Reskilling: How to Reskill Your Workforce

Reskilling is the deliberate acquisition of new skills that takes an employee into a different role within the same organisation. You could call it a planned change of someone's skill profile, one that lets them move into a job matching what the market needs now. It is not a one-off training session or a reaction to a temporary shortage of hands, but an answer to lasting change: automation, digitalisation and new technology. In this article you'll learn how reskilling differs from upskilling, how to plan it step by step and what it has to do with onboarding.

What is reskilling?

Reskilling means teaching people, from the ground up, the skills needed in a role other than the one they have held so far. Companies reach for it when a role loses its importance – through automation or a change of strategy – and the organisation would rather move someone into a different function than let them go and recruit a replacement. That is what separates reskilling from upskilling: upskilling strengthens people in their current role, reskilling moves them into an entirely different one. Well-planned reskilling starts from an analysis of which of someone's skills transfer, and builds the training around a real new job rather than around "retraining" in the abstract.

Reskilling is nothing new – it comes with every transformation. This time, though, the scale is different. According to the World Economic Forum's The Future of Jobs Report 2025, by 2030, 59 in every 100 workers will need to develop their skills for organisations to operate in new market conditions.

Seen more broadly, reskilling is also an answer to the talent shortage. The data shows a global and increasingly real problem. The Korn Ferry report warns that by 2030 as many as 85 million jobs could go unfilled, simply for lack of qualified people.

How do reskilling and upskilling differ?

Upskilling and reskilling share a common denominator – both are about learning. They are not, however, interchangeable.

Upskilling, unlike reskilling, develops skills someone already has: keeping knowledge current and broadening it. It widens a skill set rather than building one in a new area.
Reskilling always means a change of career direction and taking on a new role. Upskilling equips people with skills tied to the job they hold today.

Two approaches, two different problems to solve

Upskilling

same role, higher

Deepens and updates the skills someone already has. An answer to changing tools, technology or standards.

Reskilling

different role, from scratch

Builds skills for a new job. An answer to a role that is ceasing to exist in its current shape.

Which one fits your situation?

Whether upskilling is enough or reskilling is needed comes down to one question: is this role changing, or is it ceasing to exist? If the change concerns tools, technology or standards, developing skills within the same role is usually enough. Upskilling then protects the value of the team you already have.

Reskilling comes in where a job stops being needed in its current shape. It lets you use existing skills as a starting point for a new role instead of starting from recruitment – which is costly and does not always work out.

Business strategy and the role of reskilling

Reskilling lets you manage the availability of skills deliberately, at a time when the market changes faster than the company's structure. This is not a problem for the future: 63% of employers name skill gaps as the biggest barrier to business transformation (The Future of Jobs Report 2025).

Decisions that end in people gaining qualifications from scratch are not easy. They call for answers to two uncomfortable questions:

which roles are strategic for the company, and which have become an organisational cost?
what pays off more: developing the team already in place, or looking for new people on the market?

Developing your people is worth treating as an investment in engagement rather than a line in the cost sheet. Otherwise the organisation falls into a loop of constant recruitment and, instead of building an advantage, spends every year chasing the skills it has just run out of.

How to plan a reskilling programme before a crisis hits

A well-planned programme usually runs like this:

Map the skills you will need based on the changes the company has planned.
Compare them with the skills already in place – competency matrices, manager assessments and project data all help here.
Develop what is missing. Microlearning combined with new tasks in everyday work works well.
Run a pilot with a closing validation – agree up front how you will check the result and track progress.

New role, new skills – what exactly are we reskilling?

What reskilling addresses is a set of competencies that decides whether someone will cope in a given role today and a few years from now. One distinction helps here:

Jobs are an organisational construct. They change with the company's structure, strategy or business model.
Competencies are an asset. They can be developed, combined and carried between roles.

When competencies rather than job titles are the starting point, a company adapts more easily to the next shift in the market.

What is worth teaching people

Hard skills worth having on the list usually include:

automation,
artificial intelligence and robotics,
digital skills,
team methods such as scrum or agile,
data analysis.

When planning soft skills, it is worth adding:

giving and receiving feedback,
teamwork,
critical thinking,
time management,
emotional intelligence,
modern management methods,
resilience to change,
project management,
leadership.

What does reskilling look like in practice?

Bringing new skills into a company can be arranged into a few repeatable steps, with individual paths built on top of them:

The reskilling process step by step

Analyse the organisation's needsIdentify the skill gaps.
Decide: reskilling, upskilling or recruitmentWhere will new skills in the existing team deliver results faster and more safely than hiring from outside?
Design the development pathA clearly described set of skills, how they will be gained and what result is expected.
Run the pathInside everyday work, not alongside it.
Move into the new roleThe moment the process ends with a change in responsibilities.

Training is not an end in itself

Reskilling programmes are necessary, but they are a means, not the goal. The numbers show it: despite a growing number of development initiatives, only half of employees report taking part in training, reskilling or upskilling (WEF).

Why invest in reskilling your people?

The list of benefits is long and – importantly – it runs both ways, for the employer and for the employee.

Benefits for the employer

Lower recruitment and onboarding costs – onboarding someone who has been reskilled covers operational matters only. It is shorter and cheaper than bringing in a new hire. The same goes for recruitment: filling vacancies from outside means paying for recruiters' work, agency fees and a good deal of managers' time.
Fewer redundancies – reskilling often protects people from being let go, for instance when a job is eliminated.
Greater versatility – people who have gained new skills and changed roles carry experience from more than one area. They look at challenges from a different angle, which can make them more effective.
A stronger employer brand – the chance to develop in a new field is an attractive benefit. An organisation that invests in reskilling looks better to candidates.
Greater loyalty – people value organisations that invest in their development and try to keep talent in-house.

Benefits for the employee

Higher productivity – people who can develop in a new area feel valued. They gain fresh motivation and meet challenges with new energy.
A sense of stability – reskilling makes employment more secure. Knowing that an employer is open to options that keep people in the company makes for a more comfortable working life.
Career growth – gaining new skills and experience in a new role enriches a career path and makes someone more attractive on the market.

These claims hold up in research. 84% of employees say that learning gives their work a sense of purpose (LinkedIn Learning, Workplace Learning Report 2025). At the same time, in PwC's Global Workforce Hopes & Fears Survey 2024, fewer than half – 46% – felt their employer offers them enough opportunity to develop. That gap is the space in which reskilling genuinely sets one employer apart from another.

Reskilling – good practices

The market offers a whole range of training methods and reskilling programmes. Here are four universal practices that can serve as pillars of the whole process.

360 feedback – sharing feedback between colleagues, clients and business partners. According to a European Commission report, it is one of the more effective ways to identify skill gaps.
Job shadowing – accompanying a colleague through their work. The person learning observes without taking on the tasks. It is an easy way to see what a new job actually involves.
Specialist courses and external training – sometimes reskilling requires specific certificates. Then such training is a must.
Digital learning – with remote and hybrid work, online training is a gesture towards employees. Employers gain measurably too. Accenture, having invested a billion dollars in employee development, increased training hours by 6% while cutting costs by 11%. All thanks to digital learning platforms.

From a skill gap to a new role – what one system can hold

The hardest part of reskilling is not designing the path, but keeping it moving for months. A competency matrix is built in a spreadsheet and goes stale after the first quarter. The training catalogue lives separately from what a particular person is missing for a particular role. And the move into a new job has no hard signal behind it – only a manager's impression.

At Gamfi all three sit in one structure. A role profile states which competencies the job requires. Self-assessment and the manager's assessment stand side by side as two separate results, and the difference between them is a skill gap report – per person, team and role. The gap turns into an assigned learning path, not a recommendation someone has to go and find in a catalogue. A passed test with a date confirms the level, so readiness for a new role is no longer a matter of impression.

In practice, in the skills and career paths module you run:

role profiles with required competencies and promotion criteria visible to employees,
a skill gap report that updates along with test and training results,
an individual development plan with a deadline, not a wish list,
a visual career path showing what is missing for the next role.

Reskilling and the future of work

The future of work rewards combining skills rather than perfecting one trade. Katharine Anderson of Carnegie Mellon University points out that someone's value grows not through mastery of a single field, but through combining skills that complement one another. That is another argument for transversal competencies – the ones people take with them into a different job.

What does any of this have to do with onboarding?

More than you might think. Reskilling changes someone's professional profile. The organisation ends up with an employee who is at once old and new: a familiar face, but new skills and a new role to take on. How do you bring those two together? How do you keep the new responsibilities from overwhelming them?

Plan the process ahead of time. Break it into stages and give it a timeline. That helps structure the transition.
Cover the operational side of the person's new job.
Assign a buddy or mentor to accompany them through it.
Schedule regular check-ins and job shadowing sessions.
Treat the whole thing as onboarding. Keep both the organisation's needs and the employee's in view.
As with a standard onboarding, set full independence at work as the goal.

FAQ – employee reskilling in brief

What is employee reskilling?

It is a retraining process in which a company treats the skills someone already has as the starting point – and avoids the cost of recruiting and onboarding a new person.

Where do I start?

With identifying the skill gaps. They are what shows exactly what needs to be learned, and in what order.

Are upskilling and reskilling the same thing?

No. Upskilling develops skills within someone's current role. Reskilling means gaining new ones, often from scratch, for a different job.

What can be the subject of reskilling?

Almost any job can be a starting point. The best return comes from transversal competencies – the most universal ones. Hard skills are valuable too, digital ones above all, as are soft skills, which in an age of automation can turn out to be a human advantage.