While the pandemic’s massive shift to virtual learning generated a wealth of content, choice alone doesn’t equate to the right people developing the right skillsets. By the numbers, we know that:
- 66% of employees don’t understand why they’re engaging in learning and development at all.
- 62% want a more personalized learning experience at work.
- 75% appreciate personalized course recommendations based on their own career goals and skill gaps.
- 60% want learning and development to foster an always-on, continuous learning experience with more bite-sized, mobile learning that can fit seamlessly into the little pockets of time that they have in their workflow.
- If new information isn't applied, people forget 75% of it in just 6 days.
Being deliberate about the way your organizational culture navigates learning and development can help mitigate those downsides and unlock the full potential of a new reskilling/upskilling model Deploy tech wisely to close critical talent gaps.
So how do you make it happen? Keeping these five leading practices in mind can be a good way to start:
1. Shift from a just-in-case to a just-in-time, just-for-me learning philosophy
Centralized platforms enable content management, learning administration, data analytics and learning experience, each of which is important to shift people's skills quickly. This necessitates impactful learning pathways that are easy for your people to find, understand, follow, and track. Surrounding that model with an ingrained ability for your people to see their own progress and track skill acquisition can keep motivation strong. Organizations are increasingly using badges, academies, and other structuring mechanisms to help. These formal learning pathways also enable you to make skill building a key performance indicator (KPI) — underscoring the way learning is valued overall.
2. Integrate learning into the flow of work, and work into the flow of learning
People must become adaptable, autonomous, expert learners to continuously reskill and upskill. That means being skilled in areas like self-regulation, critical thinking, self-motivation, performance, and feedback monitoring. They also need to feel comfortable seeking out help, as well as noticing and abandoning old habits or beliefs that are getting in their way.
In a true learning culture, leaders foster those factors by reinforcing a top-down focus on the importance of learning. They create enablers and make continuous skill-building the norm. The best leaders actively discuss the skills they’re building themselves. Managers have an influential part to play here, too, followed by colleagues and mentors.
Learning and development teams can also help create an environment where reskilling and career success are interconnected by reinforcing learning objectives and building out the right materials, tools, and content. True, too, for designated learning champions or subject matter experts/networks ready to provide ongoing coaching and feedback or incentivize folks to learn new skills.
3. Focus on learning as a holistic ecosystem
An ecosystem capable of really engaging people in learning and development should be structured, designed, conducted, and reinforced with intention. Grounding your ecosystem on the “four E’s” — education, exposure, environment, and experience — can create a foundation capable of engaging people in the upskilling and reskilling process.
What does that look like?
- Education: What content will be provided, and how? Explore the key skills the organization needs and prioritize and curate them during the content structure and design stages. Then use blended modalities to conduct and reinforce the learning in ways that engage employees effectively. This could include cycling between digital learning to introduce concepts, expert-led sessions to dive deeper or provide hands-on practice, and applying new skills in real work scenarios with expert coaching.
- Exposure: What kind of collaboration can you provide during the learning process to enable people to learn from subject matter experts, experienced resources, and fellow learners?
- Environment: What platforms or changes to the actual physical work environment can reinforce learned skills and help people envision themselves both learning and then applying newly acquired skills?
- Experience: What reinforcement can you create now for the skills that are being built before you’re able to move people into new jobs? That could mean dialing up the use of practice-based methods — such as role play simulations or case studies, for example — and finding ways to reinforce new skills through someone’s existing role if you can’t move them into a spot where they’d use those skills full time. Creating initiatives that encourage learners through action learning and bringing real-world projects to the learning session are also useful strategies.
1. Make personal development planning a cyclical habit
Organizations often embed training like ethical business practices or cybersecurity right into a person’s learning path and planning cycle. Reskilling and upskilling require the same rigour and governance. Making personal development planning part of the annual cycle creates an ongoing need for people to organize, monitor, and evaluate their own learning, so they’re always developing the skills the business has identified as necessary.
2. Link skill identification, assessment, building, and application
For all this to work, each step of reskilling and upskilling must be intrinsically linked. That starts with data. For example, integrating training data with operational and safety intel within a given industry like manufacturing, power and utilities, mining or energy can help identify skills you are lacking in house. Lining up sales, customer service and profitability data with learning analytics in the consumer goods, retail or financial services spaces could reveal similarly compelling insights. Use this information to fuel decision-making at every stage of the reskilling and upskilling process.
