The Impact of Employee Skill Proficiency on Business, Innovation, and Supply Chain Performance

Effective and skilled employees are the backbone of any successful organization. Simply put, if your employees can excel at the day-to-day tasks that make up their role, they will drive significant value for your organization. Additionally, if your employees are highly proficient, they can help to create an atmosphere that fosters innovation and can even influence your business’ stock market performance.

Today’s business landscape is witnessing growing competitiveness as organizations strive to attract top talent and ensure team continuity. To support these objectives, a comprehensive upskilling program should be front and center as a core part of each employee’s package. After all, these training programs provide a range of benefits, spanning from specific role-focused activities like inventory control, supply, and demand planning, or project management, to giving employees the tools they need to drive their creativity and productivity, thus significantly contributing to business success.

Here’s why you need to prioritize skill proficiency to drive business results.

Skill proficiency is a crucial part of building a successful team. Research from the University of Oxford has found that when a team enjoys and is good at what they do, they demonstrate 13% more productivity. Additionally, increased levels of proficiency within a team play a significant role in driving customer satisfaction and helping your business retain clients over a longer period.

Skill proficiency and innovative thinking are closely intertwined. Indeed, many industry-leading businesses – particularly in the supply chain and procurement industries –  are reevaluating how they see the roles in their teams to increasingly prioritize innovation. Given that a knowledgeable, skilled team can build a culture of creativity and innovation, this is a crucial innovation in the modern business ecosystem.

A Deloitte global survey identified a seismic shift towards this perception of professionals. Workers no longer want to be defined by their jobs and instead be seen as individuals with skills and capabilities that can be deployed to work that matches their professional interests. This encourages greater levels of flexibility within organizations, allowing their teams to shift the ways they work to meet their clients’ needs, and placing innovation at the heart of each team’s workflows.

Unilever – one of the world’s leading consumer goods businesses – is just one example of an organization that has fostered this approach within its team, introducing the U-Day initiative to encourage its employees to devote one day per week to upskilling and professional skills development. This has been introduced alongside other employee-friendly initiatives and has seen significant results, with teams reporting increased employee engagement and a major increase in productivity. Although your business doesn’t need to embrace such a radical approach to upskilling, the advantages of enhancing your employees’ proficiency are undeniable.

A large proportion of the businesses Skill Dynamics partners with are focused on supply chain and procurement. In these industries, there is a close correlation between employee skill proficiency and supply chain performance, with several areas where skilled employees can make crucial, positive contributions.

For example, one of the primary objectives of procurement is cost savings. This includes savings across your procurement chain, which can be influenced by upskilling your team in core skills for supply chain professionals, such as price negotiation, and cost avoidance strategies. Similarly, by effectively training your team, you can increase their understanding of the procurement cycle, helping them to identify bottlenecks in the procurement process and implement strategies to address them

While your teams need to have a grasp of these skills, to prove their value to your customers, they ought to demonstrate a range of competencies beyond what their role demands. This might involve compliance training, enabling them to ensure activities align with pertinent laws, regulations, and company policies, ultimately mitigating legal risks and safeguarding reputation. Alternatively, team members could opt for training on reducing maverick spending, helping them to identify and reduce unauthorized spending, which can help businesses control their budgets.

Empowering this approach relies on enhancing your employees’ skill proficiency. The upskilling process requires targeted, long-term investment in training programs that can be personalized to meet your employees’ needs, alongside the adoption of a growth-first mindset within your business. To encourage your employees to to maximize their upskilling opportunities, it is crucial that they can access training in a way that will allow them to effectively learn from it. Working with eLearning providers is just one way an organization can access training in the range of formats needed to ensure their teams can learn, regardless of their learning style.

To be successful in the modern market, organizations must prioritize skill development and training initiatives for their teams. Collaborating with a partner like Skill Dynamics, offering extensive skill development resources and training options, empowers you to nurture a highly proficient workforce driving your business to new heights.

A frequently overlooked aspect of the proficiency equation is measurement. At Skill Dynamics, we assign each learner a score from 0-4 for each core area of expertise they would be expected to have in their role. Alongside this individual score, each competency is given a target score, depending on each learner’s role. This allows us to devise a personalized training plan for each learner, based on their specific needs. Our platform demo outlines this process, and how it can support learners in their upskilling journey.