How (And Why) to Start an Effective Cross-Skilling Program

If there's a lesson the Great Resignation taught us, you need a fallback plan for almost every employee.

Meg Hellerstedt, President of Sylvane, shares her experience managing a retail company during the Great Resignation period. She says, "The sudden loss of employees and the difficulty of hiring new ones were a great impediment to continuing business as usual."

Imagine a scenario where two key product team members have resigned, and the entire team is utterly clueless about how to proceed with the following product release. You are struggling to find a replacement.

Finally, when you find a replacement, no one from the remaining team members can pass on knowledge to new joiners as they have no in-depth understanding of what those two members did. It results in productivity loss for both new joiners and the entire team. Definitely, not a great situation to be in.

You can avoid the falling trap in such scenarios by adding cross-skilling initiatives to your learning and development program. Cross-skill training is an excellent strategy for building more resilient, agile, and adaptable teams.

This article will cover:

• What is cross-skilling.
• Why it is important, as showcased by 8 competitive advantages of cross-skilling.
• How to develop a cross-skilling strategy for your organization.

🤹🏼 What does cross-skilling mean in a job?

Cross-skilling (also called cross-training or multiskilling) in a job refers to training employees to develop skills outside of their primary area of expertise. This approach enables individuals to perform a variety of roles or tasks across different functions or departments within an organization.

Cross-skilling aims to create a flexible, versatile, and multi-skilled workforce, improve team collaboration, and ensure business continuity and efficiency by reducing dependency on specific individuals for key tasks.

For instance, a software developer can be trained in software testing, so they can handle testing tasks in the absence of a tester.

Another example is that sales and marketing team members can be cross-trained on each other's workflows. It results in better collaboration between both teams on the final goal of attracting new customers.

🕵️‍♀️ Cross-skilling vs. upskilling vs. reskilling: Understanding the nuances

Upskilling is the process of equipping employees with new skills to progress in their current roles.

For example, training web developers on the latest web technologies so that they stay up to date with current trends. On the other hand, cross-skilling is training employees in skills beyond their role.

Upskilling provides more career advancement opportunities to employees and improves their performance. However, cross-skilling aims to mitigate risks and build more agile teams.

There is also another term, reskilling. It refers to training employees in new skills to adapt to changing job requirements or technology.

For example, suppose the role of a support engineer is becoming obsolete due to automation. In that case, you can reskill them to take up another role.

➡️ Learn about Amazon's ambitious program for upskilling their workforce.

🪜 Your 9-step guide to implementing cross-skilling in your organization

Here is a step-by-step guide to implementing a cross-skilling program in your organization.

1. Create a career path library

Before you even talk to employees about cross-training, it's best first to build a career path library of:

• current roles in your organization;
• competencies (skills, behaviors, and abilities) required for each role;
• career paths showing potential role progression in a department.

This library will give you a quick overview of all department roles and their expected competencies.

➡️ Discover how to identify competencies required for every role with our competency mapping guide.

2. Identify potential cross-skilling opportunities

The next step is to look at the career paths and find cross-skilling opportunities by:

• Identifying roles with overlapping skills
• Shortlisting roles requiring frequent collaboration
• Determining interdependent roles.

Employees in these roles can be potential participants in cross-skilling programs.

3. Conduct employee interest survey (Optional)

You can also gauge your employees' interest areas and ask which skills they want to develop. You can conduct a career development survey for employees and ask questions about:

• their career goals;
• the skills they want to build.

4. Set cross-skilling goals

You have identified potential cross-skilling opportunities.

Next, you have to define clear goals for your cross-skilling program. Which of these opportunities should you prioritize?

You can see the organization's business goals to define priority.

For example:

• If you have a significant product release coming up, the product team has to be cross-trained for better collaboration. Then, set goals for product team cross-training.
• If you see critical dependencies in the current marketing team, then you can plan cross-training so marketing team members can handle each other's absences.
• If you observe, product marketing and customer success teams are not on the same page, resulting in poor customer experience. Then, you can cross-train these two teams to deliver a seamless customer experience.  

Once you have finalized the goals, you can document them and assign goal owners (for example, HR leaders, department leaders, etc).

There can also be multiple goal owners on Zavvy. Also, you can set sub-goals so that responsibilities are distributed between stakeholders.

5. Develop training programs

Develop training modules, workshops, and seminars tailored to the skills you want to cultivate in your employees.

Using Zavvy, you can:

• Create custom courses: You can develop internal courses customized per your organization's processes and workflows. Plus, you get a centralized Learning Management System to track all the training and its progress.

• Schedule seminars/workshops/events: Use Zavvy's recurring learning events to schedule live seminars, workshops, or events. It simply takes a few clicks to set it up. You can enter the event host, session details, and how to enroll, and you are good to go.

• Take advantage of external courses: Zavvy also gives you access to an extensive database of 1000+ courses from reputed third-party platforms.

• Zavvy also offers AI support that helps you create courses ten times faster.

6. Implement mentorship and coaching

Apart from training, you can also design mentorship programs. Pair employees with mentors who can guide them through learning. Firstly, you can send surveys to employees to find volunteers and then assign mentors.

7. Compile your employee's current skills status

Before assigning any training to employees, assess employee's competencies to get an idea of their current status. You can conduct competency-based assessments on Zavvy to find where they stand for every skill.

Ultimately, you get a skill matrix showing your current workforce's skills. In Zavvy, you can view these matrices at the organization, department, location, or team level.

8. Create cross-skilling plans for employees

Now, you have all base data and training programs in place. Based on current skill status, you can define cross-skilling paths for employees.

Managers can have one-on-one meetings with employees to discuss cross-skilling and development goals.

The best would be to add the tasks (online courses, cohorts, workshops, certification, job rotation, shadowing, or coaching calls) to employee development plans.

Zavvy AI also helps you create personalized development plans with a click.

9. Monitor progress

Lastly, set up a system to monitor and review the progress of the cross-skilling plans. You can assess skills/competencies again after the employees complete the assigned cross-training programs. You can also couple reviewing cross-skilling tasks with regular employee performance reviews.

Also, you can conduct surveys to get employee feedback on whether they found the training helpful.

Tip: Ensure that employees have opportunities to apply their new skills in their daily work or new roles within the organization. It will keep them motivated to learn new skills.

🏆 Why is cross-skilling important? 8 Strategic advantages of cross-skilling

The top benefits of implementing a cross-skilling program are:

1. Builds agile and resilient teams

Meg Hellerstedt, President of Sylvane, says her company started a cross-skilling program after the Great Resignation period. Reflecting on the benefit of the cross-skilling program, she told us:

"There's smoother collaboration and a more continuous operation that's less prone to getting jeopardized by employee absences. Our processes flow better because employees don't have to always wait on their colleagues to move forward in certain tasks."

Cross-skilling creates more agile and resilient teams to handle employee absences or resignations.

2. Increases team collaboration and productivity

Steve Hallman, Enterprise agile coach and operations management consultant, says cross-training employees promotes collaboration and increases productivity.

He explains it with an example in software development: "Every time a front-end and back-end developer work together, they will both learn something. Doing it will expose everyone to all the skills available within the development team. It simply limits the amount of work in process."

3. Boosts innovation

Cross-functional teams increase innovation. Having employees with a broad range of skills, knowledge, and resources allows them to tackle a more comprehensive range of challenges faster than teams composed of members with a narrow set of skills.

4. Ensures adaptation to market demands

Kraig Kleeman, CEO and Founder of The New Workforce says: "We live in an era where change is the only constant. Market demands shift, new technologies emerge, and the skills once considered niche become mainstream. In such a landscape, having a team that can adapt quickly is not just an advantage; it's a necessity. Cross-skilling prepares your team for these shifts."

With cross-training, employees can take on different tasks and responsibilities and be more adaptable to changing market demands. For instance, the adoption of AI has significantly increased in HR functions. So, HR executives must have technical knowledge of how to adapt to the new systems.

➡️ Learn about top AI tools for HR processes and AI-based learning management systems.

5. Increases employee engagement

Gallup asked employees with poor engagement what changes they expect in the workplace. One of their most significant issues is their current work is quite repetitive. Instead, they would like to learn more things. Cross-training equips employees with new skills so they can take on different tasks.

6. Supports internal mobility and boosts retention

Internal mobility is the movement of employees within the same organization to a new role or developmental opportunity. Cross-training supports internal mobility. It enables employees to acquire more diverse skills, helping them to find their career path in the organization.

For instance, a front-end developer willing to be a cloud engineer can be trained in cloud development. Helping people make an internal move based on their career aspirations boosts retention.

7. Creates future leaders

Pallavi Sharma, a certified HR Business Partner, says, "When efficiently designed, cross-skilling programs can be instrumental in advancing individuals in tier 2 and tier 3 roles (Managers or Senior Leaders) to ascend to the next hierarchy level."

Employees in leadership roles need knowledge of different departments and roles. Cross-skilling is a training approach to create future leaders.

8. Reduces skill gaps

Over 50% of companies face a skills gap, and half address it by training existing employees. Cross-skilling creates a talent pool with diverse competencies to avoid skill gaps.

➡️ Build a highly productive workforce with Zavvy

Zavvy is your one-stop shop for all things talent development.

On Zavvy, you can:

• ✈️ Onboard new hires.
• 📝 Build career frameworks and competency library.
• 💪 Manage all training in a learning management system.
• 🌱 Design development plans.
• 🔄 Manage performance.

📅 The best part is we can customize the features per your use case. Book a demo now to see it in action.

❓ Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

What is an example of cross-skills?

Cross-skilling is training employees in skills beyond their role. These skills are primarily related to adjacent or interdependent roles.

For example, a back-end developer understands the principle of software development. They can also be cross-trained into back-end developers. This way, they can handle software development end to end and take a full-stack developer role.

What is an example of cross-skilling?

Cross-skilling is training employees in skills beyond their role. These skills are primarily related to adjacent or interdependent roles.

For instance, sales and marketing team members can be cross-trained on each other's workflow. It results in better collaboration between both teams on the final goal of attracting new customers.

What is upskilling, reskilling and cross-skilling?

Upskilling: Upskilling is the process of equipping employees with new skills to progress in their current job roles.

Cross-skilling: Cross-skilling is the process of training employees in additional skills beyond their current role.

Reskilling: Reskilling is training employees in new skills to adapt to changing job requirements or technology.