Does your organization have the hiring blues? If so, you’re not alone. A lack of qualified applicants is hitting small businesses particularly hard; a recent survey from the National Federation of Independent Business found that 60 percent of owners were trying to hire new employees and 92 percent of those were struggling to find candidates who fit the bill.

But Hatim Rahman, an assistant professor of management and organizations, points out an easy—and often overlooked—solution to this problem: train the employees you already have.

This week: the whys and hows of so-called upskilling.

Don’t be afraid of investing in your employees

Investing in upskilling programs can really pay off in the long term, Rahman explained in a recent Inc. article. “It provides an edge for organizations that are serious about providing workers with new opportunities in still a very tight labor market,” he said.

Yet organizations neglect and even resist upskilling for a variety of reasons.

One is the worry that freshly trained employees will take their new skills and head right out the door. But Rahman thinks that fear is overblown. “Workers are not going to leave because you give them upskilling opportunities,” he said. “They’re going to leave because of bad culture, bad management, compensation”—the usual laundry list of grievances.

Another is the belief that training doesn’t really help the company. That, too, may be misguided.

Consider this study from assistant professor of strategy Nicola Bianchi, which finds that investing in HR and other management training makes firms more productive. Bianchi and his coauthor studied a World War II–era management training program with a massive reach—the firms that applied to be part of the program represented 18 percent of the U.S. workforce at the time. Only some firms were selected and the chosen firms did not receive training in every area, creating a natural experiment of the program’s effectiveness.

The outcomes were striking: the researchers found that over 10 years, firms that received instruction in two areas saw overall productivity gains of about 15–18 percent. And while the training program was designed in the 1940s, the instruction modules are similar to what is taught today.

The results “should really convince everybody that management training and implementing good management practices is important to increase productivity,” according to Bianchi.

How to pull it off

So you’re convinced about the need to upskill your teams. But how?

Rahman suggests considering a variety of training options. For example, companies can reimburse workers for relevant classes taken on their own time or offer at-work training, with curricula developed either internally or externally. The right approach might depend on the worker and the skill—an employee with family obligations may not have time to take an evening or weekend course, and a more complex skill may take more time to learn than the standard workday allows.

And whatever you do, make sure the new skills you are teaching can be quickly applied. If employees devote time to learning something new, but don’t ever have a chance to put it to use, they’ll quickly forget what they learned—and may lose patience with the process.

So, the next time you’ve got a vacant position to fill, look within your ranks—the right candidate may be right in front of you. All they need is a little extra training.

You can read the whole Inc. article here.