Reskilling for a Strong Restart

There's some good news interwoven with the bad--always true, but especially encouraging right now--and this week I found some of it in articles from McKinsey & Co.

The first one “The Restart” offers CEOs several tips, gleaned from interviews with companies in Europe and Asia. What I found compelling was the extent to which key project management skill and knowledge areas cropped up over and over in their advice. For example, they stressed the importance in reevaluating the portfolio of projects, and applying new governance criteria to determine which projects should proceed, and which should be frozen.

Performance measurement and benefits realization also showed up, in their advice about selecting “meaningful milestones” when implementing back-to-work protection measures, and tracking them to be sure these measures were working as planned. Agility is another project management theme that closely tracks this advice: the ability to change course as needed in response to new information.

Again and again, the authors stressed the critical role of transparent stakeholder communications, with customers, clients, employees, and the public. A silver lining in all this may be that companies that excel at relationship will build a fund of goodwill that will pay off in the long run. And communication is the bedrock of those relationships.

McKinsey also stresses that, if you thought you were doing digital transformation before, now you had better be doing it, and doing it right. Reinventing ways of doing business remotely has meant the rapid adoption of tech solutions. “Rethink the portfolio of IT projects,” they advise, and make sure to provide employee training in new tools and – most importantly—training in cybersecurity best practices.

Our company experience mirrors that of other professional services organizations cited in this article, where the shift to virtual work and training was able to happen in a matter of days. The authors note that companies should not waste the “value creation born from crisis” by attempting to just go back to their old ways. In some sectors, business has been surprised by spikes in productivity and innovation, and these are worth keeping and expanding upon. This, too, is a project management feature: the assessment of the opportunities inherent in risky situations!

I was already happy when I read that … but then I chanced on the second article, on “reskilling” the workforce to capitalize on the learnings that have taken place for all of us. The authors noted that, even before the present crisis, new technologies were disrupting jobs. They cite a recent McKinsey Global Survey, in which 87 percent of executives reported current or expected skill gaps in the workforce.

Now, in addition to these pre-existing skill gaps, we have employees moving to new ways of working en masse. Both employees and managers face a steep learning curve in the realm of virtual work and leadership, and these new skills will continue to be important for the transition and the future shape of the workplace. The article offers several important tips:

1. Identify the skills your business model depends upon
2. Build these critical employee skills
3. Start now!

The article cites research showing that companies that launched reskilling programs were better able to implement new business models or strategies. And a majority felt prepared to take on future skill gaps as well.

This won’t be the last disruption. Companies that develop partnerships and expertise to upskill and reskill adaptively will be more successful in facing challenges both now and in the future.

Finally—and this makes my business development heart warm—the authors caution companies against cutting employee-training budgets. We already saw that mistake in action during the last downturn. I’ll leave you with a quote from the article:

“Use your training budget to make skill building a key strategic lever for adapting to the next normal. Don’t waste two to three years and forego the efficiency and resilience you could develop now.”