Why Upskill During Recession

As the economic landscape diversifies, it’s essential for any organization to evaluate its enterprise model and its employees' expertise and competence to meet the necessary requirements of the industry. Let’s face it, a recession is looming on everyone’s heads, and while the actual impact has been comparably kind to security professionals, everyone is certainly a target during economic downturns.

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Technology has radically transformed several industries in the past decades, and international incidents, like the COVID-19 pandemic, will carry on to adjust how we do business and how we reinvent and reformulate individual accountabilities within developing organizations.

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The Importance of Upskilling — Professional Advancement and Development

The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly an eye-opener that the world needs to step up its game when it comes to economic stabilization. However, the urgent need to upskill during a change in workplace culture isn’t completely new. The Bloomberg CityLab report in 2016 revealed that this tendency has been lingering since the 2008 economic downturn.

In the present-day professional market and economic landscape, organizations are being challenged on all sides. According to a survey by Prudential, 1 in 4 U. S. workers have contemplated a career shift from the start of the pandemic in 2020. Upskilling your employees and nurturing learning and growth opportunities help in structuring a more skilled and adaptable team.

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Beyond organizational-level guidance and growth, encouraging your employees to broaden their knowledge and experience will help your organization to grow tremendously. Investing in upskilling can help them climb up the corporate ladder.

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4 Reasons to Upskill Your Teams Despite Recession

1. Increase initiative and morale

A group of steady learners are commonly more enthusiastic and dedicated to putting their best foot forward even if there’s an ongoing harrowing economic condition. If your employees start recognizing that they are in an environment with inadequate upskilling opportunities, chances are they will start to feel the strain and weight of their daily workloads rather than looking at their current position as stepping stones for their growth and prowess.

2. Upskilling is more cost-effective than hiring

Actually, employee turnover and dismissal cost a lot of money.

According to the Work Institute 2020 Retention Report, employee turnover has cost industries in the US more than $630 billion. In an economic plunge, the involuntary impulse of some employers is to lay employees off and rehire them once the economy is recovering. However, this doesn’t make sense. Layoffs are just self-imposed turnovers and are as costly as voluntary turnovers.

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It doesn’t end there. According to the General Assembly whitepaper from 2020, hiring a mid-career engineer could cost more than $30,000 because of fees, such as recruitment fees, advertising, and recruiting technology expenses. This new hire also needs onboarding, and its possible turnover rate is two to three times more than an internal recruit. On the other hand, the expense to train and reskill an internal recruit may be around $20,000 or less, saving as much as $116,000 per person in three years.

3. Your team expects you to help them upskill

Back in the day, upskilling and career development initiatives were appraised as an unnecessary extravagance to encourage management expectations next to bonuses and extra time off work. Those were not the case anymore.

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Employees nowadays assume that their employers will encourage their career development. According to the 2018 Workplace Learning Report, 94% of employees would stay at their current workplace if it endowed them with professional prowess. It’s not just advancing executives and white-collar employees that anticipate career development training from the higher-ups of their organizations. A study by McKinsey & Company concluded that 75% of frontline personnel said they give priority to upskilling for professional growth.

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Team members across all industries expect their employers to initiate programs for their career development. Organizations that don’t care for it will eventually face expensive dilemmas.

4. The recession will be over in no time

A quintessential recession lasts for only 6 to 12 months, and this period of economic slowdown will eventually be followed by a season of growth and development.

Those organizations who only look at what’s in front of them will be quick to lay off employees to save money, then rehire employees for the vacated positions once they need them again, which in reality, providing employees their much-needed upskilling and reskilling training might cost them as much.

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Other businesses that know what they’re doing will continue nurturing and inspiring teams by providing adequate upskilling opportunities. As their competitors toil through the costly process of rehiring professionals, these forward-thinking organizations will land on their feet and jump back into development and growth once the recession ebbs.

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How to Upskill: Training and Growth Advantages

There are several ways to upskill, from virtual classes to instructor-led training. However you choose to provide training for your teams is entirely up to you and your vision for your company. For example, an employee that is doing excellent at their current position but has more room to improve or an employee that would do great in a different department of your organization.

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AppSecEngineer offers a wide variety of application security training that you can utilize for the professional advancement of your team. Whether you have 10 or 10,000 employees, our armada of references and hands-on labs are sure to hone the skills and expertise of anyone who would decide to join our program. Not only that, if you’d prefer live instructor-led training, we have a complete security training suite that can accommodate your needs for your organization. Every course that we offer includes hands-on labs, cloud sandboxes, and DevOps playgrounds to ensure that you’ll get the best value for your money.

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Here are the learning paths for the courses we offer:

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AppSecEngineer can be your partner during the recession to ensure that your organization has more than enough skilled professionals to get you through the recession. Visit our website to learn more: https://www.appsecengineer.com.

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