COMP NEWS – The pandemic has strained hiring efforts for employers and forced employers to reconsider how to attract and retain talent. Recently, some leaders are claiming that educating and reskilling employees may be the missing secret to gaining talent.

Heidi Brooks, a professor at the Yale School of Management, said at CNBC’s Workforce Executive Council Summit in November that companies need to set learning as an objective to recruit and retain talent. 

 

“The orientation has been a lot of companies thinking, ‘You get to work here.’ Now the shift is more in the direction of, ‘We get to have employees.’ That’s a pretty big perspective shift for a lot of leaders and managers,” Brooks recently told CNBC.

Employers are not using a new strategy to win employees: education. Further education and training seem to be a win-win for employers and employees, as the company gains a more competent workforce and the employees feel valued and invested in.

Investments in education can not only attract new talent, but it can help retain workers on the verge of burnout, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

 

“If companies can invest in people learning and growing, their best people will stay longer and part of that is not burning out their best people,” said Henry Albrecht, chief executive officer at Limeade, a corporate solutions company that offers tools to transform workspaces and improve employee wellbeing.

 

Overall, employees want their needs recognized and wellbeing prioritized, Albrecht said. When companies invest in upskilling, education and learning, it shows workers that they’re valued.

While some may think that reskilling employees may inspire them to go out and search for different opportunities to utilize their new abilities, others don’t think this concern is well-founded.

Marcus Bryant, the managing principal at Vantage Custom Solutions, a human resource management and diversity training consultancy firm, said this concern should not discourage companies from investing in their employees, and it can make companies more attractive to employers.

 

″[Employees] are going to go out and still promote great skills and great talent within the industry, sort of a long-term perspective, but also think in the short-term perspective. Imagine if we don’t train them and they stay at our organization,” Bryant said. “They’re underperforming or not performing to their maximum ability. We can’t worry that they’re going to overperform somewhere else when they’re underperforming here.”

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