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Apprenticeship Programs Are on the Rise. Are You On Board?

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In today’s fluid job market, companies everywhere are seeking innovative ways to tap into a more skilled, diverse, adaptable talent pipeline. This is a key reason why modern apprenticeship programs continue to gain appeal.

These programs open new pathways to job seekers who are eager to learn and grow in their careers, particularly in fast-growing business sectors. At the same time, they make it easier for employers to build must-needed bench depth. Here’s how modern apprenticeships are redefining workforce development…

What’s Driving Interest in Apprenticeship Programs?

Apprenticeships are playing an increasingly significant role in workforce development. According to the U.S. Labor Department, participation declined briefly during the pandemic. However, from 2012-2021, annual new apprentices increased 64%, with nearly 250,000 new participants joining these programs in 2021. And the outlook remains strong, with Zippia projecting 7% growth from 2018-2028.

 

FY21 Apprenticeship Programs US - participation trends Department of Labor

 

It’s not surprising that more people are honing their skills and expanding their professional prospects through apprenticeships. With the high cost of post-secondary education putting college out of reach for many Americans, apprenticeship programs offer an attractive alternative for those who are preparing to enter the workforce or change careers.

At the same time, employers are looking beyond universities to fill gaps in their talent pipeline. As new technologies and volatile market forces disrupt various industries, companies recognize that a strong, future-ready workforce is a sustainable competitive advantage. With qualified talent in short supply, these organizations are investing in apprenticeship programs to develop a pool of people with proven skills and abilities that can move their agenda forward.

As a result, more employers are discovering that apprenticeships are a highly effective way to build a strong, agile workforce with relevant hands-on learning and real-world experience.

Modern vs. Traditional Apprenticeship Programs

Although apprenticeships are not a new concept, modern apprenticeship programs are ushering in a new era of professional development that offers solutions for both employers and employees. The appeal of modern apprenticeships lies in their ability to bridge the gap between education and employment by offering a dynamic approach to training.

While many trade unions run apprenticeship programs, a broad range of companies now integrate apprenticeships directly into their employee learning initiatives. For example, LVMH, Tiffany & Co., and Benefit Cosmetics run active programs, each reflecting their sector’s unique needs.

In the past, apprenticeships focused on building and construction trades. But now they span a variety of industries. For example, you’ll find successful programs offered by companies in transportation, hospitality, healthcare, financial services, telecom, technology, energy, and other fast-growing sectors. This broad adoption trend underscores the business value of modern apprenticeship programs.

An Employer’s View of Modern Apprenticeships

From an employer’s perspective, apprenticeships are beneficial for a variety of reasons — primarily because they’re an effective way to build a more diverse pool of candidates. Apprenticeship programs offer a lower barrier to entry than traditional academic paths because they’re more affordable and often require only a part-time commitment. This is crucial for addressing diversity gaps within industries and fostering a more inclusive workforce.

In addition, apprentices bring diverse skill sets to their roles. Although the typical apprentice has a college degree, it’s likely to be outside the employer’s domain. Many apprentices have prior work experience, so they may bring transferable skills to the table, along with coveted soft skills like problem-solving, communication, and teamwork.

Debunking Common Myths

Many misconceptions shape impressions of apprenticeships. However, the facts tell a different story. For example:

1. Productivity Slips When Employers Hire Apprentices

Apprenticeship is a comprehensive, hands-on learning method that can boost productivity for all involved. As existing employees train participants, their level of knowledge, skill, and proficiency increases. And because apprentices often become successful employees, retention improves. So hiring apprentices can build “bench depth” that helps keep performance and productivity on track, even when talent is in transition.

2. Companies Don’t Control the Hiring Process

Choosing apprentices is comparable to a standard hiring process. Employers identify and interview appropriate candidates, and invite qualified individuals to join the program. Once hired, apprentices are eligible for relevant employee benefits and are subject to the same workplace policies as traditional employees.

3. Apprentices Lack Experience and Credentials

Often, apprentices have developed desirable soft skills through prior experience. For instance, individuals who’ve worked in customer service, retail, or food service positions usually have solid problem-solving and communication skills, and they work well in teams. Many also bring transferrable capabilities from a different industry as they re-skill or upskill.

4. Hiring an Apprentice is “Charity”

An apprenticeship program is a proven recruiting tool. Graduates are highly desirable job candidates with in-demand skills. Most also have developed vital soft skills that can be hard to teach. They also have a hunger for new opportunities, as well as the attitude, aptitude, and drive to succeed.

Why Apprenticeships Attract Young Talent

Apprenticeships attract people of all ages. But they’re particularly appealing to young people who are entering the job market. There are several reasons why:

  • Younger candidates prefer active, hands-on learning over static, classroom-based lectures — and active learning is a hallmark of apprenticeship programs.
  • Apprentices are usually paid, so they earn an income while acquiring new skills. This financial benefit is particularly attractive to those who want to avoid student loan debt or other financial burdens associated with traditional education.
  • Most apprenticeship programs are designed to fill skills gaps in high-demand professions. By gaining practical skills and experience in these fields, young people can improve their professional marketability and job security.

Inside a Modern Apprenticeship Program

Successful apprenticeship programs play an important role in connecting the dots between an employer’s talent requirements, new job opportunities, and motivated individuals with career aspirations. For example, through modern “boot camp” training, our organization prepares high-potential participants for promising career paths.

A program’s demographics can underscore its reach and impact. For example, 19% of our apprentices are younger than 25 years old, while the average age is 34 years old. So although we support people at any stage in their career journey, mid-career professionals often look to us when they want to level up their skills or pursue a new career path.

Of the 462 individuals who have participated in our programs, 347 have been placed in professional roles. This impressive placement rate reflects the program’s effectiveness, showcasing the success of modern apprenticeships in providing meaningful employment opportunities.

Conclusion

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, organizations require dynamic workforce development solutions. Apprenticeships are an excellent way to address this need.

For employers, these programs are a gateway to a more diverse, skilled talent pipeline. For participants, these programs offer paid, hands-on skill development that paves the way for next-level success. Overall, this is a more effective, inclusive option for both employers and job seekers who need to prepare for the future of work.

Want to Succeed at Upskilling? Lead With Hands-On Learning

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Corporate learning and development (L&D) is at a crossroads. Today’s workforce desperately needs a skills update to prepare for the future of work, and old-school strategies aren’t rising to the challenge. Instead, organizations are rapidly turning to hands-on learning. Here’s why…

Skills development was once reserved only for high-potential employees. But now, with qualified talent in short supply, business leaders realize the importance of reskilling and upskilling people at all levels of the organization. And this need is only growing more urgent, as innovative technologies disrupt and redefine jobs in every industry. Still, L&D is struggling to respond.

Hands-On Learning Avoids Wasted Dollars

The scale of this learning disconnect is massive. Global L&D spending now exceeds $360 billion a year — $165 billion in the U.S., alone. Yet 75% of managers are dissatisfied with their company’s L&D programs, and 70% of employees say they haven’t mastered the skills needed to do their jobs.

In other words, most employees aren’t translating learning into skills improvement or applying what they learn in real work settings. As a result, L&D budgets are largely being left behind on the classroom floor.

However, all learning experiences are not equal. Traditional instructional formats (such as classroom-based training, theoretical learning, and standard elearning courses) are not enough to help people build the skills they need to succeed. Clearly, to develop a more competent, productive workforce, employers must rethink the way they approach reskilling and upskilling. This is why hands-on learning is rapidly gaining traction.

5 Ways Hands-On Learning Improves Upskilling Results

1. It Drives Skill Mastery

Until recently, learning focused primarily on delivering content and consolidating that content into better (curated) experiences. This may improve information discovery and access, but it isn’t enough to support the complex roles many employees must perform.

Anyone can read a blog about how to fly a plane, but it doesn’t mean they’ll be ready to step into a pilot’s role. Likewise, anyone can sit in a cockpit observing others, but that first-hand exposure doesn’t fully prepare them to fly.

To become proficient at flying an airplane, people need hands-on learning experience. For example, participating in simulations, role play, and challenges over time helps people practice and develop competence. Also by incorporating assessments, individuals receive feedback that helps them evaluate and improve their ability to perform on the job.

According to Stanford neuroscience professor Andrew Huberman, there is no “best way” to learn. However, he says research indicates that note-taking helps people engage and retain conceptual information. He recommends actively reading or listening to the material, then spending time away to deliberately revisit the content. “Periodically think back from start to finish and figure out where gaps in knowledge remain. Then repeat.”

But he adds this important point, “For material that requires problem sets, obviously, you also need to do the problem sets.” After all, no one would trust a plumber who has never touched a pipe, or a builder who has no tools.

The value of hands-on learning is common sense. We know it from our earliest days as children who must learn to walk, talk, and eat. Learning by doing is the most effective way to develop a skill.

2. It Validates Skills With Confidence

Just as a pilot must complete 1500 hours of flight time to earn a license, many employees must validate hands-on mastery of critical skills. For example, think of people involved with coding, cybersecurity, crisis management, customer service, and more.

For roles like these, too much is at stake to rely solely on passive learning through articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, and books. It’s all too easy for someone to log in to an elearning course, online seminar, or virtual classroom and then check out mentally. Hours completed and content consumed are not enough to verify an individual’s level of understanding, skill, and competency.

What’s more, as technology and business processes change, employees face increasing pressure to upskill and reskill. As the pressure mounts, it’s tempting to simply click on content and tick boxes to complete a learning pathway.

It may be tempting to think theoretical knowledge is sufficient for people to perform successfully at work. But imagine your organization manages a billion-dollar financial portfolio. Would you trust an employee with untested book knowledge to protect your company from cyberattacks? If that were the case, then why does human error cause 90% of data breaches?

3. It Helps People Remember What They Learn

Hands-on learning isn’t just a way to give people a safe space to practice new skills. When employees engage in the simple act of completing a learning task in their job environment it reinforces knowledge. This is why medical education is based on the philosophy, “See one, do one, teach one.” Doctors and surgeons realized way back in the 19th century that hands-on practice is the best way to develop skills.

4. It Encourages People to Learn More, Faster

Hands-on learning also helps people learn more than they realize. That could be because experiential learning is more engaging than reading words on a page or watching an instructor’s video lecture. It could also be because people are asked to recall information and apply it in real time during a simulation or other challenge. For example, a Harvard study found that students in classes where skills were actively practiced learned more than those who attended lecture-based classes. As a result, test scores were higher among those in “active” classes.

Reinforcing new skills ensures that nobody forgets what they’ve learned as soon as they leave a classroom or switch off their computer. It connects skills with their application. As a result, it reinforces skill development. And ultimately, it helps people learn more, more quickly. This is especially critical for employees, who often have only limited time available for learning and development.

As EY says, “Today, although the skills gap is one of the main concerns of business leaders, the workforce only has limited time available to dedicate to learning. This means L&D needs to make learning more accessible and prioritize certain learning interventions over others. Briefly, L&D needs to think about how learning can be integrated into the flow of work, so the workforce and business can grow as much as possible, given shorter, faster, more integrated learning.”

Hands-on practice actually helps the mind consolidate learning and store it in long-term memory. Studies show that hands-on learning engages both hemispheres of the brain, so it stores more information and builds stronger connections with that information. In other words, people who engage in hands-on learning gain more knowledge, and they recall it faster when needed.

5. It Meets Diverse Learning Needs

Each of us prefers to learn in different ways. Some people enjoy traditional classroom education, while others find self-directed learning more effective. The same applies to corporate learning. We can’t expect everyone to feel comfortable upskilling through an online course or by reading written materials. For example, neurodiverse people may not have the attention span to sit through a lengthy webinar or read a manual. Hands-on learning levels the playing field by letting each employee participate in a way that feels more natural and appropriate for their needs.

Hands-On Learning Is the Smartest Upskilling Strategy

Many L&D leaders enter this field because they have a passion for learning and they understand the value it brings to employees and organizations alike. But if we don’t equip employees with the best options for learning, we’re letting them down. The best way for people to practice and develop skills in a safe environment is to offer hands-on learning experiences that align with their current roles and future aspirations.

If you’re still not convinced, ask yourself this question: The next time you travel on an airline, who would you choose to fly that plane? Would you prefer a pilot with thousands of hours of hands-on experience, or someone who’s spent thousands of hours reading airline manuals?

Is Remote Work Failing Generation Z?

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When the pandemic arrived in 2020, everyone’s definition of work changed in a heartbeat. Most people headed home, leaving their offices, cubicles, water coolers, and daily commutes behind. After making it through that massive disruption, employers found an even tougher challenge on the other side. They’ve had to figure out how to sustain a positive, productive work culture outside of a shared space. Even now — more than 3 years later — many HR and business leaders still haven’t filled in the blanks. But the delay isn’t helping anyone, especially Generation Z.

What exactly is happening here? And what are the implications? Let’s take an in-depth look at what employers should consider…

Why Generation Z Matters

It’s not surprising to learn that what we know about Gen Z on the youngest members of our workforce.

Imagine starting your first adult job at home. You have no peer relationships or experience in how to navigate organizational life. Think about how overwhelming it would be to move through each day without knowing how to find context, where to look for the right resources, or who can most easily steer you in the right direction. But this has become a norm for all too many younger workers.

No one recruits people to fail. And despite a shaky economy, talent is increasingly hard to recruit and retain. So employers are understandably concerned about onboarding and upskilling Generation Z staff more effectively in today’s remote work environment.

What’s the Next Step for Employers?

Some organizations already had a head start on this new world order. For example, virtual teams have long been what we know about Gen Z. This company continues to improve remote work processes and systems. And recently, Buffer has focused on preventing issues that keep recent graduates from succeeding as new hires.

Buffer is the exception rather than the rule. Most companies had not considered challenges like these before the pandemic, so they were totally unprepared to support young hires in a remote climate. Now, organizations everywhere are actively seeking insights so they can make it work.

Unfortunately, useful data about key issues and best practices is still limited. But smart employers are thinking ahead, so they can minimize negative consequences. For instance, it’s especially important to consider how remote work potentially limits access to equitable opportunities for career growth and development among younger workers.

Here’s a central question to address: “Compared with recent generations, do our Gen Z employees have what we know about Gen Z and develop in their careers?”

Defining Generation Z

When talking about how young people are affected by remote work, we want to be clear. This group includes working-age people born after 1996. This aligns with Pew Research, which selected 1997 as the starting point. Before then, Gen Z was too young to be affected by political and cultural changes that notably influenced Millennials.

Currently, Gen Z and Millennials are experiencing very different life stages. Therefore, when researching these groups, it’s important to apply different measures of security, financial stability, and so forth.

For example, many Millennials are starting a family, buying a home, and settling down. Meanwhile, Gen Zs are finishing high school or college, moving out of their parent’s home, getting their first job, and becoming more independent.

Gen Zs are the definitive internet generation. All members of this cohort were born after the internet became widely available, and they came of age surrounded by the abundance and complexities of social media. Theoretically, Gen Zs are ready to thrive in a highly connected business world. But are they ready to thrive in a remote-first world? 

Remote Work Benefits for Generation Z

Remote work has created an unprecedented opportunity for people who want more autonomy because they can more directly manage their work schedule, location, office set-up, family time, and more. So understandably, remote work is popular among older workers who want to improve their work-life balance. But what about Gen Z?

Here are some reasons younger workers value remote work:

  • Lower commuting expenses
  • Less commute time (and more time for other priorities)
  • More professional opportunities for people with accessibility needs (when commuting is difficult or impossible)
  • More time/flexibility to pursue further education while earning an income
  • Potential to work for multiple employers at once (increase income and expand skills faster)
  • Likely exposure to a more diverse spectrum of people across roles and geographies (compared with onsite jobs)
  • Reduce the risk of toxic management (because behavior is captured in communication channels such as email, slack, and Zoom calls)
  • Freedom to reduce stress by taking breaks for self-care, or spending time with family/friends
  • Potential to start a family at a younger age (if desired) by leveraging flexible scheduling
  • Ability to take time for caregiving, if older or younger family members are at home

Remote Work Risks for Generation Z

Although Gen Z can benefit from remote work, there are downsides, as well: 

  • More obstacles to informal learning. Fewer chances to overhear and join relevant conversations, discuss questions in the hall and on breaks, or be invited to meetings and activities on-the-fly
  • Fewer 1-on-1 relationship-building opportunities
  • Lack of face-to-face community connections
  • Risk of isolation
  • Missed opportunities for on-the-job learning (skills and institutional knowledge)
  • More difficulty finding support networks and career networks
  • Threats to personal time (Digital days at home may start earlier and end later than normal)
  • Potential for increased stress if micromanaged from a distance
  • Zoom and screen fatigue
  • Pressure to create a proper workspace, even if it’s not affordable for a young person
  • Higher out-of-pocket expenses (equipment/workspace, internet, phones, hardware)
  • Regular remote office distractions that affect focus and concentration (for example, neighborhood construction, power outages, housemates)
  • Greater burnout risk (from a persistent lack of boundaries, unclear scheduling, or unrealistic expectations)

Long-Term Equity Implications 

Some of the problems noted above could have a serious, lasting impact on young workers’ professional and personal lives. For example, without in-office experience, Gen Z staff are more likely to suffer from a lack of mentorship, advancement opportunities, informal learning, and professional community.

In addition, remote and hybrid work models often blur the lines between home and work. If you’re home, you could be working. And if you’re working, you could be doing something else. Distractions are all around. Is this decision fatigue or a lack of discipline? When remote workers don’t separate these roles at the start of their careers, boundary issues can potentially follow them all the way to retirement.

That’s why it’s especially important for business leaders, managers, and older team members to understand why remote Gen Z workers need extra support to establish a foundation for success.

Remote Work FAQs

Why Do Employers Oppose Remote Work?

Some employers don’t support virtual teams because they have multiple business concerns. They may expect the worst: weaker productivity, collaboration, informal learning, and a loss of tribal knowledge. Or they may be concerned about employee wellbeing: increased isolation, stress, and disengagement.

Has Remote Work Decreased Productivity?

Depending on an organization’s workload and scheduling, remote work can lead to a decrease in productivity. Employees may be more distracted when working remotely, or if their workspace is chaotic they struggle to focus.

Many other factors can reduce productivity in a remote or hybrid work setting, so this is an important consideration to discuss openly on an ongoing basis.

Why Is Remote Work So Exhausting?

Remote work can feel exhausting, especially if you haven’t established a clear separation between work space and home space. Juggling these blurred lines can add a psychological load that increases stress and eventually leads to exhaustion.

Setting People Up for Success

Given what what we know about Gen Z and remote work, how can employers create a culture that helps young workers feel comfortable working at your organization? It may seem like in-office work is the best answer for anyone at the start of their career. However, some digital solutions can make remote-first teams feel more connected, supported, and included. For example:

  • Establish consistent office hours
  • Encourage everyone to rely on collaborative communication tools
  • Practice knowledge sharing as a way of working
  • Build and promote remote-first mentorship programs
  • Regularly ask Gen Z workers and managers open-ended questions about what is working (and what is not)
  • Schedule periodic digital water cooler chats and invite everyone to suggest agenda ideas

It’s important for leaders to build on what many of us have learned about remote and hybrid work over the past few years. Challenge yourselves and others to think outside the box. Put yourselves in the shoes of each employee — not just younger people — and think of ways to help everyone feel more connected and included. Experiment. Hold on to what works, and integrate it into your culture.

Developing Your Team Versus Driving Results: How Do You Strike a Balance?

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Faced with increasingly turbulent economic times, businesses are rapidly learning the importance of strong leadership. The world has had enough problems dealing with the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath. And companies that lacked strong leaders have been struggling to move through a nonstop stream of business problems in recent years. Many organizations have responded by emphasizing short-term performance. But the truth is that you’ll ultimately achieve better results by developing your team, as well. It’s a long game. However, this strategy pays in multiple ways.

Developing Your Team Builds Strength for the Future

During difficult times, it is natural for businesses to focus on achieving essential near-term results. The burden of generating more leads, maintaining a strong sales pipeline, and sustaining profitability normally falls to leaders. But these objectives also need to be balanced with broader business interests.

When teams are successful, it’s clear that their leaders are effectively managing people, strategy and resources. But when the inverse is true, it can underscore leadership problems that shouldn’t be ignored.

Here’s a contradiction that makes things even more complicated: as companies push harder for better results from team members, staff are likely to feel underappreciated, especially if individuals aren’t encouraged to develop in ways that help them grow professionally.

So, you may get the results you need in the short-term. But it can come at the cost of long-term company success, as skilled team members decide to move on and pursue more promising opportunities.

In this article, we look at how business leaders can strike a better balance between driving great results and developing their teams.

Great Leadership is a Journey, Not a Destination

The first thing to consider is that it is important to understand your own expectations of leadership, and determine if you ought to adjust those assumptions. Being a leader means making measured decisions and balancing their consequences every single day.

You can always learn more and understand more. But this isn’t something leaders can afford to take for granted. It’s important to intentionally embrace growth and stay open to learning — for yourself and everyone on your team.

“The best leaders learn from experiences — including failures — and apply those lessons to unfamiliar situations in the future,” says Gemma Leigh Roberts, a chartered psychologist specializing in leadership. “They see challenges as opportunities, as opposed to threats, proactively seek knowledge to stay up to date in a rapidly shifting professional environment, and are curious to identify areas for development and try new ways of doing things.”

Retain Top Staff by Developing Your Team

It is important to remember that if you want to get strong results across your company, you need a strong team. Your business results are driven by the people working with you. There is always pressure to get the best out of all your people in their day-to-day activities. But it’s equally important to ensure that top performers are kept happy, challenged, and supported.

Remember that talented individuals will always be able to find positions elsewhere. So, you’ll want to nurture and retain your organization’s best performers. A key way of doing this is by providing them with opportunities for career growth and development.

“While training is often necessary when teaching people new skills, it’s only the first step toward a more distant end,” says Margaret Rogers in Harvard Business Review. “In my experience, the most impactful development happens not through formal programs, but also through smaller moments that occur within the workplace: on-the-job learning opportunities that are wholeheartedly catered to the worker’s unique needs and challenges.”

Ideas for Developing Your Team While Keeping Results in Mind

1. Link Personal Goals to Business Goals

Too often, when we think about “top performers,” we consider it only from the perspective of how well people are achieving their professional goals. But it’s also important to link their goals with business objectives. To illustrate this point, let’s look at an example:

Imagine the highest-performing member of your sales team completes 50 sales in a recent month. But since then, only 5 of those sales have turned into repeat business because your top performer has been overselling in order to complete the original sales. Meanwhile, another member of the team made 30 sensible sales, and has subsequently turned 15 of those sales into valuable repeat business.

Here’s another example: Say a staff member wants to upskill for a role that will benefit your business, and they want to enhance their driving capabilities. By supporting this staff member’s personal training goals, you can help them acquire a higher-level license that will also be of value to your organization. In this circumstance, a personal goal can serve two purposes — simultaneously helping a team member grow while also helping the organization address business needs.

2. Establish Achievable Goals

If you want to motivate staff and provide them with opportunities for development, you need to ensure that you set realistic goals for their growth. It is also important for leaders to understand and agree with the scope of these goals.

“You need to have the discipline to take risks,” explains Howard Shore of management training specialists, Activate Group. “If your management and executive team are not aligned in their goals, and if your company culture is underdeveloped and unsupportive of change, this can create enormous friction.”

3. Know When to Change and Adapt

Leaders and managers recognize when their business is doing well because they’re rewarded with strong revenues, profits, and momentum. They know established goals are being met. Likewise, their employees and customers also feel more accomplished and satisfied. However, if success comes down to striking a good balance between today’s results and preparation for the future, then it’s essential to recognize when things may be off-balance.

Smart leaders know how critical it is to stay alert and keep an eye out for issues that require adjustment. When, how and why can an off-kilter equilibrium slow your progress or tip the scales of success against you? Here are some obvious but important factors to keep in mind:

  • Rising salaries
  • Increasing financial costs from external causes, such as inflation, recession, exchange rate fluctuations or taxes
  • Falling profits
  • Deteriorating business growth
  • Staffing issues
  • Supply chain problems
  • Threatening economic events or political instability.

4. Give Staff Ample Agency to Grow

It is important for staff to understand that they have agency in your business. The best way to manage this is by delegating tasks to team members, rather than trying to manage everything yourself. In this context, effective leaders focus on how to let people lead themselves. Having agency gives people a chance to develop on their own terms, and provides paths to growth that can be beneficial to the business as well as the individual.

5. Link Success to Opportunity

Just as it is wise to provide staff with the chance to grow, it is important to emphasize the idea that a company’s long-term success depends on team members’ collective contributions. Company-wide success is an opportunity for staff, too. This is why goal alignment matters. In the best-case scenario, individual success aligns with company achievements. This makes it easier to find an effective balance between results and team growth.

Final Notes on Driving Results Versus Developing Your Team

Leaders are essential to team success. A great team with poor leadership can lose focus or descend into infighting. It is up to management to find ways to maximize results while also ensuring effective development of their team. By keeping a continuous eye on both and proactively managing both sides of the equation, companies look forward to long-term success.

4 Smart Ways You Can Use Data to Cultivate Employee Growth

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Data has percolated into every area of business — from the hiring process, to marketing programs, to charting a company’s strategy for the future. In fact, 80% of business leaders now say data is critical for decision making in their organizations. One area where the right data can make a huge impact is when managers are helping individual team members expand their professional skills. Here are some of the most powerful ways you can use data to develop people more effectively:

4 Ways to Use Data for Employee Growth

1. Set the Stage With Feedback Insights

Before applying data to help employees grow, it’s worth starting at the top — literally. Leaders can demonstrate the power of data by ensuring that essential information flows upstream and downstream across your organization.

Start by setting up continuous feedback loops. In other words, create communication conduits that facilitate the ongoing flow of feedback from employees to team leaders and back again. This can help you better identify areas where employees are struggling and respond more quickly to those needs.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management says effective and timely feedback is “critical to improving performance.” Often, feedback reveals trouble spots that leaders must first address on a management level. This process establishes a foundation that helps employees feel empowered to improve and grow.

For example, imagine that critical project status information is consistently slow to reach some corners of your organization. You conduct a brief employee survey and find that specific communication roadblocks are keeping people from interacting more openly and proactively. As a result, you implement a targeted communication improvement initiative, including tools, protocols, and training sessions that help employees understand when, why and how to communicate project updates.

If you want employees to grow and succeed in their roles, leverage key data from ongoing feedback, so you can encourage growth that also improves business results.

2. Use Data to Establish Performance Objectives

Working hand-in-hand with feedback efforts, data can also play an integral role in establishing employee goals and evaluating performance. The concept is simple. For employees to grow, they must understand where they need to focus and the goals they need to reach.

Smart goal-setting strategies often rely on collaborative OKR methods. This acronym stands for “objectives and key results.” Rather than simply setting a goal and trying to reach it, OKRs let you connect objectives with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). Data can play a key role as you move through this OKR process.

For instance, say your business wants to boost sales revenue by 10% next quarter (your objective). To get there, you need to define a clear set of actions that will lead to that result. These actions could include a market analysis in the first month to identify additional target audiences, and roll-out of a market expansion sales initiative in the second month. Throughout the quarter, you can use KPIs to measure results and adjust the plan, accordingly.

OKRs are powerful because they tie individual and team goals to organizational objectives. These shared goals are managed and discussed on an ongoing basis. Ultimately, the measurable nature of OKRs lets you use data objectively to measure employee performance and growth over time.

3. Use Relevant Data

Data analysis is an excellent way for leaders to identify opportunities for employee growth. However, it’s important to use data carefully, so you don’t misapply it.

When measuring something like employee growth (which varies from one person to another), avoid using stale or unrelated data. This can cause you to set an unrealistic bar for goals or point you in the wrong direction entirely. Instead, use industry and company benchmarks to create relevant, achievable OKRs that fit into your feedback framework.

For example, leadership consultants at McChrystal Group have helped numerous organizations turn existing data into leading behavioral indicators of team success. The firm’s research underscores a need for workplace accountability and communication.

Specifically, McChrystal analysts have found that, compared with other industries, healthcare employees are 20% less likely to agree that accountability is upheld in their organizations. And separately, financial services middle managers are 15% less likely to say their organizations communicate clearly and regularly about objectives and best practices.

Although these statistics are interesting, they don’t apply to every workplace. So, what’s the key takeaway here?

Don’t use data just because it vaguely supports your situation. If you want to develop a stronger team, make sure your data is up-to-date and relevant to your industry, business, and team.

4. Use Data to Assess Soft Skills Objectively

It’s easy to use data when assessing hard skills and measurable results. For example, if a sales representative isn’t meeting quota, data can help you set objectives to resolve that particular shortcoming. If the employee lacks particular selling skills, data can help you pinpoint the issue and resolve it with appropriate training to improve their performance.

In contrast, soft skills are more difficult to assess. Fortunately, advances in data analysis are making it easier to assess an individual’s soft skills and determine how to improve when needed. This is especially important during the hiring process. But you can also use this kind of intelligence to encourage professional growth among existing employees.

For instance, People First Productivity Solutions recommends soft skill assessment rubrics. By entering data into these tools and analyzing the results, you can objectively determine if an employee’s soft skills are up-to-par at any point in time.

One word of warning about these assessments. You’ll want to be sure you don’t let bias and favoritism influence your analysis. The best way to do this is to measure soft skills against specific job requirements and performance. This will help you more reliably identify areas where an employee can focus to improve over time.

Final Notes

There are many viable ways you can use data to determine where and how to help your team members grow professionally and perform more successfully. From using feedback to set the stage, to creating OKRs and assessing soft skills, you’ll get better results by applying the most relevant, timely data and tools you can find.

Also, remember that a data-driven culture of growth starts at the top. If you’re a business or HR leader, you must set an example that demonstrates a desire to establish appropriate performance goals and a commitment to ongoing improvement. With this strategy, you can encourage (and even gently require) team members to dig deeper and pursue growth that will advance their career while simultaneously benefitting your organization.

Should You Create an AI-Powered Talent Marketplace?

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After years of upheaval that have redefined society, business and work, we’ve entered a period some call the “Great Reflection.” During this era of mindfulness, employees everywhere are reevaluating what they truly want from their career and their employer. In response, companies are investing more heavily in workforce retention strategies. For instance, the internal talent marketplace concept is rapidly gaining momentum.

Why marketplaces? CIPD research says 30% of employers intend to increase wages in 2023. This is certainly one way to show people you value them. Who wouldn’t appreciate competitive compensation? But many people are looking for deeper reasons to stay onboard. As a result, more companies are focusing on employees’ career development concerns.

According to Gallup, 76% of people are seeking opportunities for professional growth. At the same time, modern businesses know they can’t advance their agenda without a future-ready workforce.

That’s why now is a good time to invest in an internal talent marketplace. This kind of solution offers multiple pathways to develop more skilled, innovative individuals and teams. But how can you accomplish this in a way that is cost-efficient, personalized, and accessible? This is our story…

Inside a Talent Marketplace: One Example

To accelerate internal mobility, Schneider Electric, a global leader in integrated energy solutions, has developed and deployed an Open Talent Market (OTM). This marketplace leverages leading-edge technology to help retain talent and stimulate employee growth.

OTM is an AI-driven career development and internal mobility platform that matches workforce skills and ambitions to opportunities across the organization. First, employees describe their current skills and past experiences, as well as their future aspirations. Then OTM provides information about relevant open positions, part-time projects, and possible mentors.

The platform also offers career planning capabilities. For example, people can explore potential career paths and establish short-term development tracks to address immediate upskilling needs or develop new skills for the future.

How the OTM Process Works

This talent marketplace is open to all connected employees at Schneider Electric, and through pilot programs for shop floor employees who don’t have daily access to a work computer. With artificial intelligence as its backbone, OTM manages the entire experience at speed and at scale.

To get started, employees create a profile in the platform, which can be based on a LinkedIn profile or resume upload. Next, they can edit and expand their profile information, adding appropriate skills, experiences, interests and development areas. The more data an employee includes, the better the AI results will be.

Schneider Electric embraces the “3E” development framework – Experience (70%), Exposure (20%), and Education (10%). And because OTM is so easy to use, employees can independently explore upskilling and development opportunities that align with each of these learning methods.

Talent Marketplace Benefits

In addition to improving talent development and mobility, this solution has formalized the way our organization manages its internal gig economy. Now, by offering part-time projects through OTM, the company can unlock hours from employees who are eager to work on stretch assignments.

But the real beauty of this talent marketplace comes from its underlying AI, which makes it possible for anyone to discover opportunities that might not otherwise have been considered.

Too often in the past, finding a new position or mentor was all about who you knew. Now, it’s about transparency. That means everyone has access to a broader spectrum of opportunities that might not have been visible previously.

At the same time, the AI personalizes the matching process. In other words, it helps employees focus on opportunities that fit their unique skills and interests, instead of requiring them to filter through a sea of options. This levels the playing field and accelerates the talent matching process by identifying the strongest possibilities, regardless of current role or business unit.

Preparing to Support Internal Mobility

An effective talent marketplace depends on a culture that is open to internal mobility. For many organizations, this requires a significant mindset shift before and during the rollout.

At Schneider, the end goal is to retain our employees by placing them in opportunities that are best suited to their skills and help them continue to grow. This is why we strive to foster open dialogue among employees, current managers, and hiring managers about internal mobility and talent development.

To set the stage for OTM, we adjusted several key policies and procedures, and built OTM logic to support our business objectives:

Policy Changes

  • To help employees pursue new opportunities more on their terms, we’ve removed minimum “time in current role” requirements, as well as the need for a manager’s approval when applying for a new position.
  • To encourage actionable communication about opportunities, we ask internal candidates to receive feedback about any application, regardless of its outcome. In the past, this was not occurring consistently.
  • To support continuous learning and development, we request that employees dedicate 10-15% of their time to projects outside of their current role.

System Functionality

  • When using OTM for career planning, employees can see possible career paths based on several criteria, including their desired roles, typical paths that others in their current role have pursued, or whether they’re interested in moving into management. Within those paths, they can see existing open positions, as well as skill development opportunities to help prepare for future roles.
  • In addition, employees can use OTM to build shorter-term career tracks based on skills or experiences they want to gain or a specific position they want to pursue:
    • A track based on skills and experiences lets employees browse available opportunities, as well as courses offered in our learning management system.
    • A track based on positions lets employees select a specific position they’d like to pursue. Then the AI compares market data to find the skills most often applied in that role and identifies which of those skills the employee already has and indicates any gaps. The platform then suggests available projects, mentors and courses in our LMS that could help an employee fill those gaps.
  • Lastly, OTM is not a one-way street. The AI helps employees uncover matched opportunities. But it also lets recruiters and project owners discover candidates with a skill or experience needed for a position or project role. This feature required change management to ensure that our managers perceive it as a tool that enhances internal mobility, rather than “poaching.”

Talent Marketplace Results

To-date, 80,000 Schneider Electric employees are registered OTM users. And since its launch in May 2020, this solution has helped more than 26,000 employees connect with projects, positions or mentorship assignments.

OTM has been a highly effective way to actively involve employees in managing their careers. It supports people as they develop, grow, and shape their future. And it helps the organization more fully utilize talent, while strengthening engagement and retention. At Schneider, our commitment to a world-class talent marketplace is leading to a brighter future, all around.

 

EDITOR’S NOTE:  In developing this article, Jessica Staggs collaborated with Michele Egan, Open Talent Market Digital Transformation Lead at Schneider Electric

When You Train Employees, Do You Also Boost Retention?

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Sponsored by FranklinCovey

If you’re involved in hiring or managing people, no one needs to tell you that competition for top talent is incredibly fierce. And keeping teams engaged and motivated is getting more difficult all the time. That’s why it pays to be especially thoughtful and strategic about how you train employees.

This isn’t just my opinion. It’s the conclusion of organizations like SHRM, which found that employees are 76% more likely to stay onboard when their organization has a dedicated process to support workforce learning and growth. Similarly, Deloitte estimates that retention is 30-50% higher among companies with a strong learning culture.

But this begs the question — exactly how can you build and sustain a learning environment that engages people so they want to stay onboard and advance your agenda? That’s the topic we’re exploring today with a brilliant business leader who is also a recognized expert in learning and development…

Meet Our Guest:  Paul Walker

I’m honored to welcome Paul Walker, President and CEO at FranklinCovey! As the company’s chief strategist and operational leader, Paul is committed to transforming organizations and enabling greatness. He actually started his career at FranklinCovey 22 years ago, and has grown and adapted along with the company. So clearly, he knows first-hand how learning and development can help retain top talent. Please join us as we explore this topic:

Connecting Learning With Retention
Welcome, Paul! Let’s dive right in. How is training tied to workforce retention?

Our work with clients and research from others tell us that training is integral to retention for several reasons:

  1. When you train employees, they feel valued because you’re investing in them. And the more valued people feel, the more likely they are to stay.
  2. It helps people perform better. We all want to do our best work everyday. If we need skills to do that, and our employer is helping us acquire those capabilities, it not only helps us do better today, but may also prepare us for something exciting in the future. Again, we feel valued.

How to Train Employees Effectively
What do people really want from work-related training?

There are probably more factors, but over and over again we see employees focusing on these things:

  1. Is it easy for me to access, so I can get the most out of it?
  2. How well does it fit into the flow of my daily work life?
  3. How relevant is it now, and will it prepare me for where I want to be in the future?
  4. Is it useful? Does it actually help me perform better?
How Can You Train Employees for Retention? Join us for a live #WorkTrends Twitter Chat - Wednesday, March 29th - 1:30-2:00pm ET. Follow @TalentCulture on Twitter for questions - and add the #WorkTrends hashtag to your tweets so others can see your comments and interact with you!

JOIN US ON TWITTER!

Choose Learning Metrics That Matter

Retention is important, but what other KPIs should we consider?

When we want to train employees, we need to be sure we’re not just advocating for retention or other objectives that may feel a bit soft to people who make budgetary and strategic decisions. These leaders don’t necessarily see how learning supports what they want to accomplish.

Instead, we need to focus on how learning improves the quality of the team’s results. That’s crucial to the organization’s performance.

We need to talk in the language Deloitte used in its research that says:

  • 92% of companies with more intentional, sophisticated learning develop more novel products and processes,
  • 56% are often first-to-market with products and services,
  • 52% are measurably more productive, and
  • 17% are more profitable.

Make It a Leadership Priority to Train Employees

Absolutely. There’s value here, and our KPIs should reflect that…

I would also say the best organizations have figured out how to ignite a passion for employee learning in their leaders. In other words, people development is a key leadership expectation, and leaders want to be involved in helping their people grow and develop. It’s not just the responsibility of HR or L&D…

For more insights from Paul about how to train employees for retention, listen to this full podcast episode. And be sure to subscribe to the #WorkTrends Podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

In addition, we invite you to join our live Twitter chat about this topic on Wednesday, March 29th from 1:30-2:00pm ET. Follow us at @TalentCulture for questions and be sure to add the #WorkTrends hashtag to your tweets, so others in the community can easily find your comments and interact with you!

Also, to continue this conversation on social media anytime, follow our #WorkTrends hashtag on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Developing Entry-Level Talent: How to Invest for Success

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Imagine you’re a hard-working entry-level employee who’s been in your current position for less than a year. Your skills are solid, but they don’t help you stand out from other entry-level talent. You know which skills could help you advance, but you’re not sure what resources are available to you or how to get support for a growth plan. You don’t see a pathway to expand your skill set. You just feel stuck.

Sadly, this isn’t unusual. But scenarios like this can have serious consequences for employee morale, mobility, and retention across an organization. For example research says:

It’s no surprise that people look elsewhere when they believe their skills aren’t seen, valued, and nurtured. But this doesn’t need to happen. As an employer, you can avoid losing entry-level employees by investing more effectively in their future with your organization.

Where Employee Development Fits In

A comprehensive professional development program is one way to demonstrate your commitment. Upskilling, reskilling, cross-training and continuous learning practices help employees keep existing skills fresh, develop new capabilities, and expand their career potential over time.

Future-minded employers know that developing entry-level talent is not just good for employee engagement and morale. It’s also a smart business strategy because it builds “bench depth.” By encouraging employees to embrace new responsibilities and growth opportunities, you can create a more diverse internal talent pipeline that will adapt with you as your business needs change.

A commitment to developing entry-level talent also sends a powerful message from the highest levels of your organization. It tells people that every member of your workforce is important, and you’re invested in their future success.

What’s at Stake for Employers

Organizations that invest in entry-level talent realize significant benefits:

1. Higher ROI

When you’re facing workforce skill gaps, recruiting qualified talent may seem like a faster, cheaper, easier solution than employee development. But this is a short-sighted approach that doesn’t necessarily lead to a stronger team. Bringing in new talent requires multiple costly, time-consuming steps, from recruiting to interviewing to hiring. And there’s no guarantee new hires will onboard successfully and become committed contributors.

Why bet on an uncertain outcome, when you already have a team in place that you’ve worked so hard to recruit and onboard? If you spend the same amount of time and money helping existing employees grow, you’re more likely to achieve a higher return on investment.

2. Less Brain Drain

The value of institutional knowledge is also important to consider. The lower your commitment to development, the higher your turnover rate is likely to be. And as employees leave, they’ll take away “insider” intelligence about how your organization gets things done. For example, you’ll lose insight into strategies, tactics and processes that worked, as well as those that didn’t. This kind of information can make or break operational efficiency, effectiveness, cohesion, and more.

By developing entry-level talent, you can equip employees with the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in your environment. Along the way, you’ll build and reinforce institutional knowledge, rather than eroding it as disenchanted employees leave.

3. Stronger Employee Value Proposition

We know people are drawn to employers that emphasize continuous professional development and growth. If your loyal workforce sees you turning to new hires instead of investing in existing employees, what should you expect to happen? Morale will sink, the desire for professional growth will vanish, and skills will stagnate. Eventually, employees will look for growth opportunities outside your organization.

Instead, why not reinvigorate your team through learning? Focus on reskilling, upskilling, and cross-skilling. It’s a more sustainable way to strengthen employee satisfaction, commitment, retention, and performance. To get started with a successful entry-level employee development program, consider these five steps:

5 Ways to Develop Entry-Level Talent

1. Establish a Reasonable Budget

Start by defining the key elements of your employee growth plan. Identify the professional development topics and skills your program should address. Any development model will involve both direct and indirect costs, and these should align with market value.

However, expenses aren’t the only consideration. You’ll also want to estimate the value of potential benefits. For example, you may choose to establish a mentorship program that pairs new hires with veteran employees. This is a relatively low-cost way to support a culture of learning, but it can lead to significant tangible results.

2. Provide Time and Resources for Employee Participation

Simply put, employees need dedicated time and support to engage in professional development. Allocate a specific number of days for this purpose — perhaps even paid time away from the office, if possible.

A little workplace flexibility goes a long way in helping talent feel valued, and giving employees choice in managing their schedules encourages accountability and self-regulation.

3. Tap Into the Power of Work Relationships

Ask entry-level employees what kind of development support they feel would be helpful. Then ask managers to co-create a roadmap with their direct reports, based on the knowledge and skills they want to develop.

Managers are likely to know how to leverage connections among team members so they can learn from one another. Research shows that these relationships matter. For example, McKinsey found that 91% of people supported by mentors are satisfied with their jobs. In addition, cohort-based learning enhances workplace communication, overall.

4. Include Team-Building Opportunities

Besides mentorship programs, consider other ways for entry-level employees to learn from teammates. Cross-departmental collaboration, for example, is an underused resource. When employees work with others and learn from one another, they can sharpen both interpersonal and job-related skills. They’re also more likely to understand the company’s inner workings and see the value in individual workplace roles.

5. Showcase Progress

For any program that demands time and energy, employees and employers alike want to see results. To reinforce the benefits of participation, plan to demonstrate how development efforts lead to professional growth, improved performance, and team success. For instance, one study of U.K. reskilling programs resulted in positive economic returns and improved morale. These are the kind of concrete results everyone appreciates.

Summary

These suggestions are intended as launching points to help you make the most of your investment in entry-level talent. With these development factors as a framework, your learning programs can make a measurable and lasting difference in workplace communication, productivity and innovation. Most importantly, this kind of investment can help you build a stronger team that will be invigorated and inspired to move forward together. Everybody wins.

How Can Your LMS Help Bridge the Skills Gap?

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Sponsored by Learnsoft

The Skills Gap is Growing. So is Pressure on L&D

Demand for skilled employees seems limitless. Modern technology and automation are  displacing workers in all industries, even while creating new jobs that need to be filled. Baby Boomers are rapidly retiring, but entry-level people from younger generations haven’t yet developed enough expertise to take on these positions. And competition for skilled professionals in technology, healthcare and other specialties remains fierce.

Throughout the pandemic, HR departments felt pressure to deliver a high-performing workforce. Unfortunately, that pressure isn’t likely to ease any time soon. In fact, by 2030, talent shortages in the U.S. alone are expected to result in $162 billion in unrealized revenue. 

If these trends give you heart palpitations, I apologize. But the good news is that these pressures are causing employers to look within their organizations to bridge this skills gap. As a result, we’re seeing increased investment in upskilling and reskilling of current employees. Even so, L&D programs are not as efficient as HR and business leaders want them to be.

In part, this is because organizations are not leveraging available learning tools and resources to their full capacity. If you see this happening in your organization, how can you improve?

Let’s take a closer look at the primary types of skills gaps and how organizations are responding. Then, I’ll explain how a learning management system (LMS) can go beyond simply delivering training content to help your business address critical skills challenges.

3 Kinds of Skills Gaps: What Are They?

“Skills gap” is generally used as a catch-all phrase for whatever is amiss in the employee/employer productivity relationship. But actually, there are three gaps to consider:

1. Skill Gap

Unlike the broader term, this specifically refers to intellectual or functional gaps in a person’s ability to perform a particular job effectively. For example, in healthcare this can be demonstrated by a lack of certification required to provide patient care. Or in construction, skilled laborers may need to develop proficiency with new equipment before they can use it at a job site. This differs from a knowledge gap.

2. Knowledge Gap

When employees do not know relevant information about their job or how their role fits into their department or organization, this is a knowledge gap. It can surface during onboarding – but can persist throughout an employee’s tenure. This is why hiring managers need to understand a new employee’s industry and job-specific knowledge, and then provide resources to bring that individual up-to-par as soon as possible.

3. Performance Gap

To perform well in a role, skills and knowledge are essential. However, motivation and commitment are just as important. This brings us to the performance gap – which is the disparity between an organization’s goals and an individual’s performance. This can be measured by a lack of engagement, low productivity levels, poor quality output, and other relevant metrics. These gaps can be especially detrimental, because they tend to expand over time when organizations lack tools to accurately measure key performance factors.

How Employers Are Addressing Skill Gaps

The most efficient way to accurately measure skills in an organization is with an appropriate skills management tool. For example, almost all large companies (98%, according to Training Magazine), use an LMS to manage and deliver e-learning courses and training programs.

The most-used function of an LMS is the ability to track training completions and course certifications within the learning platform. This solves some of the basic skills problems organizations face. However, the missing piece in many LMS platforms is a comprehensive and intuitive reporting capability.

For years, organizations in many industries tracked individual skills and knowledge through manual processes. In some industries, this is still managed manually.

That’s right. In 2023, organizations continue to struggle with automating and streamlining data management and reporting. Even when training is conducted online through an e-learning platform, the data is not easily transferred between applications.

I’ve worked with organizations where employees complete training online or in-person, and then a data entry specialist spends time manually extracting the completion data and copying it into an excel file. Next, they manually import the information into another HR application. This process is time consuming, inefficient and leaves room for error. But fortunately, there are better ways to manage this data-intensive business process.

An LMS Can Do More Than Deliver Content

1. Leverage Integrations

To truly maximize the benefits of an LMS, you need to integrate it with other enterprise applications and tools. By integrating your LMS with your HR ecosystem, you can streamline and automate your training processes, reduce administrative burdens, and enhance the user experience.

Your organization can track and manage L&D goals across the entire company using a single login system that connects an end user to any application within the LMS system. Users don’t need multiple logins to access the intranet, the compliance training portal, benefits and payroll, professional development courses, and so on. Instead, they’re all housed in one system – and those systems talk to each other so they can verify transferred data.

Here’s the benefit from a skills gap perspective: Because these applications work together within the HR ecosystem, you can easily identify employee reskilling and upskilling needs.

2. Support Employee Career Advancement

Understanding employee competency is essential to optimize the talent available in your workforce. This is why an LMS platform’s reporting function is just as important as its content delivery function. Job turnover is bound to happen, but how can an LMS help you more rapidly fill unexpected job openings?

L&D can quickly turn to a comprehensive reporting dashboard that identifies team members who are compliant and certified to fill a role. Intuitive reporting can make it easy to identify these qualified employees, regardless of their team or location. You can also leverage reporting to pinpoint existing skill deficits and make data-driven employee development decisions.

3. Establish Clear Paths to Success

The most important step in closing any skills gap is offering individuals opportunities to upskill through learning experiences and resources that expand their professional knowledge. Research indicates that employees agree. In fact, according to SHRM, 76% of employees are more inclined to stay at a company where continuous learning is available.

This is the strong suit of a modern LMS. It can help L&D teams work with managers to define skills benchmarks, build assessments that identify skills gaps, and determine how development can close those gaps.

You can outline specific courses employees must complete to move up in rank. Then you can communicate about these career growth opportunities and the path forward.

4. Meet Employees on Their Learning Terms

The keyword here is learning. There are many ways to distribute information. But you need to ensure that employees don’t just “acknowledge” that information. The goal is to absorb it, understand it and retain it.

A lack of learning engagement doesn’t benefit employees, and it can even put your organization at risk. For example, Corporate Compliance Insights found that 49% of survey respondents skipped or did not thoroughly listen to mandated compliance training. Imagine almost half of your workforce admitting they don’t pay attention to required learning! Sadly, this is a reality.

How can you avoid passive learning and drive engagement? Whatever content you create, it’s important to bring training directly to individuals and make sure the experience is as accessible, useful and relevant as possible. 

Be sure people have access to personalized training that best suits their needs. In some scenarios, this means face-to-face virtual training. In others, it means microlearning modules people can knock-out in 5 or 10 minutes.

Engaged learners make empowered workers. It is important to remember that people are lifelong learners. Employees need to train, retain, and show competency in their roles. This doesn’t stop when they clock-in for work. A flexible LMS can help employees train at workstation or remotely on a laptop or phone. And it should support personalized learning paths that help tailor learning to individual interests and goals. 

Your Organization Has Changed. Has Your LMS?

Addressing the skills gap means prioritizing your employees by making learning accessible, personalized and engaging. Most LMS providers require organizations to enter a multi-year contract – some up to 10 years. That’s a long time to use a platform if it doesn’t meet all your needs.

Is your LMS keeping pace with the needs of your workforce or your business? Consider these criteria of an effective LMS platform:

  • SaaS-based solution with flexibility to address diverse, changing needs
  • Integrates seamlessly with your HR ecosystem
  • A user experience that is easy for learners, instructors and administrators
  • Functionality that accommodates individual learning schedules and needs
  • Supports various content types to drive learning engagement
  • Streamlines upskilling/reskilling/cross-training efforts
  • Enables self-directed learning paths with recommendations based on job position, requirements, skills, competencies, and performance.

9 Strategic Learning Moves to Prepare for the Future of Work

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In HR circles, we talk a lot about employee development. Often, we focus on its role in improving workforce engagement and retention. But strategic learning is about much more than that.

No question, when employees have an opportunity to add new work skills to their portfolio, they become more motivated and involved in their professional growth. It may well spark a desire to stick around, earn a certificate, and aim for further advancement.

Research certainly supports this assumption. For instance, 76% of employees are more likely to stay with a company that offers continuous training, according to a recent survey by TalentLMS and The Society for Human Resource Management. But these days, we need to recognize the power of learning and development as a strategic business move.

The Value of Strategic Learning

Certainly, employees need the right knowledge and skills to perform well in their current roles. But are you preparing them for tomorrow? Strategic learning looks ahead and introduces new practices, approaches, technologies, and solutions that will drive business success, going forward.

The future of work is unquestionably complex. It will be transformed by automation and furthered by machine learning and AI. If people don’t have the means to evolve and expand their capabilities, we’ll all be held back as the workplace enters uncharted territory.

More Than Just New Skills

Effective learning and development is not just about helping employees acquire new skills. It’s also about embracing learning as a strategic imperative. Over the years, I’ve discussed the importance of this perspective with numerous experts. In particular, one previous conversation stands out.

In 2020, I invited Dickens Aubourg to join me for a #WorkTrends podcast interview. Dickens is a learning and development expert who, at the time, was Director of Client Learning at Paycom:

9 Ways to Elevate Your Learning Agenda

In this interview, we explored Dickens’ perspective on strategic learning — and the 9 points we covered still resonate:

1. Treat employee training as a key business strategy that integrates retraining, reskilling, and upskilling. Ultimately, the goal should be to gain and sustain a competitive advantage through workforce readiness, competence and innovation.

2. In most organizations, learning and development isn’t sufficiently supported. Nor is it defined correctly. Learning isn’t an isolated act of class attendance or content consumption. It’s actually part of the daily employee experience. A mix of ongoing formal and informal learning is essential for effective professional development and performance support — including opportunities for social and collaborative learning.

3. We need to value informal learning for bringing context and relevance to work. It’s a way to improve connection and collaboration within teams and across the workforce, in general.

4. Quantifying and recognizing both formal and informal learning creates experiences that help leaders drive meaningful business impact and results.

5. The shift to remote and hybrid work enables organizations to more easily develop people from within. This is critical in modern work environments.

6. HR products and platforms that focus on learning will be an increasingly important component of the HR tech ecosystem. We won’t be separating learning from other people functions, nor should we.

7. It’s important to remember that, while training is not the only form of learning, it is central to employee development. Training on new tools and processes can be woven into an overall learning program that offers other development opportunities, giving employees a sense of growth and accomplishment, as well as the potential to reach new horizons.

8. Leaders will benefit from a better understanding of upskilling. The best way to do that? Start upskilling high-level managers and others in leadership positions. Ask them to identify gaps in their capabilities and offer pathways for professional growth. Targeting only lower-level employees for upskilling isn’t fair, and it’s actually short-sighted.

9. Continuous learning breeds a more nimble, agile workforce, which is what the new world of work requires. Organizations are constantly incorporating new technology and tools. We saw it during the pandemic, but it’s accelerating now. Individuals and teams must keep pace. A culture of learning supports this.

Top Takeaway: Strategic Learning is About Optimism

Employers can no longer afford to hold back on training, development, educational resources, and a commitment to workforce learning. Not only does strategic learning contribute to HR goals, but it also is essential in helping organizations achieve key business objectives. So, for individuals and employers, alike, this means learning is an act of optimism.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand recently at partner companies that are turning to new approaches and processes for growth and improvement. And as a result, they’re thriving.

So here’s the lesson: Tapping into everyone’s potential for growth is not just wishful thinking. It’s an opportunity to strengthen the employee experience and improve performance, while advancing your business agenda. The sum total? We all win.

Should You Cut Your Learning Budget in a Downturn?

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At some point, every organization will face an economic downturn. It could be a global recession or a serious slump in one of the industries you serve. Regardless, too many organizations jump to the wrong conclusions too quickly. They slash investment in employee development to save on variable expenses. But cutting a learning budget in haste can lead to much more severe business damage over time.

That’s why smart leaders embrace a long-term growth mindset before, during, and after a downturn. It’s why they double down on developing their people, even when times are tough. And as a result, these organizations don’t just survive. They thrive.

Learning: Strength in a Downturn

Wondering how some businesses actually flourish during difficult economic times? Take a look at the research. During the recessions of 1980, 1990, and 2000, a small minority of companies (9%) showed strong performance. In fact, they outperformed competitors by at least 10% in sales and profit growth.

What was their secret? In part, they invested in helping employees make better-informed decisions, improve their responsiveness, and adapt more quickly. What was the common denominator beneath these improvements? Learning. People needed the right knowledge and skills to pursue new roles, embrace new tasks, work more resourcefully, and make more effective decisions.

That’s why organizational learning is critical during a downturn. Yet ironically, L&D is often among the first departments that suffer when budgets are cut. It’s time for learning leaders to challenge this practice. Because employee development is not just a nice-to-have option when times are good. It is actually a powerful way to increase productivity, retention, and competitiveness — especially during uncertain economic times.

Flip Your Perspective

A downturn often brings uncertainty and fear. But seeing it instead as an opportunity for growth and differentiation can help your organization position itself as a market leader when recovery eventually comes. Preserving your learning investment can help your people do exactly that. If you cut back your learning budget now, you will hinder your future success.

I might be preaching to the L&D choir. But this is a vital message to spread far and wide across your senior stakeholders. Why? Chances are, the learning budget has already been slashed in each of your competitors’ organizations. If so, you can plant seeds now that can eventually grow into a competitive advantage.

Build the Case for a Sustained Learning Budget

To communicate effectively with executive stakeholders and colleagues, focus on understanding their unique priorities, fears, and challenges. For example, issues that matter to your CFO won’t necessarily be what keeps your CHRO up at night.

Department heads can be a goldmine of insight into high-priority projects, as well as the skills needed for successful outcomes. Partnering with these leaders increases buy-in. And with more voices supporting you, the less likely your learning budget will be cut.

Internal partners can also help you define learning programs that will have a deeper impact on your business. For example, when Capital One implemented a new cloud-based digital transformation, senior learning leadership worked closely with the CIO to define and develop required skills, assignments, and content.

Align Learning With Business Success Metrics

During a downturn, leaders are laser-focused on return on investment (ROI). To avoid seeing your budget hit the cutting room floor, L&D should focus on business metrics that show how learning contributes to the top and bottom line. When you show evidence that learning boosts performance, productivity, and operational efficiency, your C-Suite will think twice about trimming your funding.

Again, partnering with other departments can help uncover relevant data that may not be available in your learning system. For instance, you could link learning behavior with business data such as sales leads, onboarding time, or customer satisfaction scores.

The more directly you tie learning content and consumption patterns with business readiness and productivity metrics, the better. It’s even better if you can prove your learning strategy delivers a tangible business impact at a lower cost than a legacy learning system or process.

Make Every Dollar Count

Ericsson is a good example of this strategy in action. When investing in a new online learning system, the L&D team found that course completions rose by 62%, while the cost of operating the learning technology ecosystem fell by half.

At the same time, business units saw a 41% increase in ethical practices, with 97% of employees completing new anti-corruption training within two months of launch. This was a month faster than previous campaigns with higher completion rates.

In addition, the L&D team discovered that the number of workers who learned Ericsson’s five company-critical skills (5G, artificial intelligence and machine learning, collaboration, sales, and automation) increased by 14%.

Address Employee Uncertainty

A final point you can make to your C-Suite involves the human aspect of thriving in a recession. Make no mistake, your people are feeling very vulnerable right now. If they think their jobs and livelihoods are at risk, they cannot do their best work.

People may need to expand their workload in the wake of hiring freezes or layoffs. They may need to switch to another role, team, or project to keep your business operating smoothly. Or, they may have extra capacity when a project is canceled or delayed.

All of these situations affect employee wellbeing and performance, especially if people don’t feel equipped to perform well. In fact, nearly 60% of workers say a lack of confidence in their skills makes their job more stressful, and nearly 40% believe their mental health suffers as a result.

Offering a tailored learning plan with clear career growth opportunities that extend beyond the immediate downturn can have a huge influence on an employee’s perception of job security.

The Marketplace Values Skilled People

Companies that treat their people well during a downturn are building lasting loyalty and a strong employer brand that can pay off over time. For L&D, actions you take now to preserve your learning budget can directly influence your organization’s ability to attract and retain talent in the future.

This is also a strong confidence signal to those outside of your company. It shows prospective customers, analysts, influencers, and investors that you understand this is just a moment in your business lifecycle, and that you’re preparing your workforce for the inevitable upturn.

After all, if your people aren’t prepared with the right skills when the opportunity arises, your business won’t be able to seize the day. In fact, if you wait to upskill your people when a recovery begins, you’ll be too late. Others who invested in learning during the downturn will lead.

Grow Now, Lead Later

Historically, some of the most innovative and inspiring businesses continued to grow during downturns because their leaders understood that opportunities don’t necessarily come during good times. Tough times present challenges that can force you to rethink processes, reskill your people, and develop a competitive edge while other companies may pause.

Learning is crucial in all economic climates, but especially in uncertainty. Skills are the building blocks for your future. You don’t want to cut back on them and find yourself without a springboard to success when the going gets better. For the kind of business impact that will stand the test of time, resist the temptation to cut your learning budget. Instead, double down — the sooner the better.

8 Learning and Talent Development Topics for Better Employee Retention

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impact awardInvestment in learning and talent development is an essential ingredient of every company’s engagement and retention plans. What is one crucial topic to include in employee L&D that will lead to better employee engagement and retention?

To help you create an effective L&D program, we asked L&D professionals and business leaders this question for their best insights. From including interviewer training to developing individual talents, there are several essential topics that may help you deliver a robust employee L&D for better engagement and retention.

Here are 8 must-have topics for better employee retention:

  1. Interviewer Training
  2. Communication and its Impact on Business
  3. Feedback Delivery
  4. Celebrating Achievement
  5. Leadership Development
  6. Build Emotional Intelligence Skills
  7. Goal Setting and Performance Feedback
  8. Develop Individual Talents

Interviewer Training

A must-have learning opportunity for all employees is interviewer training. By focusing on a task and responsibility that most employees engage in throughout their careers, you simultaneously give your employees the skills to contribute to building a more successful company with the right talent. Additionally, you give them skills to carry with them wherever they go next. Interviewer training empowers everyone to become a brand ambassador. It also encourages a truly inclusive and diverse workplace and gives all employees a chance to be better.

Ubaldo Ciminieri, Co-Founder and CMO of interviewIA

Communication and its Impact on Business

Studies show that collaboration drives workplace performance. Learning the value of communication and how it impacts the business should be a priority for all employees to understand. Beginning with the “why” communication is crucial to show how it can affect and change the culture by building trust across the leadership team and staff.

In creating a high-performing, high-functioning organization, there needs to be collaboration on all levels. This means we need to communicate and over-communicate. Things change when people you work with understand what you are trying to do, the why, and how it affects them. The outcome is a high-performing team where work gets done with highly engaged staff, and the company exceeds expectations on all levels.

Denise Moxam, VP of HR and Engagement at Production Solutions

Feedback Delivery

There are countless learning topics that can positively impact employee engagement and retention. One of the areas that I believe to be crucial is feedback. To be able to skillfully provide regular, accurate, and timely feedback can improve performance, increase trust, and build relationships. All of which have a direct impact on both retention and engagement. Of course, the results are dependent upon individuals’ competency in this area. While some people may have the inherent ability to deliver feedback the right way, at the right time most of us need training and practice.

Greg Forte, Senior Director of L&D at Precision Medicine Group

Celebrating Achievement

Celebrating is a powerful skill that all leaders need to have in their toolkits to confidently & effectively lead now. When you celebrate a teammate, you are demonstrating that you see them, care about them, and value their contributions and how they show up in the world.

Celebrating is a skill, and it needs to be included in your L&D strategy. When you have leaders who properly and consistently celebrate their employees, you will see motivation, trust, connection, belonging, engagement, and retention skyrocket! Throw that confetti, leaders!

Leah Roe, Leadership Coach & Founder of The Perk

Leadership Development

While it’s not typically part of the category of employee learning, building a healthy leadership practice at all levels of the organization may be the strongest driver of employee retention and engagement. Employees need the opportunity to grow and thrive in their careers. This will rarely happen without leaders who recognize and encourage their development.

We know that most learning happens on the job and in conversation with others who already know the job. A learning function that equips front-line, mid-level, and senior leaders with the mindset, skill set, and tool set to effectively grow their employees will have an exponential impact on employee engagement and retention (not to mention business results).

Leaders who simply see employees as a means to the end of profitability, customer service, or meeting their operational metrics miss the key ingredient to meeting these business goals. They will see their employees walk away to another opportunity where they can grow.

Dave Adcox, Director, Learning & Organizational Development at Whitley Penn

Build Emotional Intelligence

By building emotional intelligence skills in our leaders and our teams, we support their ability to create an environment where employees are engaged and want to stay. Through our learning and development efforts, we can help our employees understand and manage their emotions, navigate relationships, and build trust. Additionally, we can help them show empathy, reduce stress, communicate better, and inspire others. In doing so, we create a place where our employees thrive and our business grows.

Mary Tettenhorst, Sr. Vice President, L&D of General Electric Credit Union

Goal Setting and Performance Feedback

Since studies show engagement often hinges on an employee’s first 90 days, providing new hires a supportive onboarding experience that includes context on company objectives, culture, and communication standards is critical. Supplementing this with assistance on goal setting will help level-set expectations and facilitate a growth path for the employee.

Always, make sure that your managers are equipped with the knowledge to articulate performance expectations, deliver feedback and coaching, and provide development opportunities for the employee along the way.

Glenn Smith, L&D Manager at Nextbite

Develop Individual Talents

The single most important L&D topic has to be how to effectively develop your people. Unlike a capital investment that has a fixed ROI, investing in human capital has almost unlimited ROI. Not only are you increasing the capacity and competence of your team to create value, development telegraphs that you believe in your people enough to invest in them. When people feel like valuable members of a winning team, they will provide higher levels of engagement and discretionary effort. Development creates a virtuous cycle that benefits both the organization and its people.

Thane Bellomo, Director of Talent Management and Organizational Development of MI Windows and Doors

Immersive Training Solutions for a Hybrid Work World

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Remote workforce training has come of age. Forced to get creative during lockdowns, many companies moved beyond their traditional learning and development initiatives, exploring other education options. Those that reported excellent results usually had one thing in common: They embraced immersive technologies.

What does immersive technology look like? Think virtual reality or augmented reality. Both VR and AR training options allow people to feel like they’re in the midst of a situation without physically being in the room. And these educational experiences are not as untested as you might assume.

Though COVID ramped up the reliance on immersive education, immersive VR and AR solutions didn’t start in early 2020. They’ve evolved over the past decade. That’s why Mercedes-Benz began using Microsoft’s HoloLens to scale up widespread corporate training a few years ago, following in the footsteps of competitors like Ford and Volvo.

Advantages to VR and AR Training Solutions

You don’t have to be in the automotive field to get the benefits of immersive technologies to train your personnel, though. VR and AR training can be useful for organizations across a wide range of sectors, from engineering to oil to industrial operations.

For instance, some businesses opt for immersive training to help their employees understand how to approach complex situations. Others use immersive modalities for self-driven “practice,” as workers can run through scenarios countless times to perfect their abilities. But corporations don’t have to limit AR and VR to “hard skills.” Leadership, problem-solving, and other soft skills can come to life in a virtual format, too.

That doesn’t mean that you want to just jump into immersive training without a plan. It’s important to be prepared so you can successfully upskill a cross-section of your team cost-effectively and reliably. With those considerations in mind, you can move forward by paying attention to the following strategies:

1. Budget correctly for your immersive training program.

One of the biggest obstacles leaders face when trying to get executives to champion VR or AR training is the perceived costs. As with most technologies, the direct cost for software, equipment, and setup of VR and AR training has dropped over the years. Even VR headsets have become surprisingly affordable, not to mention much more comfortable than before. Nevertheless, the upfront price might seem too high—at first. However, you have to factor in all the ways that AR and VR can cut down on traditional expenses associated with training.

For instance, immersive training allows you to give the same message to all your people without transporting them anywhere. You don’t have to rent a conference room or pay for travel. Instead, you can put all your dollars toward scaling your training solution in a reliable, consistent way where efficiency nets greater ROI.

2. Take your immersive training on test runs.

During the pandemic, countless companies embraced immersive training out of necessity. Unless you’re under a time constraint, you can likely start smaller. Invest in some AR and VR technology programs, but don’t change everything you do regarding onboarding, upskilling, or reskilling.

What’s the simplest way to begin in a limited way? Find a partner who works in the immersive technology industry. Most providers will be able to help you develop VR and AR simulations that you can test on specific teams or employees. That way, you’ll be able to see how immersive technologies can be used across the rest of your business. You’ll also have an easier time getting higher-level champions to support more comprehensive VR and AR training due to your proof-of-concept information.

3. Collect data from every immersive training.

A huge boon to VR and AR training is the ability to collect scores of data. You can use the information you gather to better measure and even monetize your training sessions. An example might be to collect information on how many times your newest employees need to run through a certain simulation. If you notice that one simulation seems more challenging and takes longer to learn than others, you might want to consider ways to break it down into bite-size parts.

The more data you bring into the fold, the better you can make your VR and AR modules. This will help improve the learning across your workforce no matter where your employees plug in. And when you test different modules, you can see how they’re affecting other ones by examining the data.

Immersive training is set to become a norm at many firms and organizations, particularly with the uptick in telecommuting. Even if you’ve never considered adding VR or AR technology to your learning and development initiatives, take a second look at the possibilities. Classic in-person and e-learning models work, but they have limitations. Immersive training solutions can optimize education for all employees and corporate goals, making them excellent companions to your current lineup of training.

Employee Education: How to Avoid the ‘Forgetting Curve’

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You’ve spent the day at a leadership conference learning all sorts of great things: how to coach your team, how to build engagement, how to run effective meetings, how to encourage career development, and more. You go back to work the next day with good intentions—but quickly lapse into your old habits.

Within a few weeks, you try to recall what you learned, but even with your notes, you have a hard time. What on Earth happened? If he were still alive, 19th-century psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus would have the answer: You just experienced the “forgetting curve.”

We’ve known for 126 years that the human brain doesn’t retain a lot in terms of memory, and Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve shows just how rapidly new information is lost if we don’t have the opportunity to put it into practice quickly. But just 12 percent of professionals use their newfound skills right away.

This means taking people out of work and putting them through a formal, structured class (where they might even be tested with the accompanying assumption they know what to do if they pass) and then putting them back in the workplace doesn’t actually influence the performance.

Being expected to retain large volumes of information all in one go is like trying to drink from a firehose—sure, you absorb a little bit, but the majority washes over you without sinking in. Fortunately, though, there are employee education tactics to make knowledge “stickier” and avoid the forgetting curve.

1. Give workers access to bite-sized learning.

When it comes to employee education, it’s common to bombard employees with large amounts of information. But most people, especially your high performers, are time-poor and constantly pulled in competing directions.

The way around time constraints is to give workers access to quick information that can be ingested in small bursts. For instance, a self-directed program of 15-minute modules allows employees to tap into knowledge at their point of need. So rather than spending a week learning about agile management, they get a distilled understanding of the principle that they can apply immediately.

Microlearning is also an effective way to improve uptake and engagement. Eighty-five percent of all educational content is either forgotten or rendered useless within six weeks of learning it, which indicates that traditional training might not be the most effective way for people to learn. Pandora is one example of a company that turned to microlearning for its workforce and saw training completion rates go from 15 percent to 90 percent. Busy people who might not be able to commit fully to an all-day event can usually find small nuggets of time to devote to a little education.

2. Encourage managers to follow up after training to help reinforce learning.

Having team members share how they’ve applied what they learned is one of the most effective ways to overcome the forgetting curve and to ensure behavior change (which is usually the goal of employee education). These informal interactions can be brief; think of them more as a huddle than a formal check-in, as discussing what has been learned in conversation can help make knowledge stick.

This is especially important after bringing new employees into the fold. Onboarding typically involves a large volume of information: “Here’s our tech system. Here’s how we do stuff.” Once onboarding is over, employees frequently experience the forgetting curve. Meeting with their team leaders to go over digestible chunks of the material they learned while onboarding helps with retention.

3. Stack new knowledge on top of prior knowledge.

Another way to bypass the effects of the forgetting curve in employee education is to build learning experiences. For example, an employee would need to be able to demonstrate and apply specific behaviors before learning something else. This type of information “stacking” creates a strong foundation and avoids learning loss. Over time, the lower levels of the “stack” become more and more ingrained.

Be careful, though: Not all knowledge “belongs” on top of other knowledge. Learning has to make sense for your employee. Take the idea of a public speaking course for a performer who doesn’t have a speaking engagement planned. The material may seem unnecessary, making it more likely to be forgotten before it can be applied.

To ensure that you’re stacking knowledge efficiently, request feedback from your team members. You can always fix something that’s not working.

4. Create training opportunities that are easily accessible and device-agnostic.

People in need of information don’t always want to read about the topic. Many people are visual or auditory learners. Or they may want to interact kinesthetically with curricula if possible. Be certain that you’re offering training that meets people’s learning needs and preferences.

Similarly, be sure that all employee education content is accessible on any device. Use laptops, tablets, smartphones and desktops for learning purposes. The more user-centric your learning content is, the more it will become a reliable resource.

Calculate which types of devices or learning styles are being used most often by your team. Maybe the majority of employees seem to tune into podcast-style micro-content on their smartphones, in which case you might like to add more audio formats to your learning toolkit.

5. Go for a blended learning approach that still includes formal learning.

Formal learning has a place in corporate training, as long as it’s equally as engaging and effective as other types of education. Intersperse formal learning with other types of employee education, such as microlearning, feedback loops, and self-directed learning.

When designing your learning processes, go for a blended approach with multiple touchpoints. Don’t just have a lecture-style marathon. Instead, add a post-workshop task and follow-up sessions to round out the learning and reinforce the transfer of knowledge.

The forgetting curve may be a proven phenomenon, but there are certainly ways to overcome it! Just put a few measures in place, and you’ll have far less forgetting—and far more employees eager to show off their mettle.

The Value of Self-driven Skill Development [Podcast]

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For many employees, a job isn’t simply the act of doing some work and collecting a paycheck anymore. For example, Millennial employees live in what some are calling an “identity economy,” where they place value on their work and want it to have meaning. They’re demanding more thorough training, and they don’t want to stop learning or become stagnant in their roles.

While it is great that employees want to deliver more value to businesses, many organizations don’t have the processes in place to empower them to do so. As workers become more invested in skill development, HR departments and managers should offer employees more opportunities to grow and adapt. They need to consider how they can offer employees collections of valuable information to make skill-building convenient, accessible, and rewarding.

Our Guest: Ike Bennion and Henry Vasquez, Cornerstone

On the latest #WorkTrends podcast, I spoke with Ike Bennion, the director of product marketing, innovation and strategy at Cornerstone, and Henry Vasquez, manager of product management for Cornerstone’s Skills & Capabilities products. Ike has written and presented on various HR functions, including AI, recruitment, learning, content, and benefit strategy. Henry has 10+ years experience in software development with a strong understanding of enterprise knowledge management, talent management, and productivity software. Cornerstone is a founding member of the Velocity Network, which puts people in control of their data by helping them accumulate a digital wallet filled with their validated experiences, skills, certifications and licenses, and more.

Why should brands care about self-driven skills development?

“They should care because there’s a lot of redeployment of skills happening in the marketplace today,” Ike says. “We aren’t necessarily seeing job roles disappear while new jobs are created in their places. But we’re seeing skills move from position to position.”

Basically, to prepare employees for these changes, employers need to develop a library of resources that empower employees to learn.

“Employees need a robust library of resources at their fingertips to adapt to whatever the day looks like,” Ike says. “So for employers considering whether to offer this to employees, the question is: Do you want a competitively skilled workforce or do you not? If the answer is yes, then think about how you’re going to offer the right resources to the right employees.”

Personalizing the Skill Development Experience

Leaders need to take on the role of driving skill development, Henry explains. In short, they need to determine where individual employees will succeed and how they can grow. Once they’ve done that, they can offer badges, points, and other incentives to fuel people’s desire for skill development.

“If you can convince your leadership team to lead by example–watch webinars, take college courses, upskill–you can build an extremely effective skill development culture,” Henry says. “You can also offer regular career development check-ins to make sure employees are doing what they want to do. If you don’t create space for those check-ins, work just becomes tactical, and you’re not really focusing on the employee.” 

Managers can inspire employees to focus on skill development by focusing on social engineering and currency. They can put skill development into the context of helping the company to succeed. This will drive people to want to engage with learning. Leaders can show their direct reports that hard work and upskilling has an impact and reward them for doing so.

“When you know everyone else is learning, it makes you want to get involved. By championing knowledge sharing, you’re motivating the people,” Henry says. “When you share knowledge and you’re being heard, your expertise is valued. And that creates a great social ecosystem of learning.” 

I hope you enjoy this episode of #WorkTrends sponsored by Cornerstone. You can learn more about the value of self-driven skill development by reaching out to Ike Bennion and Henry Vasquez on LinkedIn.

Career Development, 2021 Style: Learning How to Learn

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Think back to your first day of work with your first major employer.

You probably arrived early on your first day, ID card ready, and experienced a week full of inductions, walk-throughs, and hand-shaking introductions.

Now imagine if your first day took place in April 2020.

Your first day would probably be spent in your bedroom, opening a laptop and trying to figure out how to log on to Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace.

In a similar fashion, your mentors were also coming to terms with new technologies, new processes, and the dramatic events unfolding all around them.

It’s almost as if they were experiencing their first day in a new job, too.

The extraordinary nature of the COVID-19 pandemic impacted everybody.

But most notably, it had a profound effect on the career development of younger generations and those entering the workforce for the first time.

Focus on Young Workers

Grappling with personal concerns and anxieties during a global health crisis is one thing, yet young workers also had to cope with:

  • Organizational learning taking a back seat, with leaders focusing on surviving the crisis rather than integrating new workers or transferring skills
  • Lack of authentic relationships; communicating with and meeting coworkers and mentors took place virtually, without the benefit of in-person interactions
  • Absorbing a diluted, online version of company culture, without the benefit of informal coffee, lunch, or hallway chats
  • Learning to work with new platforms and systems without in-person support
  • Working from challenging environments–such as shared housing or in a multigenerational household

By concentrating on learning and career development, business leaders can help workforce entrants find their place within organizations and focus on building their skills for the future.

Organizational Learning

Why is organizational learning important for career development?

An organization that empowers people to learn will drive personal growth, job satisfaction, and loyalty. In turn, this leads to greater performance and in-house skills.

Indeed, at a time when employees are choosing to quit their jobs rather than go back to the office, organizations must find more effective ways to find and retain talent.

(Let’s not forget, this also comes at the time of a global health crisis, the worst recession since the Great Depression, and a dire skills shortage.)

That’s why it’s crucial to invest in learning and development in your organization, but this doesn’t just refer to hard skills.

The Need for Soft Skills in 2021

Organizational learning comes in many different forms. Developing soft skills is arguably the top priority during this unprecedented moment in history.

But, the soft skills required now are markedly different from those of just five years ago.

The World Economic Forum’s top skills for 2020 places complex problem-solving at the top of the list, followed by critical thinking and creativity.

In 2015, the top three included skills related to in-person interaction, such as coordinating with others and people management.

“Employers overwhelmingly agree that young employees need soft skills, such as communication, creative problem-solving and entrepreneurial thinking,” according to the World Economic Forum.

Positively, all of these skills can be learned. The key difference is that in-person learning has, for the most part, been replaced by distance learning.

This may be new for many workers, particularly those working remotely for the first time.

That’s where the process of re-learning comes in, or “learning how to learn.”

Learning How to Learn

In 2018, Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, explained how to become better at learning, tackle skills gaps, and enable career development.

“A growing body of research is making it clear that learners are made, not born … In short, we can all get better at getting better,” Boser says.

Boser outlined three key behaviors to help workers focus on learning:

  1. Organize your goals: First, set achievable goals and plan each stage. This strategized approach will help to strengthen the commitment to tasks while minimizing feelings of self-doubt. “By setting targets, people can manage their feelings more easily and achieve progress with their learning.”
  2. Think about thinking: Also known as metacognition, “thinking about thinking” is the process of being more inspective. How do you know what you know? Could you explain it to a friend? Do you need more practice or clearer goals? Push yourself to really think about what you’re learning.
  3. Reflect on your learning: Have you ever noticed that when you step away from a problem, you achieve greater clarity? This process of reflection and focused deliberation is crucial for understanding. This cognitive quiet, says Boser, also helps explain why it’s so difficult to gain skills when we’re stressed or angry or lonely: “… for us to gain any sort of understanding, there needs to be some state of mental ease.”

Learning Starts Now

Young workers are the next generation of leaders in your workforce.

The sooner you can integrate them into your organization through a process of organizational learning and career development, the sooner they will become embedded in your culture and a part of your company’s future.

Consider the benefit of providing a virtual office membership to your remote employees and leveraging coworking options for future in-person collaboration. Investing in the well-being of your employees is investing in your company.

While nobody could have predicted the health crisis or its legacy, a positive outcome is that we can turn it into a process of constructive learning and equip young workers with a unique and invaluable set of skills for the future.

The Future of Work: AI Transforms Career Progression

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What is the shelf life of your professional skills? According to research, not very long. In fact, one in three skills from an average 2017 job posting in IT, finance, or sales is obsolete due to continued digital innovation. If that stat doesn’t shock you, it should. The skills we have today are expiring fast, with some experts estimating their life expectancy at just two to three years.

While we can’t place blame solely on the global COVID-19 pandemic, it and other world events have accelerated us toward an environment of unrelenting business transformation and permanently pixelated work arrangements. Employers must now prioritize a more inclusive, purpose-driven culture through broader strategic skilling investments to retain and attract top talent.

Leveraging AI for skill proximity

As our skills become increasingly outdated, new skills will replace them. So, how can employees expect to excel in their careers when today’s business landscape is continuously evolving? It boils down to one word: visibility. A barrier many employees face in the workplace is a lack of visibility into career advancement opportunities. Employees are also largely unaware of the resources and connections available to help them achieve their career goals. This obstacle stems, in part, from a prolonged debate regarding who within a business owns career development. Difficulties aligning the needs and wants of the employee with those of the organization has also contributed to the issue.

Through skills proximity, employers can provide greater visibility. Companies should prioritize an employee’s distance between skills and identify how skills correlate to expedite development. If businesses can find a balance between where employees want to take their careers and where they might be able to take their careers within the organization, they can recognize and foster the skills needed to help them grow.

AI technology has a role to play here. For employees to proactively pursue a growth plan that accelerates career mobility, we need to leverage AI to make skills data and qualification information readily available. Resurfacing relevant learning content and development opportunities is also paramount to an employee’s future success. Done right, it can deliver a broad range of business benefits too. Improved organizational agility and workforce productivity, as well as increased transparency and DE&I, are all advantages attributed to AI.

In addition to AI technology, learning and development content is another tool necessary to ignite career development at work. However, human resources and talent leaders first need to identify a way to connect learning and development to performance results–and annual performance reviews aren’t going to cut it.

Employees and businesses each play a role

There is no one size fits all approach to employee engagement. For employers to maximize the success of their training programs, they must first personalize the content available to each employee. Lessons should be adapted according to an employee’s needs, learning style, and preferred delivery method, in turn allowing the employee to more easily navigate their own development and gauge how their skill-maturity aligns with their overall career goals.

Businesses also need to reconsider how they measure learning and development. Self-directed learning pathways require an element of unstructured exploration required for career growth. Currently, however, course completion and time in course are the metrics being utilized. While important, we need to pivot and explore other factors, including course engagement and the focus of content employees primarily seek out.

Ultimately, employee learning is the foundation of high performance and a key motivator for those wanting to stay at their current company. According to LinkedIn’s 2021 Workplace Learning report, managers are 3.3x more likely to still be with their company in two years if offered the room to learn and grow. Proof that when you invest in people, they will invest in you.

Employee experience is critical for overall company success

The bottom line is the best way to help employees achieve their full potential is to provide career growth opportunities. An AI-driven platform can provide employees with a unified view of skills. It can provide a measurement of the proximity of different skills. Also, it can provide continuous monitoring of the new skills required for continued career progression. Organizations that utilize comprehensive skills data will have a better understanding of their talent’s existing skillsets. Additionally, they’ll understand what will be required of them in the future to adapt.

Between artificial intelligence and the careful deployment of skills-oriented content, anyone with the intrinsic motivation to grow can benefit.

Got Burned-Out Employees? Rethink Learning and Development

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As we transition to a post-pandemic working world, I need my team to ________.

How did you fill in the blank? 

Many organizations need employees to focus on a host of skills and tasks to help their business bounce back from the pandemic. Priorities include improving communication, building resilience, selling, cultivating digital dexterity, and more. All this is important, yet there’s a major problem: many employees aren’t in learning mode.

It’s not that employees are lazy, unmotivated, or dispassionate about their development. It’s simply that they’re experiencing employee burnout, and as they transition back to the office, they feel can’t take on more. Having to learn new skills on top of reintegrating with teams, settling into a “new” office, and readjusting their work schedule feels like an overwhelming proposition.

Regardless, there are skills that teams need to develop right now for businesses to achieve both short-term and long-term results. 

To resolve this, businesses must embrace the reality that as the concept of work has been disrupted, so has the concept of learning. Traditional approaches to development–like face-to-face instruction—need to be re-imagined to ensure that employees can build skills at the right pace. What’s more, new ways of thinking and working must be introduced gradually to ensure they can become sustainable habits.

To achieve this, employers must integrate learning into a professional’s day-to-day work life and streamline it. Here are four ways to make this happen.

Abandon classroom training. 

Not forever. Just for now. Employees have zero appetite for cramming into a small room with their teams to listen to a PowerPoint lecture for hours. And lengthy learning games and ice breakers? Forget about them. During the pandemic, we learned how important our time is. Even the idea of sitting in a classroom can be un-motivating. For employers and safety restrictions, it’s also an unnecessary extra hurdle to prepare a room for learning. We now know there are other ways to learn. You can learn virtually, independently, through asynchronous methods, and more. Right now is not the time for classroom learning. Maybe in the future. But not now.

Think hybrid. 

Just as we now have a new appreciation for what a hybrid work environment looks like, learning should take the same approach. By looking at their learning methods (in-person learning, virtual learning, live vs recorded instruction, self-led development, book clubs, etc.) employers can create a mashup. Identify the skills that need to be developed and the time it takes to develop each respective skill. Then, be creative with how you can build the skill in micro-learning sessions over a set period of time. In regard to micro-learning, think about a learning session that takes less than 90 minutes.

For example, you can partner with clients to deliver cohort training, which leverages group, virtual learning, and one-on-one coaching. Deliver the group learning in multiple micro-sessions. The coaching serves as a supplement to ensure that the knowledge shared is both retained and customized for each participant. Make each group learning session 60 t0 90 minutes. Allow each coaching call to be 30 to 45 minutes. Deliver content over the course of three months to support development, while ensuring that nothing is more than any participant can handle. Have each participant schedule their coaching session at a time that best suits their schedule. Cohort training is ideal for time-constrained managers.

Leverage technology. 

We’re all gifted at leveraging Zoom, Teams, and Google by now. There are still different platforms we can utilize to share knowledge, like Padlet, Quizlet, Mural, and more. Help employees learn at their own pace with LinkedIn Learning and other sites like Udemy and Coursera.

It’s not all on the shoulders of employers to create and distribute content. You can design a self-paced course, complete with accountability metrics, to provide your employees with the right amount of learning at the time that’s right for them. Don’t make learning a time-consuming affair. Spread it out over a longer period of time. It also doesn’t have to be expensive, especially if you’ve got the right partner with the right platform.

Share the responsibility.  

Professionals showed creativity in the “getting stuff done” department during the COVID-19 crisis. Allow them to apply their ingenuity around their skills development. Provide the expectation, share the options, and then allow them to find their time to learn. Forced-fed learning is rarely effective. Setting a high standard, allowing team members autonomy, and reinforcing with accountability is a great way to generate engagement. As an added bonus, this method helps encourage on-the-job learning. This is more valuable because professionals get to apply what they’re learning in real-time, ensuring that the habits they’re building become lasting. After all, real-life learning is always more impactful than learning done in a laboratory setting.

Re-imagine learning and development. An incremental, micro-learning approach to development has never been more on time and on target.

Is Your Training Content Ready for a Hybrid Workforce?

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When it comes to training today’s hybrid workforce, traditional content formats fizzle. Their limitations in flexibility with UI, design, integrations, and analytics can cause learning and development (L&D) initiatives to fall short of expected goals. Improving worker skills in a hybrid setting depends on rethinking the document status quo. To drive experiential learning, adopt interactive training content technology.

It’s a Hybrid World

The future of the workforce is hybrid.

A hybrid workforce is a blended workforce where some work in the office full time, some people are remote full time, and others are in the office part-time and home part-time. As society begins to open up after the pandemic, hybrid workforces have become the norm. For instance, over half of the workforce intends to be in the office 10 days or less a month, according to a Webex study, while Upwork estimates that 26 percent of workers will be working remotely through 2021. Furthermore, they estimate that 22 percent of the entire workforce will work remotely by 2025. That’s roughly 36.2 million people.

So what does this mean for L&D professionals? That complexity will increase the difficulty of running traditional training programs. L&D professionals need to think outside the 2D box to engage and energize hybrid learning. Employees need interactive, engaging, and consistent learning experiences.

L&D professionals need tools that are easy to use to create training content that’s experiential and easily shared among remote workers. They will need to lose the 2D approach and adopt a multimedia approach, including video, polls, and the ability to choose their own personalized learning journey within the training materials.

While it’s important for employees to have an immersive and engaging experience, it is equally important for L&D professionals to easily manage, create, and distribute training materials. It’s especially important for them to be able to make necessary adjustments as time goes on.

How to Drive Experiential Learning in a Hybrid World

What is experiential learning? Experiential learning describes the ideal process of learning and invites you to understand yourself as a learner. It also empowers you to take charge of your own learning and development.

The experiential learning process supports performance improvement, learning, and development. According to David A. Kolb at The Institute for Experiential Learning, “There are two goals in the experiential learning process. One is to learn the specifics of a particular subject, and the other is to learn about one’s own learning process.”

This can’t be done in an engaging way with old training materials—not in today’s hybrid world. You need to have content that’s flexible and powerful enough to fill gaps and support experiential learning opportunities more effectively. Also, The content is important before, during, and after the overall learning experience.

Interactive content is the best solution for experiential learning. It can support multiple media types (e.g., audio, video, etc.). Additionally, it can be customized with polls, quizzes, or other ways to take action and put the new knowledge into practice.

With people at home, at work, or both, training needs to be more self-driven. In other words, interactivity enables self-driven experiences, increasing overall engagement with materials and more freedom for users to learn in the way that best suits them.

You need more powerful digital content platforms to help even the playing field for dispersed workforces. This will help organizations create better digital-first learning experiences.

The Work World Has Gone Hybrid and Your Content Needs to Evolve to Suit It

The shift to hybrid learning is in full swing. Because of this, L&D professionals are in the process of looking at their old training content systems and finding new ways to maintain productivity and meet future goals. The challenge is to deliver consistent development and training materials for hybrid workforces and make learning experiential for dispersed teams. For success, the learning experience must be built to reach participants through as many senses as possible. With this in mind, improving worker skills and capabilities within hybrid workforces depends on rethinking the document status quo. It also means adopting interactive content technology to drive experiential learning.

Managing Employee Uncertainty to Help Them Thrive [Podcast]

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Employee uncertainty is bad for business. When people don’t feel their work situations are stable, they get anxiety, depression, and have a tendency to catastrophize. They also become disengaged with their work. Because of this, productivity wanes, and so does financial success. Gallup estimates that 22 million employees are disengaged, resulting in $350 billion lost each year due to absences, illness, and other unhappiness-related issues.

It’s up to leadership and HR professionals to manage employee uncertainty before things get out of control, especially in these unprecedented times spurred by the pandemic. It is up to managers to get ahead of uncertainty and find ways to communicate with employees, reassure them, and have structures in place to manage uncertainty should it arise.

Our Guest: Sandy Scholes, Chief People Officer at Flipp Corporation

On the latest #WorkTrends podcast, I spoke with Sandy Scholes, chief people officer at Flipp Corporation. She has over two decades of diverse HR experience, having held several executive HR leadership roles at organizations like Entertainment One, Becton, Dickinson, GlaxoSmithKline, and CARA. Sandy has long sustained a passion for working with people and focuses on growth empowerment. She aims to help create work cultures of learning at organizations and provides strategies to manage employee uncertainty during times of organizational change.

Because employee uncertainty is especially prevalent thanks to the pandemic, I was eager to get her insight into how to work with such uncertainties. I wanted to know: What can organizations do to combat this? The first thing is to equip leaders and managers with the ability to spot uncertainty in the first place.

“It starts with all of your leaders and coaches. You need to pull people in a room and equip leaders and managers with the right kind of skills to try to notice that. You have to double your communication,” Sandy says. “At Flipp, we’ve asked all of our leaders to be deliberate and spend one-on-one time checking in on employees to see how they’re doing.”

The second thing to realize is that everyone reacts differently to uncertainty, and will need different accommodations. What one employee needs to feel more secure may be wildly different than another.

“You can’t treat everyone the same. For example, at Flipp, for parents, we’re trying to manage uncertainty by providing more flexibility. How do we create a schedule where they don’t feel overwhelmed?” Sandy says. “Managers and coaches need to understand that they have to provide this level of flexibility so that people can work differently now.” 

Don’t just survive. Thrive.

Of course, managing uncertainty isn’t enough. Once you help people get to a baseline of comfort, you want to make sure they’re able to get to the next level. Employees don’t just want to survive; they want to thrive.

“Make sure employees have a growth and development plan. You have to sit down with them monthly, even if they’re remote. Talk about career aspirations. Because if they don’t feel like they’re going to develop, then they’re going to feel stagnant,” Sandy says.

And engagement will suffer. With the surge of the “Great Resignation,” this isn’t a risk you can take. Offer employees options to grow. Give them stipends to allow for creativity and learning–even if it doesn’t directly correlate to work.

“If employees want to take music lessons or guitar or they want to sign up for a wine course, they can take some of that money and spend it on a personal thing. It’s all about feeding your soul,” Sandy says. “Stay invested, grow people, help challenge them, and make sure they’re learning and they feel like they’re making a difference.”

I hope you enjoy this episode of #WorkTrends. You can learn more about managing employee uncertainty by reaching out to Sandy Scholes on LinkedIn.

The Secret to Retaining Tech Talent: Give Them Ways to Grow

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If you want to keep that tech talent you invested so much time, energy and resources recruiting and hiring on, put yourself in their shoes. Work is about far more than coding: as employees rise in tech, they may be called upon to make presentations, participate in a conference, lead a team, articulate a complicated process to newbies, troubleshoot with peers — you name it. And employees are hungry to expand their skills. Companies that overlook this reality stand to lose that talent they worked so hard to find. That’s going to impact not just your present, but your future: those stand-out new hires already marked as candidates for succession may look elsewhere for opportunities.

To say this is not an ideal time to be bleeding talent in the tech sector is beyond an understatement. According to a recent survey by the job site Indeed, 86% of hiring managers say it’s challenging to find and hire tech talent. The average tenure in a job in 2016 was 4.2 years according to the BLS. But the average tenure in the tech industry is far lower, according to SHRM — only three years.

The reasons are numerous — including the nature of working in tech itself. Tech talent is by nature hungry to learn — whether or not you’re providing the opportunity, learning is part of their DNA. Many tech companies focus far more on apps and tools than on social and language interaction. But if you had the chance to ask a tech employee, most would readily convey a need to improve their soft skills as well — which is evidenced by the rising popularity of soft skills courses for tech talent offered by giants such as Harvard Extension.

The overall economy and work climate also play a key role:

  • Recent economic shake-ups left many people realizing they need to keep a Plan B in their professional pocket.
  • A thrilling but endless disruption of new innovations and new start-ups are constantly clamoring for tech talent — including your employees. Today, the pace of development and rollouts is generally rapid fire, and the people who work in this climate are used to training and ramping up fast.
  • It’s intensely easy in this digital, mobile and social environment to look for greener grass on the other side.
  • Increased globalization means different cultures, a variety of social behaviors and a range of different languages. To unify a multinational, multigenerational team takes far more than just hiring them.

Millennial Culture

Millennials have a core sense of healthy self-worth, and tend to see themselves as consumers of employers and jobs they can pick and choose from. But according to research by Deloitte, they’re also looking for an employer that offers more stability than ever before. And in terms of any career, you have to grow to remain in the same place. So if they’re in a job that doesn’t provide the chance to grow, they’re going to look for one that does. 18-35 year-olds stayed in a job for an average of 1.6 years last year — a trend noted by Lingo Live in their new report on the importance of upskilling for tech employees. Millennials are not only hungry to learn, they’re hungry to land in a place they can.

Align Learning With Working

The bottom line for today’s talent, and today’s digital culture a well, is that they are constantly experiencing new things: new apps, new social media pages, new forms of communication, new emojis, new policies and procedures, new bus routes, new challenges. This is the case at work as well as in life. Add the unique circumstances of any individual — such a software engineer for whom English is a second language or taking a job has meant living in a new country.

Every time our attention shifts to a new task or a new environment, we are thrust into a learning capacity once again. If you don’t provide your people with multidimensional learning and development opportunities, it doesn’t mean they don’t need to find the education and upskilling they need to grow. It just means their learning needs will not align with working for your company.

Instead, create that alignment — and then leverage it to drive engagement and ambition as your employees learn and grow within the context of their employer. Consider the soft skills you may want to offer:

Language skills and proficiency: According to the “Real Benefits” report by Lingo Live, language skills are overlooked by employers but highly valued by employees. In fact, a full 70% of engineers they surveyed believe their language skills play a key role in career advancement in their industry. Especially for tech talent that has been sponsored on a work visa, the challenge of communicating, writing, reading, and even interacting in English can be daunting. It’s a challenge easily remedied with a range of web-based, easily accessed language courses and practice.

Leadership skills: From team management to cultural customs and social etiquette, we expect a lot of our managers and leaders. In fact, the Education Advisory Board pinpointed a need to developed five key soft skills for tech talent, all of which are critical for a successful career trajectory. Rising up through the ranks usually means taking on more responsibility and overseeing employees. Among these key skills STEM fields are facing an increased demand for: creativity, teamwork/collaboration and building effective relationships. All can also be bridged into language development and cultural training, enabling tech talent to gain confidence that they can, indeed, become leaders.

Upskilling your talent is a tangible way to demonstrate that you value your employees not just as present-tense labor, but as future assets to your organization. But the benefits go far beyond the doors of your company and right into recruiting. Your employees will convey your brand whether or not you intend them to, but if they are growing and able to learn and develop within the aegis of your organization, they will let others know — and that makes you an employer people want to work for. For any organization trying to establish itself above the fray in this era of transparency, and be able to truly attract, hire, engage and retain the best tech talent, being able to provide soft skills training is an undeniable plus.

This article is sponsored by Lingo Live. Views are my own.

Photo Credit: Compu-Net Systems, LLC Flickr via Compfight cc

 

The Connection Between Skills And Employee Engagement

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Employee Engagement: individual’s investment of wisdom, skills, energies, creativity and time in the work assigned.

We have explored wisdom. Now let’s explore employee skills and their connection to positive engagement for job, team and company.

What Skills Mean (definition)

Skills means application of knowledge, wisdom, and dexterity to specific elements of one’s work assignments. The transition from product economy to service economy has not lessened reliance on skills. Companies hire specific abilities that achieve profitable results. These include manual or intellectual, technical or social, mathematical or linguistic skills.

What Skills Bring (value)

Productivity. Refined skills generate employee productivity. Productivity combines effectiveness and efficiency. Effective skills application accomplishes results. Efficient skills application means least expenditure of resources in shortest time. Consider: a skilled employee produces more output and thus more value. Consider: that employee is more positively engaged for the company. Consider: company attention to ever-increasing those skills increases engagement value.

Pride. Human nature desires success. The resulting emotion is pride of success. When individuals approach a project proud of their skills, they engage more readily, more productively. Successful, those individuals relish another go at a bigger challenge. They want more opportunity to engage their skills. They are motivated to sharpen those skills for the next opportunity. Here is the dual value of skills engagement and skills improvement. That is a victorious cycle of greater success.

Profitability. The more skilled your employees, the more productive their output. The greater number and significance of opportunities to apply their skills, the more satisfied your employees. The more satisfied your employees, the greater your employee retention. The greater your retention, the more profitable your business. You might call this “empowerment”. The more employees are empowered to utilize and improve their skills, the greater profit a company is likely to experience.

How To Bring Skills On (actions)

How, then, does your organization focus on the skills component of your employees’ engagement? Here are three broad areas that cover many ways to boost engagement by boosting their skills. Keep in mind, by boosting an employee’s skills, you’re also boosting his or her engagement.

Recognition. Individuals take personal pride in what they do well. They experience more pride when what they do well is recognized. There are an infinite number of employee recognition tactics. The key here is recognizing specific skills, not just overall performance.

Suggestion: a recurrent chance for individuals to talk about their specific skill(s), how they developed them, what they’re doing to enhance them, what the skill means to them personally. This may be a constant agenda item at team meetings or a brief “interview” in regular newsletters.

Continuous Improvement. Does your company provide the learning chance for employees to improve their skills continuously? One sure way to show the company values employees and their individual skills is to make it easy for them to build those skills even greater. This may be with training, coaching, external education, professional/trade association membership, and subscriptions/libraries.

Suggestion: survey employees regularly, frequently. Offer formal and informal surveys, anonymous and identified surveys. Ask employees what information they want and need, and how they want it. Of course, be sure the survey results are treated with respect and that responses go to all employees quickly and clearly.

Added Opportunities. Invite employees to suggest more, better ways to use their skills. Increase their skills opportunities. This was called “out-of-the-box thinking,” and that’s a good name. Encourage employees to think out of the box in which their skills are normally applied. Give them the opportunity to follow that lead, to work from their productivity and their pride, and to generate greater profit potential.

One suggestion is an ongoing “suggestion box” inviting employees to suggest new, different ways to adapt and apply a specific skill. This should be supported with ample publicity and celebration.

We have looked at how business should focus on wisdom and skills as employee engagement elements. The next article will examine energies.

About the Author: Tim Wright is professional speaker/coach/facilitator with expertise in employee engagement and culture improvement.

photo credit: CRYROLFE via photopin cc

Applicant Assessments: Testing The Waters

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(Editor’s Note: We invite you to discuss candidate screening techniques in more detail with the entire TalentCulture community, this week at #TChat Events on Wednesday, February 19th. For details, see the #TChat Preview post: Hiring Great Talent: How Do You Decide?)

Can you tell from a resume if an applicant has the skills needed to succeed in a job? How do you know if someone is really the right fit for your company?

If you’re unsure, perhaps pre-employment tests should be part of your evaluation process. Knowledge is power — and assessments can be a powerful addition to any hiring toolkit.

Evaluating Job Candidates: A Smart Strategy

Increasingly, organizations are relying on screening tests to improve their hiring and workforce development decisions. In fact, in a recent survey by Aberdeen Group, 49% of companies said they have an assessment strategy in place — up from only 40% in 2011.

Infographic - How to select assessments for employee screening

See Details: How To Choose Job Candidate Testing Tools

Melissa Hulsey, president and CEO of Ashton Staffing, explains that, with the correct type of test, employers can evaluate candidates effectively across multiple dimensions, including job skills, professional  knowledge and cultural fit. It’s even possible to make behavioral predictions and gain insight into core values.

“Properly constructed assessments look below the surface information presented by applicants to systematically predict which one will be the best hire for a position,” explains Dr. Charles Hanler, president of Rocket-Hire, a consultancy that helps improve organizational hiring practices. He compares the resume review and interview process to the tip of an iceberg. The bulk of an iceberg is what remains below the surface — what you can’t see and touch.

Choosing Applicant Assessments

It’s essential to choose the right type of assessment for your goals. Tests can produce a mind-numbing array of candidate metrics — personality, cognitive abilities, professional knowledge, work skills, physical and motor abilities, emotional intelligence, language proficiency, drug use and even values like integrity. Yet, when evaluations are properly applied, employers can more quickly and confidently identify candidates who are best qualified for open positions and most likely to succeed in the organization.

As the Society for Industrial & Organizational Psychology explains, there are pros and cons to each of the many types of employment assessments. But before deciding how you’ll test candidates, it’s important to determine what kind of information matters most to you. Tests vary according to their mode of administration (web-based tools vs. paper and pencil), content focus (interpersonal skills, mathematical ability), level of standardization or structure, costs, administrative ease, and other factors.

Although there can be significant benefits from using tests in the employee selection process, there are also multiple issues to consider. In particular:

• Validity  Does the test actually measure the characteristic it is designed to measure? For example, does it actually predict future job performance or success?

• Reliability How consistently does a test measure the target characteristic? If an assessment tool isn’t highly reliable, it will be of little value in predicting a candidate’s future job performance. As with validity, a test’s reliability should be verified before it is administered.

• Legality Because employment tests are periodically challenged in court, employers must make sure assessments do not violate federal, state, or local EEO laws, including Title VII.

TYPES OF CANDIDATE TESTS
Assessment Centers Often used to assess interpersonal skills, communication skills, planning/organizing and analytical skills. Typically involves exercises that reflect job content and types of problems faced on the job.
Biographical Data Uses questions about education, training, work experience and interests to predict success on the job. 
Cognitive Ability Tests Assesses aptitude or potential to solve job-related problems by focusing on mental abilities such as verbal or mathematical reasoning, or perceptual abilities like speed in recognizing letters of the alphabet.  
Integrity Tests Assesses attitudes and experiences related to honesty, dependability, trustworthiness, reliability and pro-social behavior. 
Interviews The most common type of employment test. Typically assesses interpersonal skills, communication skills and teamwork skills, and can be used to assess job knowledge.
Job Knowledge Tests Typically uses multiple choice questions or essays to evaluate technical or professional expertise and knowledge required on the job.
Personality Tests Measures traits related to behavior at work, interpersonal interactions, and satisfaction with different aspects of work. 
Physical Ability Tests Uses tasks or exercises that determine ability to perform. Measures physical attributes and capabilities, such as strength, balance and speed.
Work Samples and Simulations Measures specific job skills or job knowledge, but can also assess general skills such as organizational, analytic and interpersonal skills.

How Do You Evaluate Job Applicants?

Do you use pre-employment tests to screen applicants before they’re hired? Has this been effective for your organization? How does this help or hinder your company’s candidate experience? Share your experience in the comment area.

Image Credit: Stock.xchng

Digging Deep into Social Learning #TChat Recap

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Why in the world of work would anyone sit online for an hour and share serious answers to a list of questions – along with random bits of wit and wisdom that come to mind?

No, I’m not talking about watching “Game of Thrones” and tweeting with my friends. I’m talking about our chat — #TChat — the weekly Twitter chat where TalentCulture community members come together to talk about today’s “world of work.”

Learning Together: A Surprise Inside

No subject is off limits, except maybe “Game of Thrones” (which, by the way, trended lower than #TChat on Twitter last night). No offense to that show, or to this week’s historic #MarriageEquality trend line (which also was less active than #TChat during our session last night). In fact, we’re honored to trend with both of these popular topics.

But I digress. Once again, I ask, why would anyone devote an hour each week to a Twitter chat like ours? I remember asking myself that question when we launched #TChat over two-and-a-half years ago. I never thought it would last a month. I love telling that story because, well, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Collective Knowledge: Sharing Adds Value

This week, the TalentCulture community dug deep into the concept of “learning.” In particular, we’ve been exploring social learning — that amorphous, organic, continuous, “knowledge sharing” activity that was originally ignited in the Garden of Eden. (“Adam, would you like a bite of this juicy apple?”) Or if you prefer, that point in human evolution when our frontal lobes sparked cognitive thought, we began hunting for information, exchanging it with others, and making decisions on behalf of ourselves and those in our social circles.

Social learning can be as simple as a single moment: an incremental yet transformative interaction where one person shares a piece of information that another receives, absorbs, adopts and applies in a new context that propels him or her forward. This process of information exchange, reinforcement and transformation lights up pleasure centers in the brain, as ideas pass from one person to another in an “additive” way. With each hand-off, information evolves, and is modified by the next person who absorbs, adopts and applies…

Layers of Learning That Live On

And so it goes. This is the beauty of social learning. And this is why I participate in #TChat forums.

It is why I’ve found value in showing up nearly every week for over two-and-a-half years. Participants offer ideas that continue to build on one another. As I step back and look at this community’s body of work it’s similar to the formation of rock over a geological span of time.

We can dig through #TChat archives and see the layers of growth and progress. We can see how continuous interaction has created a context that helps our community evolve – absorbing the bad with the good, and establishing more useful understanding as we move forward. It’s a community where a better world of work emerges every week from the layers below — generating a new level of wonder and wisdom.

The beauty astounds.

#TChat “Social Learning” Week-in-Review

MichaelClark

Watch the sneak peek interview with Michael Clark

To dig deeply into organizational learning and talent development issues this week, we joined forces with two brilliant experts: Michael Clark, CEO of ReCenter, and Justin Mass, Sr. Manager of Learning Technology & Design at Adobe. The richness of their contributions added tremendous value throughout the week.

We invite you to revisit insights on this topic anytime! Just follow the links below…

SAT 3/23  “Sneak Peek” Video: ReCenter’s Michael Clark kicked-off the week by defining key terms with our community manager, Tim McDonald.

SUN 3/24  TalentCulture CEO, Meghan M. Biro, outlined 5 ways that professionals can leverage learning in her column at Forbes.com.

MON 3/25  #TChat Weekly Preview “Igniting Social Learning” laid out the week’s premise and questions.

TChatRadio_logo_020813

Listen to the recorded #TChat Radio show

TUE 3/26  #TChat Radio: “The Social Learning Show.” Our hosts joined forces with organizational development experts, Michael Clark, and Justin Mass, to examine social learning innovation and its role in optimizing talent in today’s workplace. It’s a fascinating 30-minute session for anyone interested in improving professional and organizational performance through learning.

WED 3/27  #TChat Twitter: Justin and Michael gathered around the Twitter stream with hundreds of other participants to expand and amplify key issues in workforce learning and development. See highlights from the conversation in the slideshow below…

#TChat Twitter Highlights Slideshow: Igniting Social Learning

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Closing Notes & What’s Ahead

SPECIAL THANKS: We extend our gratitude to Michael Clark, and Justin Mass for leading our community through the social learning discovery path this week. Your expertise in learning tools and techniques is inspiring and invaluable.

NOTE TO BLOGGERS: Did this week’s events prompt you to write about social learning and talent development? We’re happy to share your thoughts. Just post a link on Twitter (include #TChat or @TalentCulture), or insert a comment below, and we’ll pass it along.

WHAT’S AHEAD: Next week, we move to yet another level of talent discovery, as we explore the notion of “Humans as a Service (HaaS), with Jason Averbook, Chief Business Innovation Officer at Appirio, and Richie Etwaru, Group Vice President of Cloud and Digital Innovation at Cegedim Relationship Management.

Until then, we’ll continue to tackle World of Work conversation each day. So join us on the #TChat Twitter stream, or on our new LinkedIn discussion group. And feel free to explore other areas of this redesigned blog/community website. TalentCulture is always open and the lights are always on.

We’ll see you on the stream!

Image credit: Stock.xchnge

 

Igniting Social Learning: #TChat Preview

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(Editorial Note: Want to read the RECAP of this week’s events? See Digging Deep into Social Learning #TChat Recap)

Social learning. Two simple words with so many meanings.

The TalentCulture community understands one meaning very well. After all, we exist is to encourage social learning among talent-minded professionals. But this week, we want to look more expansively at the role of learning in today’s social business environment.

Our mission is to unpack this concept collaboratively – sharing ideas and information about how and why social learning can make a meaningful difference for individual careers, as well as organizations.

We even have some heavy-hitter experts to help us see how leading-edge learning tools and techniques can transform business.

MichaelClarkWhat’s Your Learning Goal?

Yesterday, I started the conversation on Forbes.com by thinking aloud about 5 ways anyone can jump-start social learning. As I fleshed-out these thoughts, a key question kept coming to mind: When you pursue learning, what’s your purpose?

  • Are you learning, so you can teach?
  • Are you teaching so you can learn?
  • Are you learning for learning’s sake?
  • Or do you have other intentions?

What’s more, does your goal really matter? I think it does. Arguably, the most powerful learning experiences are fueled by purpose-driven passion.

Truth is, learning should propel us not just through school, not just through work, but through life. And when our personal quest for knowledge, skill and competence aligns with business goals, the results can make a meaningful difference.

#TChat Focus Topic: Let’s Get Social About Learning

Life is a continuous process of learning and skill development. And by nature, learning is a social activity. Throughout our lives we look to others – parents, teachers, mentors, managers, experts, peers and others – for information, instruction, insight, guidance and validation. It’s all part of the learning process.

So, what does it mean to apply emerging social tools and techniques to the process of continuous learning? And why does it matter? Let’s talk about it!

TChatRadio_logo_020813#TChat Radio

#TChat Radio – Tuesday, March 26 at 7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Tune-in online and discover new ways to ignite professional and organization learning, as we interview Michael Clark, CEO of ReCenter, and Justin Mass, Sr. Manager of Learning Technology & Design at Adobe.

#TChat Twitter

#TChat Twitter – Wednesday, March 27 at 7pm ET / 4pm PT. Join our weekly online forum, and share your thoughts with others about these key questions:

Q1: How & why should we define social learning & talent development in the world of work?
Q2: How can we bridge today’s skills gap by connecting business with education?
Q3: We equate social learning with online learning, but is that view complete? Why/why not?
Q4: What are the most important technology platforms for social learning today?
Q5: What critical metrics should leaders should use to measure social learning & talent development?

Want to see more about this week’s topic? Watch Michael Clark, talk with TalentCulture community manager, Tim McDonald in this preview video on YouTube, or read Tim’s “Sneak Peek” blog post now.

Throughout the week, we’ll keep the discussion going on the #TChat Twitter stream and on our new LinkedIn Discussion Group. So please join us share your ideas and opinions.

We’ll see you on the stream!

Image credit: Pixabay