Employers are trying to get better at retraining workers  

While executives bemoan the cost of hiring in a tight labor market to meet fast-changing business needs, there is a ready pool of talent they wouldn’t need to spend a dime recruiting: their own workers.

But, as The Wall Street Journal reports, reskilling workers isn’t that simple.

Thousands of companies across the country are in the thick of a digital revolution that requires them to transform their operations.

Instead of teaching new skills to their current workers, employers often choose the disruption and high costs of layoffs or buyouts. Sometimes the required skills aren’t easily taught to existing employees, experts say. It’s also often because companies have only a hazy sense of what their internal talent is capable of, and migrating large numbers of employees into new positions requires time, money and commitment.   

But this hiring strategy is getting more difficult to pull off, because there aren’t enough people ready to fill the new positions. In response, companies are trying to retrain employees.

Amazon.com Inc., for example, will soon begin offering a path for workers to rise from warehouses to data centers, doubling their earnings along the way and helping Amazon staff a fast-growing part of the business. Read the full story.

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