. 

In this article, we’ll cover three key stages of tech skill development: tactical, strategic, and transformational. We’ll explain what each stage entails and how to build the upskilling strategy you need to scale learning and meet the changing tech landscape head on.

Start your tech skill development efforts small before aiming for sweeping change. The tactical—or crawl—stage is about establishing the fundamentals and introducing learning to your organization.

Think about your organization’s current culture. Is skill development part of it? Do leaders at all levels encourage learning?  

If not, you need to build learning into your existing values and culture. For example, if your organization holds sustainability as a core value, you might pledge to plant a tree for everyone who improves their skill level or earns a certification. Values like curiosity and experimentation tie to learning naturally. 

You then need to provide employees with the resources and support they need to make learning part of their daily routines. There are a few ways you can introduce and integrate learning into your culture:

• Add learning to team meetings. Talking about learning regularly will help it become part of your culture, and your team meetings are a great place to start. Each week, everyone on the team might complete a lab or course and then share their learnings in the retrospective.
• Empower managers. Team managers are often caught between business needs and supporting their team. This can cause them to neglect their team’s development in favor of meeting deadlines. Enable managers to prioritize their team’s learning by explaining why it’s important, how it can help their team move faster, and the consequences of not providing learning opportunities. 
• Give employees learning time. Time to learn shouldn't be a luxury—it should be a given. Give teams dedicated learning time, or scheduled learning sessions or workshops, where they can prioritize skill development. 

At this stage, you don’t want to boil the ocean. Start with a few teams or a single department to find what works before trying to scale across your entire organization. 

Once you start bringing employees on board, it’s time to move to the next stage. The strategic stage focuses on aligning skills with outcomes and scaling skill development programmatically across your organization. 

You’ve started to make learning part of your culture—what do you actually want to achieve with it? What are the organizational goals and outcomes you’re driving towards? And what skills or knowledge do your people need to get there? 

Learning for the sake of learning is commendable, but let’s face it: You want your people to use what they learn to make better decisions, build better products, or improve the customer experience. 

To create a skill development strategy that impacts business goals and outcomes:

• Benchmark skills with low-stakes assessments. Skill assessments benchmark your employees' abilities, allowing you to identify their skills gaps and create personalized, targeted upskilling to meet your goal. As a result, employees learn the skills they need, and they don’t waste time on topics they’re already experts in. 
• Create learning paths. Another approach is to build tailored learning paths for certain skills, roles, or projects. Skill development platforms contain thousands of pieces of content. Learning paths cut through the noise and guide employees to learn the right skills without getting overwhelmed. 

In this stage, you also want to expand upskilling to other teams and departments. 

• Build communities of practices. Employee advocates can tip the scales towards critical mass. Identify early adopters and folks who are passionate about learning. They can motivate their peers to learn, share resources, host lunch and learns, and generally grow learning communities within your organization. 
• Implement upskilling plays like certification challenges. Gamifying learning and creating learning challenges can build excitement and motivate employees with a bit of friendly competition.

Download the Tech Upskilling Playbook for seven strategies you can use to upskill your teams.

The third stage focuses on maintaining your learning culture over time and using it to drive business outcomes repeatedly. That means continually upskilling your people and iterating your strategy to keep skills sharp. 

As time goes on, measure and evaluate your upskilling efforts. Gather feedback from learners and track impact against your KPIs. Are teams completing projects faster? Is your employee retention rate up? Have you reduced costs? 

Use what you’ve learned to inform your next play or adjust ongoing learning efforts. This will ensure you continue to align upskilling and learning communities with changing tech and organizational priorities. 

Uncover 17 ROI metrics for L&D programs.

Think of these stages as tools to guide your journey, rather than a definitive process. In reality, these stages aren’t so clear cut—they overlap and blend together. Your organization may be doing things from multiple stages at once. That’s okay! 

What matters is building learning into your culture gradually, scaling strategically, and iterating to ensure skills line up with business needs. Understand where your organization currently stands and then make a plan to move forward. 

Need some support? Download the Tech Upskilling Playbook: 7 Strategies to Level Up Your Team for L&D insights from successful organizations.

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