The IT Pro Podcast: How upskilling is driving staff retention

Large companies are relying on online learning more and more, to improve the career goals of their employees, and upskilling can be an important way of retaining staff while adding to existing expertise.

But the public sector has lagged behind the private sector on this front, and is currently experiencing record churn and vacancies. 410,000 staff quit social care in 2021, and care roles around the country are now short of approximately 165,000 staff.

This week, we spoke to Hadi Moussa, General Manager and Managing Director for EMEA at one of the largest online learning platforms, Coursera, to unpack how virtual upskilling courses can help improve staff retention in social care, as well as the prospects of roles within the sector.

Highlights

“The objective is to drive quality improvement among the UK health care professionals, and also to help address some of the knowledge gaps among the NHS staff to help meet and of the future public health challenges.”

“Creating more of a culture of learning, and effectively having people find the time for learning, is a major challenge that we also hear from many of the companies that we work with. I think it's really about embedding it into the way that staff operate, because you need to show really the value of gaining those additional skills in terms of your ability to do your job better, your ability to drive better outcomes, your ability to, for example again, get promoted over time.”

“One of the key components that is really required for the UK to become a technology superpower is around skills. And that is why we believe that there is this need to continue investing in skills, even in this type of environment, to be able to drive the outcomes that both the private sector and the public sector are looking for in this case.”

Read the full transcript here.

Footnotes

• How to digitally upskill your staff on a budget
• Upskilling a remote workforce
• How to upskill your existing workforce to beat the talent drought
• Beating the IT brain drain: How to break the cycle of vanishing skills
• Why reskilling isn't just about learning new technology
• Google to offer US businesses $100,000 worth of digital skills courses
• Tech skills in the UK lag behind most of Europe
• Global Skills Report 2022 - Coursera

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