While tech professionals have pursued reskilling and upskilling for the past several decades, the concept of preskilling became more important during the COVID-19 pandemic when companies pursued digitization and automation. The workforce needed to evolve to get the “skills for tomorrow,” said Severine Zaslavski, vice president of global product development at ManpowerGroup.
Preskilling allows you to plan for the next stage of your career, what roles might look like and the skills you will need. By contrast, upskilling involves participation in training and certification programs to achieve certain tech skills such as coding or data science, Zaslavski said.
With preskilling, workers acquire skills before they become necessary for their roles. It involves an understanding of future market patterns and keeping up with evolving technology, according to Steve Winterfeld, an advisory CISO at Akamai Technologies, a provider of content delivery network (CDN), cybersecurity and cloud services.
“I think it has always been important, but with the pace of change it is becoming critical,” Winterfeld says. “Being an expert in a specific technology has a shelf life, and you need to have the ability to understand how you learn and what you are good at to apply it to the next generation of technology.”
Tech professionals should prepare for in-demand skills that may not be on the immediate horizon. Preskilling requires education and preparing in advance for areas of focus that may be unfamiliar.
“It's about creating educational experiences that allow students to build those skills and confidence through hypothetical scenarios, not like actual work,” says Thomas Brunskill, cofounder & CEO of The Forage, a company that collaborates with employers to offer online job simulations.
How Preskilling Works
As tech professionals find alternative ways to gain key skills other than a four-year degree or credential programs, preskilling provides that practical training, according to Brunskill. Educational institutions are partnering with employers to provide training in the right skills; employers are best equipped to provide preskilling programs because they are closest to what tech careers entail, Brunskill notes. Examples include IBM and its P-TECH program, as the tech giant works with community colleges around the United States.
While upskilling and reskilling include hard skills like coding, preskilling entails some soft skills, Zaslavski explains.
“Preskilling takes a different view altogether,” Zaslavski says. “From an individual perspective, it’s about preparing for the skills that you would need before the job even exists.”
For example, ManpowerGroup offers a program through Experis, its IT professionals staffing company, to give tech professionals exposure to jobs that might involve AI in the future.
Preskilling could involve a student studying in a computer science program about what software engineering is like at Walmart compared with JPMorgan, Brunskill says. It may involve training future candidates on what a job as a cybersecurity analyst entails at SAP.
It’s a way to learn what skills at companies are aligned with their interests.
And testing out a role before you begin a career brings great insight into whether it’s a fit, according to Brunskill.
“It's much better for that candidate to find out earlier rather than committing to the career and realizing a couple of months or a couple of years later that this isn't suited to me and that I'm miserable in this job,” Brunskill says.
Tips on How to Approach Preskilling
To engage in preskilling, tech professionals should “learn to learn faster” as well as assess where they are as far as tech skills, and then pursue training programs to gain the skills they need, Zaslavski says. Assess if you’d like to continue in your career direction, what you’ll need to know in the future and what type of person you need to be to reach this stage, she advised.
When approaching preskilling, tech professionals should find a mentor to help them perform a gap analysis of their skills, Winterfeld advises: “Finding mentors is a great tool to leverage in this process. I sent one analyst to ‘toast masters’ and another to get a cybersecurity certification… This is a constant cycle through your career, not a one-off project.”
The key is having a passion for learning and keeping an eye on what skills will emerge. “Learn how your partner organizations work, your company's revenue model and what emerging skills will be needed (AI is not a surprise),” Winterfeld adds. “Set goals to better your technical, leader/project management and business skills every year.”
In the end, simply learning skills and not getting caught up in whether it’s preskilling, reskilling or upskilling will be key.
“You need to learn what you can now and get a better idea of what's coming, how it could impact you and whether it's going to interest you as well,” Zaslavski says.
