Leveraging Data-Driven Insights: Using Talent Intelligence to Shape Upskilling Programs

Upskilling your employees is crucial to your company’s future: it’s how you ensure you’re prepared for anything that lies ahead. Unfortunately, only 40% of employees say their company is upskilling, according to PwC research. 

Part of this failure to upskill employees is likely because developing an upskilling strategy for your entire organization is a big undertaking. Luckily, talent intelligence is your secret weapon to building an employee upskilling program based on data-driven insights. Here’s everything you need to know.  

What is Talent Intelligence? 

Talent intelligence is a holistic approach to a company’s talent needs, using both internal and external data to drive better talent decisions and outcomes. Talent intelligence tracks metrics and data like performance, skills assessment results, industry patterns, and labor market trends to determine key HR processes. 

While it can be used in all of your talent processes, talent intelligence is particularly helpful in determining how to upskill employees effectively and executing that plan across your organization at scale. 

How to Use Talent Intelligence to Upskill Your Workforce 

There are many different ways that you can use talent intelligence to create or enhance your upskilling program: here are a few of the most effective ones to consider. 

Identifying Skill Gaps 

To determine what kind of upskilling program you need, first you need to identify the skills gaps within your organization. You will need to do this on multiple levels: individual, team, and organization-wide. Plus, you need to determine what skills gaps exist right now, as well as which ones your organization will experience down the road so you can plan ahead. 

Talent intelligence can give you the in-depth data you need to identify all of these gaps, based on your existing employee data and the industry trends you anticipate happening in the next few years, like the rise of generative AI. With detailed analytics, you can create a thoughtful plan and budget based on an accurate view of your organization’s skills gaps. 

Personalizing Upskilling Opportunities 

Upskilling should be a highly personalized experience to deliver the best results – partly because every employee has different skills, but also because they have different motivations and goals. Their upskilling plan needs to reflect all of these factors, as well as their preferred learning style. 

A good talent intelligence system can help you deliver these tailored upskilling plans to each employee, as well as track their progress and ensure they complete their trainings. Plus, it can offer them additional optional trainings that may interest them, even if they’re not directly related to their goals, because their development opportunities don’t need to be limited to a certain direction if they have more wide-ranging interests. All of that learning will eventually benefit your company in some way. 

Linking Training to Company Goals 

While training needs to be personalized, it should also tap into a larger vision: the vision of the future of your company. Communicating that vision is beneficial for employee engagement and motivation, as it makes them feel like they’re part of something larger than themselves and contributing to the good of that larger goal. 

How will training your employees to use AI and automation in their roles, for example, benefit your whole company going forward? Or how will their new skills in strategic planning offer their team significant benefits? Proactively answering questions like these will make your upskilling program more engaging and successful. 

Managing Your Broader Workforce Planning 

While your upskilling program is an essential part of your workforce planning, it’s not the only element. To be as successful as possible, it needs to tie into your other elements like recruiting and internal mobility seamlessly. 
The right talent intelligence tool, like Jules AI from Cangrade, will help all of the pieces of your talent acquisition and management strategy work together without silos.

When all of your talent systems work effortlessly together, you can create a brighter future for both your employees and your organization as a whole.