Upskilling: The Proven Way to Advance Your Career

Introduction

Upskilling promotes a positive career change or at least an improvement in your earning potential. Generally, individuals choose to get upskilled to apply their new and improved skills in their workplaces, however, a lot of times, upskilling is more about personal development rather than for fulfilling organisational requirements.

With the pace of modern times and the rapid adoption of new technology by organisations, upskilling is direly necessary. It is also important to stay updated with the times and not allow any scope for a skills gap. Let’s cover why it is important to upskill for your career and the various other benefits you can get out of it.

What Exactly is Upskilling?

Upskilling can be simply defined as the process of acquiring additional education or training for becoming a more valuable employee. This allows you to become a better human asset that companies or employers wish to recruit.

You can upskill yourself by using various learning mediums or you can enroll in a well-designed program to get upskilled alongside getting the relevant certificates to validate your accomplishment.  

Upskilling their employees is important to companies as well, as they too need to bridge the gap between the skill of the workforce and the advancement of technology in the industry. Companies face a lot of trouble when recruiting for specialised job roles and other senior positions due to this skills gap that currently exists in the workforce.

A huge number of MNCs and conglomerates have started ensuring that their employees participate in personnel development programs and in upskill training. However, if you are a working professional who has not gotten this opportunity from your employer yet, you must start considering doing it yourself using the wide variety of programs and courses available online. 

How can I Upskill?

You can upskill yourself by reading a range of books associated with the subject of your interest or by joining a full-fledged boot camp. However, boot camps cover the subject in a more extensive manner and thus, should be flexible in order to accommodate working professionals into the curriculum.

Ninjas Career Camp is a highly flexible coding boot camp that you definitely should check out if you are considering upskilling in coding. Upskilling through learning other programming languages such as Python or C++ is also a good idea if your core language set is different.

For the ones who wish to engage in web development, you can enrol in a MERN stack course that covers MongoDB, Express.js, React.js and Node.js.

Professionals who are very busy can also take up a coding workshop that only takes a few days (or a few hours) or get certified in technology such as AWS or Azure at their own pace whenever they get time. There is no limit, really. You can even decide to learn a new human language, learn digital marketing or even prepare yourself for senior roles by learning system design. If you want to get into product design, product management or even data analytics, upskilling is the way to go.

Upskilling allows you to get better at what you are doing or learn something completely different. You can choose to upgrade yourself for fulfilling company requirements or for simply becoming a better version of yourself. Upskilling opens up your growth prospects not just inside your own organisation but also increases your value for other employers and companies who are looking to hire someone with your skillset.

Here are some more areas where you might consider upskilling yourself:

• Leadership Studies
• Management Studies
• Data Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Data Governance
• Deep Learning
• Machine Learning
• Full-stack web development and MEAN stack development
• Operations
• HR
• Data Visualisation
• Reporting and Forecasting
• DBMS with SQL or even distributed file systems

The Various Benefits of Upskilling

Here are the various benefits of upskilling:

• Increase your chances of getting a raise. Upskilling ensures that you have the leverage you need for expecting a pay rise. With better abilities and a larger skill set, you will be compensated accordingly by most companies. 
• Get opportunities for a career change or get offered better job roles inside your organisation. By learning different tools or subjects, you can opt for a completely different job role that you will enjoy. With a more advanced skill set, you will be given more important responsibilities by your employers.
• Work-life improvement and personal development. You will be fundamentally improving yourself, that is one of the main benefits of getting upskilled.
• Collaborate better with other people from various departments. Become equipped with more knowledge to converse fluently with seniors from your department.
• Acquire entrepreneurship abilities. You can even start up your own company or project. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Key Takeaway

Upskilling leads to a better future with immense scope for growth. This is why upskilling has become so popular recently and the best companies have started making their employees go through frequent upskill training to bridge the skills gap.

If you wish to enhance your career and get the chance to get involved with much better job roles inside your organisation, upskilling is highly recommended for you.