Abstract
Organizations worldwide realize the value of creating and sustaining a resilient workforce as employees have been battered with physical, social, and psychological pressures due to the unexpected and challenging demands of pandemic. This chapter revolves around training, upskilling, and reskilling in organizations and establishes their relationship with building resilience in employees. It is significantly relevant and timely as work relationships and expectations have suddenly changed across sectors and industries. It is imperative to include scenarios gathered from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), hence a case study of EFS Facilities Services Group using primary and secondary data has been added. This case is a direct evidence of building resilience in workforce with the help of upskilling and reskilling. This chapter will inform of practices adopted for building resilience among workforce at a global level. Conclusions and recommendations inform about different interventions that organizations can adopt in order to build a resilient workforce.
TopMain Focus Of The Chapter
The main focus of this chapter is to create awareness among readers about the concept of “resilience” and its usage among employees impacted by the new normal. The primary issues dealt with in this chapter are pertaining to the value of being adaptable and flexible to newness at work along with being agile and resilient for successful work experiences. The author has set the tone of the chapter in a way that readers quickly imbibe the importance of being resilient and embed traits that help them to survive difficult times like the pandemic COVID-19. The literature review provides a path for readers highlighting the research carried out in the past by cotemporary researchers and authors and EFS case study provides real time information about the implications of the topic. It reiterates the concept and process of building resilience at workplace.
The topic of resilience has been highlighted in this chapter to create awareness among managers and decision makers so that organizations can adopt new interventions to build and enhance resilience among their employees. It is unfortunate that a large percentage of employers tend to be unclear about the process of building and sustaining resilience in workforce and may face a difficult situation during tough and turbulent market situations. The case study provides insights on how training can be used as one of the interventions in organizations undergoing tough times e.g. pandemic COVID-19. So the study lays emphasis on upskilling, reskilling and upgradation of skills through training interventions as tough times demand new and updated skills among employees.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Upskilling: Upskilling can be understood as teach (an employee) additional skills or expanding the skills, abilities and capabilities of employees or even learning additional skills.
Pandemic: A pandemic is an infectious disease that spreads across several continents or worldwide, affecting a significant number of individuals (e.g., COVID-19).
Resilience: Resilience can be explained as the ability of individuals or organizations to recover from setbacks (individual loss of job, friend, or relative; drop in market sales; addition in competitors; sudden change in demand or loss of market share etc.) leading to adapting well to change, and keep going in the face of adversity or tough times.
Reskilling: Reskilling is the process of acquiring, learning, or adopting new or enhanced skills so you can do a different job to what you were doing before, or training employees to do a different job.
Training: Training is defined as teaching an employee a particular skill or type of behavior to fit in the job well.