The COVID-19 lockdown has forced all businesses to reassess almost every aspect of how they work. In whatever ‘new normal’ emerges for your employees — whether it includes continuing to work from home, interacting digitally or harnessing emerging technologies to innovate — it’s important to ensure that your people have the right skills and a willingness to embrace change. The speed of technological advances has already created significant demands for upskilling your workforce, and post-crisis demands will heighten that need.

Upskilling your workforce is not just a matter of pushing out technical training to your employees. Upskilling requires careful assessment of desired skills and competencies to be targeted, investment in a learning environment, assessment of the impact of change and a systematic way to measure the return on your upskilling investment. This initiative also will require significant leadership commitment and a push from the top.

Action points

• Define the skills and competencies you need to accelerate your competitive position and run a digital enterprise.

• Compare your current capabilities with your objectives to develop an upskilling programme, function by function.

• Ensure that your upskilling programme reflects individual needs, aspirations and job demands.

• Build an infrastructure and empower your employees to drive organic innovations.

• Manage change and adoption of your upskilling programme.

Outcomes to target

• Strengthened productivity

• Sharpened innovation

• Enterprise agility

• Enhanced employee engagement and satisfaction

• Bolstered recruitment and retention

You are required to choose a particular business or industry and discuss how this strategic objective of the PWC framework applies to the chosen business or industry. Word limit 250 words.