Elevating potential: Exclusive research on Employee Growth and Development

In this UNLEASH webinar, watch Kelly Steven-Waiss, Chief Transformation Officer at ServiceNow and Nima Sherpa Green, Editor-in-Chief at UNLEASH take you through how to tackle your skills gap, the role of future-oriented L&D and tackle a whole raft of pressing employee skills issues.

Webinar highlights

The big challenge of talent attraction – According to UNLEASH data, revealed on the webinar, well over half of HR practitioners see recruitment as the biggest challenge, followed by onboarding and talent management. This is because hybrid and remote work has made the landscape more complex, impacting the skills needed to be able to command new tech and changing employee needs.

This, as Steven-Waiss explained, means rethinking hiring, the employer brand, employee experience, and how employers create visibility over career pathways for staff, with many not feeling they have the understanding to move forward down certain paths. In addition, with many HR leaders not tracking potential and creating routes for internal progression, a large number don’t have insight into the skills they have and therefore what learning opportunities they need to deliver which can compound gaps.

“We clearly have a global talent shortage but [the results of the UNLEASH survey] say that we are in a race for skills not a war for talent,” explained Kelly Steven-Waiss, Chief Transformation Officer at ServiceNow, talking about how complex the need for skills has become.

Mobility – “We have built systems around static jobs but we know markets and organizations and people won’t stay still and in the spirit of growth mindset people grow and change in a dynamic fashion,” explained Steven-Waiss, adding that this means organizations need to help leaders see skills in an “abundance mindset” looking to grow their talent and seek it elsewhere in the organization, with the business supporting this via a skills, not hierarchical jobs, architecture.

Role of technology – Technology can help the skills issues by connecting HR leaders and employees via a unifying system, giving everyone access to organizational skills and opportunities. But with many businesses still operating via outdated offline tools and spreadsheets it can feel impossible to make this jump and un-silo data kept separately.

“Yet Rome wasn’t built in one day and it’s not difficult to start,” said Steven-Waiss, noting that leaders can begin small. Start by tying learning to needed skills, creating skills architecture, and ensuring all employees have access to opportunities. As she concluded: “Technology is the holy grail.”

Tying people, skills, processes, and technology together

By aligning your people with HR and leadership thinking around skills, and bringing this together with good processes and technology, employee growth and development can be used to drive a raft of benefits from better productivity, personalization of work, better engagement, and more innovation which then impacts the bottom line. Indeed, it can make HR more crisis-resilient.

And, in Steven-Waiss’ eyes, future technology will only help this agenda.“I’m bullish about positive things AI can bring us,” she said.

Getting leadership buy-in

“Leaders have not been able to buy into moving to a skills-based organization as typically they have hoarded talent and allow people to move around and learn in different ways and learning is still considered ‘soft’ where the benefits are only for individuals and not for the whole company,” says Steven-Waiss.

As such, HR needs to have a conversation about how the skills growth agenda links to business success, talking about how learning boosts business. Currently, only 36% have buy-in from leaders for their plans

Then, HR can truly start turning to skills. Here, Steven-Waiss said that starting small, getting alignment, and evaluating needed technology solutions are the best places to start.