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Upskilling and Role-Shifts: How Senior Employees Can Adapt to a Change in Job Environment
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When it comes to advice given to people who are looking for a new job after being made redundant, one of the points mentioned is that an individual needs to view themselves as someone having a set of different skills that can be moulded and used for different roles in the job market. 

This is a useful concept to remember when you are promoted to a managerial role at your workplace. Shifting to such a space after years of having been valued primarily for the work you produced is an immense qualitative shift that can take getting used to. 

Where previously your role was limited to the sphere of completing work, meeting deadlines, making that pitch, working for decisions not taken by you, now the rules are very different. With this comes the need for a different approach, too. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you begin processing this new journey: 

  1. The Old Metrics of Comparison No Longer Work: Technology is constantly changing and by dint of this, so are the skill sets of newer, younger employees. If you begin to compare your technical skill set to that of someone new, it is likely that you will feel a sense of insecurity and inadequacy. It is important to remember that this difference in skill sets is a structural inevitability of how the industry functions and progresses. 
     
    In your role, your key mandate is not to out-perform somebody on your team but to focus on a new form of puzzle solving. This means being well-attuned to the diverse strengths and weaknesses of your team members, trying out combinations of who is best-suited to work with whom, who can be assigned what parts of a role in a project to make a difference to the quality of the output. 
     
    This new framework that you function in has a different vantage point. In a non-managerial role, effort and energy are often spent on creating a well-rounded set of skills that manage to make up for any drawbacks at the workplace. For e.g. someone who doesn’t have great people-skills might probably try to make up for this by being better at their technical skills. 
     
    In your capacity as a manager, you get to give breathing space to this approach. You can, for instance, recognize that it is normal for a team to be made up of different people with positives and negatives that they bring to the workplace. It is possible to create work requirements that hone in on the particular strengths of your team members, in a way that is genuinely beneficial for the company. This involves straddling multiple points of view and that is where your new and developing expertise comes into play. 
     
    To wit, your new role might make you feel like you are far behind on the learning curve compared to younger employees and team members, but re-framing where you stand, realizing that the skill set you now have to master and use is a very different one from before will help you see the bigger picture. Doing this will cause these fears to diminish in size, allowing you to concentrate on what is more important from your location and perspective.   

  1. Taking stock, identifying your strengths, dealing with identity-loss: In your new role, it is likely that the absence of your core working skills being used is causing you a feeling of emptiness and loss. This is an opportune time to look at your years of experience in the industry you have been in. You can look at your various different roles over time and create a list of what skills you used, what were the problem-solving aspects involved in these different instances, what were the learnings that you took from these different situations, what elements of this can be utilized in your new role now. 
     
    Since you are now building a different set of skills, there will be a need to re-look at the ways in which you have worked through a previous problem before to do two things: one, see what skills you already have for the role you need to fulfil now and two, what are the gaps that need to be bridged. 
     
    Doing this customized list-generation for yourself will help you in your own career’s growth trajectory. Being familiar with your own internal compass helps you deal with feelings of emptiness and fears that arise from looking at where others are currently in their own journeys.   

  1. Growth-based mindset: Often, the way that hierarchy in an organization is structured involves a pyramidal pattern of growth. However, for employee-satisfaction and growth of the company, it is important that each team member is seen as someone who is a leader in their own right - where growth and taking responsibility is an essential part of their role. 
     
    This means that the manager’s role attempts to foster a culture that allows for this. Micro-managing work-tasks within the team and creating a fixed mindset can help do the job but it also leads to role-dissatisfaction for the people involved and stagnation in interest levels. 
     
    Being aware of how to design such a growth-based environment where everybody is finding space to make progress, as opposed to a pyramidal hierarchy of leadership is also a new and important part of the manager’s mandate in their new role. 
     
    A few ways to do this can involve factoring in some downtime into the work schedules of different team members to work on learning more about the industry, working on a personal project idea relating to the industry, creating space for brainstorming sessions, encouraging diversity programs within your job space that permit for the influx of newer and more creative ideas that otherwise stand the chance of never seeing the day of light. 
     
    These suggestions don’t always need to be entirely new, full-fledged projects within themselves. A lot of these tasks can be done by you in your managerial capacity if you take the time to communicate well with others. Stay in the know about the well-being, physical and mental health of your team-members, know what changes need to be made in the office environment to facilitate an easier work environment.   
     
    Making the shift to a managerial role is challenging and daunting in several ways. However, with adequate preparation and thinking, this role holds potential to be one that involves a lot of new skill-building and learning in your career. 

  

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