Multi-skilling
Multi-skilling is the process of training employees in specific skills that cross the traditional trade-specific or craft-specific skill sets. Thus, to develop multi-skills, employees require additional training to enable them to perform more jobs within the same job family or to do the entire job from a holistic point of view. Multi-skilling is often misconstrued to imply that it is consequent upon downsizing. However, downsizing occurs due to skill obsolescence, while multi-skilling is due to a holistic development of human potentialities. This holistic development takes place to effectively address the requirements of a changing production process (more flexible and customized), organizational systems (decentralized control), and state-of-the-art technology (numeric control, computer numeric control, direct numeric control, etc.). Multi-skilling facilitates intra-occupational and inter-occupational job mobility and thereby reinforces human resource planning (HRP).