Frontline Worker Training in 2023: Instant Cross-Skilling and Upskilling

Now, more than ever, your frontline employee training and development has to take existing talent and prepare them with the skills and capabilities needed to overcome talent shortages. 

In the U.S. alone, the number of unfilled jobs has reached a high of 10,334,000. That means there are two jobs for every person available to work, and if you factor in necessary skills, experience, and capability, there are six open jobs for every person qualified to work in those roles. And this is not a short-term issue, we may be looking at a longer-term talent shortage: a Korn Ferry report finds that by 2030, more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled because there aren’t enough skilled people to take them.

That Means Your Frontline Worker Training Has To Be Even More Agile

Your employee training and development can’t just be about skills and capabilities, it has to also be about who shows up on any given shift on any day. 

Let’s just say that to be fully staffed for a shift, you need 20 people but only 15 people show up for work that day. Your team still needs to do the same amount of work, but with fewer people who aren’t trained in the skills needed for those tasks. How do you deliver good customer service with the staff on hand who aren’t trained for tasks that need to be completed? 

There also might be many different elements to running a shift, and now that you’ve got less staff due to the great resignation, you need people to know how to do many different things to keep operations running. Maybe employees were trained on a process but haven’t used those skills in a while so they need a quick refresher in the moment—because if employees have to take time off the job to re-learn something the bottom line could suffer. 

As an L&D Professional, You’ve Got To Deliver “Instant” Cross-Skilling and Upskilling

The only way to do this is with a digital learning platform, where you can quickly create, publish, distribute, and share engaging operational training and knowledge content. Job aids, short videos, quick checklists, embedded training, interactive graphics, and more can all be accessed on mobile devices in the moment of need.

To quickly cross-skill or upskill frontline workers, they need to find training and knowledge with a Google-like search, learn what they need as quickly as possible and immediately apply what they learned in order to do the work job in the flow of work. Instead of death by PowerPoint or the next button (which takes time out of work), a microlearning platform gives frontline employees the knowledge they need to feel more confident serving the next customer or completing their next task, even if they don’t already have the skills needed. 

When you deliver the right content, at the right time, your frontline workers can be prepared for anything 2023 throws their way. 

To view the full Learning 2023: New Challenges, New Trends, New Thinking on-demand webinar replay, click here.