Keeping up with the pace of change is a challenge for companies across the world. While the rapid acceleration of technology development has created powerful business opportunities, it has also created skill gaps that companies of all shapes and sizes struggle to fill.
The pace of change is too great for us to rely on hiring and recruiting alone to bring in more skills. So how do you combat these skills gaps whilst keeping hold of your current workforce? Organizations must prioritize reskilling, upskilling, and growing the current workforces from within.
The challenge of building a skilled workforce at scale was the topic of this recent UNLEASH webinar, held in partnership with Coursera. The session, moderated by Kate Graham, Head of Content Labs and Insight at UNLEASH, brought together thought leaders in the HR and L&D space to discuss how to build a successful skills development strategy, which technologies must be considered, and the impact on the employee experience. Here are some of the key takeaways.
Without behavioral competency and employee capacity, new tech is fruitless
We can’t build and use technical skills without building the behavioral competencies that sit behind them.
So says Gemma Paterson, Head of Development Experiences & Innovation at Legal & General, a UK-based financial services giant. At L&G, the pandemic has allowed some “leapfrogging” in the L&D function: “It’s become really apparent really quickly that things like data-led thinking, digital and agile are all at the forefront of peoples’ minds. The fact that we have been working remotely means that we’ve had to develop those skills quickly.”
As a result, L&G has found that they need to balance the approach to prepare people for both the new work environment and the new skills push it has created.
Kyle Clark, Senior Skills Transformation Consultant at Coursera, has seen similar trends. While employed learners focused on highly technical courses in 2019, the pandemic brought a considerable shift towards human skills. In the uncertain terrain of the pandemic-imposed world, skills like kindness, gratitude, and mindfulness took precedence over technical training topics like machine learning and data science.
Give teams a voice when it comes to determining their skills agenda
Nobody knows better than the teams you’re operating with what skills are needed, where you’re going, and how to get there.
For Addie van Rooij, VP People Operations, L&D Services, M&A HR Services and Labour Relations at HP Enterprise, decentralizing L&D is the key to have a more flexible, agile, and engaging approach to building a skilled workforce. Rather than taking a top-down approach to L&D, he suggests that the central L&D function primarily provides frameworks and fosters a development mindset amongst teams. Allowing teams to assess the skills they need and empowering employees to pursue on-the-job learning is the key to truly flexible and fast-paced upskilling. “The business function is the real skill enabler, the real skill developer.”
Elisa Bassi, Global People Development & Learning Director at L’Oréal, agrees that self-driven learning has an important role but supports a more hybrid approach in which some activities are localized, and some are centralized:
“Maybe you want to enable a sort of self-driven learning in the teams of given countries, but it might be better if there’s a framework and there are guidelines, so it’s not that everybody is going in a different direction in driving their own upskilling. Because in this case, you lose the value that you want to have collectively from having skills that are aligned with a specific capability that you need.”
Business strategy must always lead your skills agenda.
The work on skills should be visibly and meaningfully connected with the strategy.
Elisa Bassi argues that centralized L&D provides that connection. Learning leaders are best equipped to assess business objectives, internal capabilities, and market-wide skills evolutions and distill these into skills development activities. If you begin with the business strategy and the organizational capabilities, you can create truly effective skills strategies and ensure quality and consistency across the company. This pertains especially to the implementation of new technology: “You need to have a really solid learning strategy before you can invest and deploy.”
Gemma Patterson suggests that the role of L&D is to go directly to teams across the business to understand their barriers and use that knowledge to determine the centralized strategy in tandem with the business needs:
“You can’t climb a skills mountain; building skills is less about the skills themselves and more about solving problems and tacklings challenges. Then it becomes less of a mountain to climb. A more iterative, experimental, and partnership-led process with the business is much more manageable.”
“Future-proofing” is mainly a mindset shift.
“We need to ensure that we don’t shortchange our learners as they attempt to become future-ready.”
Kyle Clark closed the webinar by tying in new technologies with these new ways of work. He believes that important meta-skills are the key to building a skilled workforce that will last, citing learning itself as a core competency. “We are in this constant tension between what I have to do right now and what I should be doing incrementally to achieve a larger goal.” Carving out capacity and providing employees with the space and technology to build the right skills over time is the only sure way to create a future-ready workforce.
Technology plays a significant role in this shift, with innovative learning platforms unlocking meaningful dialogues within the organization that lay at the heart of skilling at speed and scale. For Addie van Rooij, “technology enables that conversation.”
Elisa Bassi has seen a growing understanding that future success is dependent on employees’ ability to learn and companies’ ability to pick up on signals about what skills will be essential in 2-3 years. “It is true that there are skills which are changing very fast, but there are competencies that never change. It’s important to have a learning strategy that takes both of those things into account.”
