As a nonprofit leader, when it comes to the future of your workforce, focusing on skills is an essential step. However, many upskilling strategies are missing the mark. The confusion often starts with a lack of understanding the difference between upskilling, reskilling and cross-skilling—the lines tend to blur and identifying the role of each will better equip your organization to prepare for the future of work. While both upskilling and reskilling are about learning new skills, the context for each is a bit different. Upskilling is focused on helping employees become more knowledgeable and develop new competencies that relate to their current position while reskilling is about equipping workers to switch lanes and move into new roles within your organization. Cross-skilling is the process of developing skills that are valuable across multiple functions.

There’s no denying that upskilling and reskilling initiatives require a significant investment, in both money and time. Superior approaches generally include both compelling content as part of a Learning and Development (L&D) curriculum, as well as experimental opportunities such as mentoring and projects. Given the effort upskilling and reskilling require, some might wonder if it might just be easier to prioritize external hiring. While it might sound like a simpler strategy on the surface, turning to new talent won’t solve your skill-building concerns. Even if your organization manages to recruit employees with the necessary skills, these recruits will need to build new capabilities in the future. Since the pace of change is accelerating, offering opportunities for upskilling and reskilling has become unavoidable this day in age.

When determining the best form of training for your employees, it can depend on the permanency of their positions. It would be a poor use of resources to invest in the professional development of an employee whose role is becoming obsolete. Upskilling tends to benefit positions that can easily evolve with the organization, while reskilling is perfect for helping employees of changing departments get ready for entirely new workplace obligations. Organizations that are content with their current staff can use upskilling to continuously help their employees develop their qualifications without reassigning them a different position. You can help support your staff grow as professionals by providing them with enriching training opportunities while maintain an effective forward-thinking team in the workplace. 

Taking into account the skill set of your team, your organization can then determine if a particular employee will remain in their current position or if their capabilities will be more beneficial in another area of the organization. Staff members who exceed the organization’s expectations in their department and have proved to be excellent leaders should undergo reskilling to prepare them for a promotion. Where a promotion isn’t an option, perhaps they could make a lateral move, in which their salary and hierarchy stay the same but their position changes. Employees who would benefit from honing their existing abilities can do so through upskilling programs.

Upskilling and reskilling your professionals will have significant impact on their careers. Offering either form of training to an employee can develop their professional skills and position them as a valuable member of your organization. Businesses that understand the benefits of both processes will help their employees find success in whichever position and responsibilities they undertake.

When looking to hire interns to work at your nonprofit, there are multiple factors that can help determine if your organization wants to offer a paid or unpaid internship. On January 5, 2018, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) “created new guidance for determining whether a worker could be classified as an unpaid intern under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).” The FLSA requires “for-profit” employers to pay employees for their work. However, this is not always the case when it comes to interns. Under the FLSA, interns may not be classified as “employees” which puts them in a situation where they don’t receive compensation for their work. With these new rules in place, employers now have more say when implementing unpaid internships.

Internships can provide highly beneficial, sought after opportunities for individuals and organizations alike, especially nonprofits.  Internships give organizations unique ways to observe new talent, promote training and share resources within their community. Often interns can be college students and these internships can allow students and other individuals creative ways to grow in their intended fields, to learn valuable work skills and to develop their resumes for future success. 

As a nonprofit, deciding to offer a paid internship can be a difficult decision to make, however, here are three reasons why a paid internship could be the way to go:

1) An unpaid internship could limit your pool of candidates to choose from, ruling out college students who come from lower and middle-income backgrounds. Not only are these students looking for compensation to pay for a college, they need money for everyday necessities.

2) Since interns tend to work on teams with paid employees, an unpaid internship can affect the work of those paid employees making their work feel less valued.

3) Keep in mind, when assigning projects to an unpaid intern to make sure the work isn’t something they should be compensated for – which could result in wage claims. Offering a paid internship can prevent issues like this from arising.

Bringing on interns is a great way to help those new to the workforce learn what it takes to be successful in the working world while helping nonprofits get special projects completed. Plan ahead and structure your program so that your internship program is a great experience for all those involved.

Technology continues to create more tools for recruiters to use to reach potential candidates—whether it be via email, social platforms like LinkedIn or the most popular, texting. While texting is an informal way to communicate, it can act as simple way to vet someone to see if they are a good fit for your company or at the very least, see if they are interested—this can be an optimal time saver. The number of technology companies creating messaging tools to help organizations reach potential employees by text continues to grow.

With most nonprofit organizations are constrained by limited bandwidth, utilizing a text-messaging platform could be a beneficial solution that could help bring in the ideal employee while managing time more effectively. Adding this type of tool to your hiring process can help fine tune interview logistics and allow for pre-screening questions prior to scheduling a phone or in-person interview. In such a highly competitive market, nonprofits are always looking for solutions to grab the attention of candidates that are the best fit for the job as well as better manage how they communicate with those seeking an open position.  

Compared to email and job board email listings, incorporating text messaging into your recruiting process can increase the likelihood of actually getting a response. Texting offers a quick back and forth conversation, which can help move the process along at a quicker pace, allowing employers to ask basic questions regarding requirements, experience and availability—while candidates can ask about benefits or pay. This could all be discussed before scheduling a meeting or even a phone call—preventing the off chance of wasting either parties’ time. Texting also offers an informal environment that can help decrease the chances of any awkwardness of a first-time discussion.

While text-based recruiting is more commonly used for higher volume job categories such as retail, food service, nursing and customer service, there are some companies using these solutions for professional jobs or high-demand positions such as software programming. These messaging tools are being used to hire a wide-range of positions and continue to become more sophisticated as the demand increases.

The role of an HR professional requires wearing many hats and with that comes the challenge of juggling multiple projects, involving various moving parts of a nonprofit organization. One of the biggest and most challenging tasks that lives on the desk of human resource professionals is recruiting/hiring new employees. Most have come to learn that the hiring process has a tendency to be biased, which comes with moments of being unfair to certain applicants. While most of it comes from an unconscious bias, these acts still play an intricate role in making a decision when hiring a new employee.

While bringing awareness to our natural bias and attempting to correct these behaviors can be difficult, there are solutions that can be put into place to offer your human resource’s team a strategic plan to help prevent such biases from occurring.  

1) Reformat your job descriptions: A job description is one of the most crucial parts of the hiring process. It sets the tone for everything that follows and the parameters around the type of person you’re looking to hire—from their skills to their capabilities. The use of different words can have a greater impact than you realize on the candidates that come across your job listing. For example, certain adjectives like “competitive” and “determined” can be more appealing to men where as “collaborative” and “cooperative” tend to resonate more with women.

2) Try “blind hiring”: A technique that “blinds” you from seeing any demographic-related information for a particular candidate. This approach can help improve the chances of not weeding out a great candidate and to retain a more dynamic interview pool without your natural bias interfering with the hiring process.

3) Assessments using work examples: Offering a test to solve work-related problems can be a helpful indicator to both the potential hire and employer— revealing their level of job performance and the opportunity for the candidate to demonstrate his or her skill level. This can help eliminate the bias and unconscious judgement of appearance, gender, age and personality.

4) Create a consistent interview process: While an unstructured interview can allow for a more organic conversation, it tends to be unreliable when predicting job success. Whereas in a structured interview, the candidate is asked a set of defined questions, allowing employers to focus on the key factors that have an impact on performance—this approach offers a consistent interview process and minimizes potential bias.

5) Implement goals of diversity: Creating these goals will offer guidance and define the parameters in which to abide by—this helps keep diversity and equality top of mind when hiring future employees.