UPSKILLING AND RESKILLING YOUR STAFF INVESTING IN YOUR GREATEST RESOURCE

Penny Godfrey encourages heads and governors to invest time and money in professional development to ensure staff –from every area of school life – have the skills they need to continue to work confidently and effectively.

In recent years, alongside every statistic around recruitment, retention and resourcing, there has been an entreaty to organisations to focus on upskilling.

Globally, we hear that upskilling and reskilling is what organisations must do if they stand any chance of dealing with future skills shortages. PWC predicts that by 2020 ‘the talent shortage and skills gap in the U.S. alone is expected to total a loss of $8.5 trillion’. Yet, according to MIT and Deloitte, just 34% of workers they surveyed feel that their organisations fostered their skills development opportunities.

When it comes to skills shortages, schools are not exempt.

A 2021/22 report from Ofsted warned that many schools are experiencing, ‘ongoing challenges in recruiting and retaining qualified staff’, and that this needs to be ‘urgently addressed’.

More recently, figures published by the UK Department for Education show that just 59% of the secondary school teachers required by the state sector were recruited in 2022, a sign that staffing challenges are only going to get worse. The independent sector fairs slightly better, but there is no room for complacency. It has been reported that more than half (53%) of universities and independent schools say it is difficult to recruit staff.

But can additional training help with staff recruitment and retention? What does ‘upskilling’ even mean? And more specifically, what does this look like for schools?

At Jaluch, we believe that schools, in line with most other commercial businesses, will typically have five key ‘upskilling’ and ‘reskilling’ priorities:

• developing leadership capability

• preparing existing staff for roles that do not currently exist

• continuing professional development for all

• rigorous personal development for ambitious employees

• continual, committed and focussed learning around technology. F

Just because your school leaders have been successful across the last ten years does not guarantee success for the next ten.

Senior school heads are just like everyone else. They must invest time in their own development to ensure they continue learning and adapting.

Unfortunately, our experience at Jaluch is the most senior people in any organisation tend to be the first to excuse themselves from training. Or they simply do not turn up – perhaps believing the pressing tasks they have to hand are more important than skill building. The demands of a senior school role can be all-consuming, but this is not the time for leaders to dip out of learning, in the vain hope they will be still seen as ‘current’ in five years’ time.

The focus here could be to get senior school staff to identify what skills they themselves might want to develop – ideally based on some of the great research that has been coming out of the large global business schools.

Harvard Business Review published an article entitled 21 jobs of the future some years back, but it is still a brilliant wake-up call. It reminds us just how much we need to keep running to keep up. Letting skills stagnate is simply not an option.

Let us consider three jobs your school could feasibly be advertising for at some point in the future:

• a Chatbot and human facilitator to join your marketing team.

• an algorithm bias auditor to support those using software for automated decision-making e.g., following exams/assessments

• a digital process engineer within your finance department.

Sound far-fetched? Well, these are all roles currently being advertised in the corporate world.

Of course, it takes time to envisage what your school will need in the future and identify how to train your existing employees so they can fill those roles. It requires complex problem-solving, transformational thinking, emotional intelligence, and inter-department collaboration. However, the cost of having your competitors storm ahead of you in the market because they adopted these practices much earlier, and have already re-trained their staff, might be a price too high to pay for many schools.

Your existing team should be continually updating their skills set to remain ‘current’ which, in turn, will ensure ongoing competence and confidence.

Aim high and focus on training that helps your teams become the bright lights of the future. In the increasingly competitive independent school market, you will certainly put yourself in a stronger position if you have staff who embrace modern technology, are receptive to diverse ways of working and enjoy being part of a culture that prioritises continuous learning and development.

The goal for any school leader should be on developing teams who are confident and competent in their roles this year, and will be next year, and the year after that.