Upskilling & Reskilling: How to Win the Future & Your Workforce  

What You Will Learn in This Blog:

• What your employees expect regarding skilling and upskilling
• The manifold upsides of upskilling and reskilling 
• How to quickly get manageable, visible upskilling efforts underway

Kickstart Reskilling, Microlearning & More to Retrain, Energize, & Retain Talent 

Here are two facts that should both delight employers and give them pause: 

1. Today’s employees and job seekers want to learn new skills and grow.
2. The vast majority expect learning to come from their employers.

A recent study from Gallup and Workhuman found that “60% of workers who recently learned a new skill did so because it helped them do their job more effectively.” That same survey revealed that 51% of workers see upskilling as an opportunity for growth.

This is good workforce news. The majority of employees understand the value upskilling brings to the business and their own careers. 

What may be news to leadership? Employees expect to get that learning and achieve new skills from their employers. While employers hunt high and low to find new hires who are the most skilled and able to contribute from day one, candidates have a different workplace vision. They are looking for employers willing to help them acquire the ever-changing skills needed to stay competent and relevant as workplaces evolve. 

A 2025 Aerotek survey of job seekers found that 74% of applicants expect employers to provide skill development. One quarter (25%) said they had recently left their jobs because they were unable to learn new skills in the workplace, underscoring upskilling’s role in both attracting and retaining talent. 

Learners and Skill Seekers Make Better Businesses

Job seekers’ and employees’ desire to learn is a net positive for employers. At a time when rapid technology advancements, global marketplace shifts, and demographic change are perpetually reshaping how businesses and their teams get work done, everyone should want skill-hungry talent. 

Employers, also overwhelmed by change, change, and more change, might see this upskilling mandate from their employees and candidates as a net negative–another expense, a new time drain, a powerful resource pull. But that’s the wrong mindset.  

Employees who are eager to learn are more likely to stay and make key contributions. On top of that, businesses that embed employee growth and upskilling programs into the talent journey are not just better at navigating change, they are staffed and ready to lead it.

LinkedIn found that businesses known as career development champions (committed to career growth, skill development, and learning) are more confident in their ability to achieve profit targets, better positioned to benefit from emerging technologies like AI and generative AI, and much more confident in their ability to attract and retain talent. 

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Connect with the Synergis L&D team here. Explore upskilling strategies with experts who are building certification, microlearning, and full-scale training programs for leading national enterprises. 

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Where to Start with Upskilling: Visible Quick Wins

To become a workplace where learning and upskilling thrive requires an evolution–not a radical one, but a visible one. You do not have to become a full-blown corporate university by next quarter. The best first step for employers is to focus on programs and tools that signal to employees and candidates the company’s willingness to support the upskilling they seek. Programs like:

1. Online Certification Programs

For many employees, existing online certification programs and providers are a good, efficient way to gain some of the knowledge and skills they are missing on the job. Take for example UX professionals looking to keep pace with breakneck AI-driven change while also working to become high-value, strategic partners to the business. While Google’s UX Design Professional Certificate covers UX fundamentals, many UX pros are looking to work AI tools and guardrails into their toolkit with certifications like Microsoft/LinkedIn Learning’s Career Essentials in Generative AI or AI Product Manager from Coursera/Microsoft. Supporting free or low-cost certifications like these (and giving employees the time to complete them) can be an easy first step in the upskilling journey.

How do you get started? Empower leaders and hiring managers who have identified critical skill gaps across their teams to find and pilot both paid and free certification programs that could help close skill gaps. Even announcing a small pilot program (2-3 employees) to identify the right training programs is a signal to employees that upskilling changes are underway. If those reskilling pilot programs deliver (new skills are gained, employees have grown) those managers can then help the business assess what a larger implementation of the certification program would look like.  

2. Partner-driven Learning & Upskilling

Local colleges, universities, and trade schools often offer flexible, online professional development courses, while industry associations curate up-to-date training and credentials tailored to specific skill sets. Many of these organizations may already be established partners your business can leverage for upskilling. Using the UX employee example from above, it’s easy to see how an UX association benefits when UX professionals upskill and reskill, either through their employer or by leveraging the association. The more abundant and current UX skills are in the marketplace, the more value realization businesses will see from their UX teams, increasing the influence and worth of UX professionals and programs to businesses everywhere. 

How do you get started? The first step is reaching out to industry partners and local schools. You may find many of these organizations as eager as you are to support upskilling and general workforce advancement. After all, a stronger, more skilled workforce benefits everyone. By collaborating with these institutions or providing employees with access to their high-quality content with new membership seats, employers can efficiently deliver relevant training from trusted sources to address immediate reskilling needs and employee growth.

3.Microlearning Programs

When skill gaps are too many or too big for the business to handle through certificate or partnership resources, focused microlearning programs can be an effective way to ramp up training. Microlearning or microskilling is the art of teaching a skill in small doses to achieve stronger engagement and greater retention. Businesses often engage Synergis L&D consultants to come in and build microlearning programs for upskilling workers that minimize downtime while still advancing their skill set and capabilities. 

How do you get started? Learning content for micro programs is often created leveraging internal SMEs and highly accessible formats, such as screen recordings with voice overs, basic quizzes/surveys in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, or simple Canva-based infographics. Because these programs are short, focused, low-fi and action-oriented, they can be rolled out and tested quickly to ensure they are achieving the intended results: upskilled employees. 

4. Expand Learning and Development Capabilities with Expert Upskilling Support

If internal Learning and Development (L&D) teams are overstretched or unable to keep pace with upskilling needs, it may be time to bring in extra support. Through programs like Synergis’ L&D practice, businesses can tap into seasoned learning and upskilling experts to come in to help rapidly build upskilling and/or microlearning programs. For many fast-moving businesses, this project-based infusion of L&D expertise can be the difference between acting on upskilling needs immediately or keeping employees waiting and poorly prepared. Only one leads to a workforce ready to win the future. 

How do you get started? To expand learning and development capabilities or engage experts to support an upskilling project, Synergis is always here and ready to chat. Reach out to our L&D solutions team to discuss your challenges and goals or to learn more about the various ways businesses are succeeding at upskilling, reskilling, and retaining skill-hungry talent. 

Go beyond compliance

We tend to focus on meeting WCAG criteria at the beginning of our journeys, but that shouldn’t be our end goal. Accessibility is more than compliance; it affects all aspects of life. You can lead with empathy by incorporating accessibility into every aspect of your business, from internal emails to marketing campaigns.

• Host lunch-and-learns about accessible meetings and communications.
• Send employees to learn and network at accessibility conferences.
• Become a vendor or sponsor disability-focused events.
• Host hack-a-thons to build components that are easy to use with assistive technology.
• Encourage teams to speak up about ideas for improving user experiences.

Amplify disabled voices

As we’ve mentioned before, society tends to want to hide disability, but we want to highlight disabled experiences and improve them. There are a lot of ways to amplify disabled voices within your business. You can start by ensuring your disabled employees and end users feel seen, heard, and respected.

• Normalize accommodations by offering common ones to all employees by default.
• Create an Employee Resource Group (ERG) for disabled employees.
• Get first-hand feedback on your products from disabled users.
• Seek out disabled experts in your field and learn from them.

Including disabled voices means actively seeking feedback and prioritizing improvements to the usability of your products or services. Accessibility should be part of every stage, from the first brainstorming session to the final product release to future enhancements. When usability and accessibility are put first, everyone benefits.

For example, making a website fully responsive improves the usability for smaller devices as well as assistive software. Many people with low vision use assistive technology to zoom in on small sections of content, effectively changing the viewport size to that of a smaller screen. Responsive designs easily adapt to various viewport sizes, increasing the overall usability.

Design beautiful, accessible products

While many designers may initially see accessibility as a barrier to creating beautiful designs, we like to think of it as a challenge. We understand that it can be frustrating to suddenly have so many new rules to adhere to.

• Color choices must meet contrast minimums.
• Interactive components must be keyboard compatible.
• Video backgrounds must have pause controls.

It can be overwhelming at first, but our experts can help. Our Accessibility Advisors can meet with your design team at any part of the product lifecycle. Do your designers already have a mock-up for a new project? Our advisors offer design reviews and consultations to help your teams incorporate accessibility into new designs before they reach development teams. This can save time and resources by diagnosing potentially inaccessible interactions before they have been built.

Maybe your team is still in the brainstorming phase. We also offer accessible experience design services to help UX designers map out accessible user flows before the first mock-up is designed. If a wireframe has already been designed, our experience designers can evaluate it for potential accessibility barriers and prescribe solutions. As time goes on, you may find your teams learning and growing to a point where they only need occasional assistance with complex design components.

Where will your journey lead you?

Whether you’re just beginning your accessibility journey or you’re three years into it, Synergis is ready to jump in and help however we can. The goal of this series is to empower you and your teams to get excited about accessibility, or at the very least spark a desire to learn more about it. We will continue documenting our journey as we progress, and we hope you’ll follow along with us. We have so much further to go.

Together, we can create a more accessible world.