Why digital learning maturity makes a difference to performance

Why should you care:

• Hear how HEINEKEN’s digital learning transformation has made a difference to its 85,000 people since the pandemic hit.
• Discover the six key areas of digital learning maturity you should be thinking about.
• Evaluate your digital learning and benchmark against 200 other global organizations.

The growing importance of digital learning maturity in your organization.

Since the world changed forever in early 2020, digital learning has been the only show in town when it comes to training and development. The pandemic accelerated L&D’s transformation faster than anybody could ever have anticipated. And we aren’t all going back to the classroom anytime soon.

But the impact of digital learning now reaches far beyond the traditional learning and development requirements within an organization. Yes, there’s the need to keep people compliant and trained as there has always been. However, the business-critical nature of upskilling, reskilling, redeploying, and mobilizing people across companies is more acute than it has ever been. It’s a cliché at the moment to say that talent is in short supply of course, but getting the right people, into the right roles, at the right time has possibly never been harder.

To back this up, there’s some staggering research out there that clearly outlines that supporting current and future talent to develop and add skills to the individual employee’s, and an organization’s arsenal, is business-critical.

According to the World Economic Forum, “as jobs are transformed by technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we need to reskill more than 1 billion people by 2030.” In the same report, they go so far as to say “the world is facing a reskilling emergency”.

So, how well are you able to support this in your organization?

It’s hard to tell right? To be able to give an answer to this, you need to be able to assess and benchmark your current strategy and solutions, as well as your future roadmap. And CrossKnowledge has carried out unique research across 200 global organizations in order to allow you to do just that.

The Digital Learning Maturity model uses six key dimensions to evaluate the L&D landscape inside organizations today to help make learning investments more effective and efficient. These are:

• Learners
• Line managers
• L&D capability
• Learning experiences
• Learning architecture
• Learning analytics

These are measured on three different levels; access to learning, integrated learning experiences and effective skills-building at scale.

People development is an increasingly strategic driver for organizations, with skills gaps a threat to their growth and innovation. And digital learning maturity is an approach and a model to understand and progress skills acquisition.

Jan Rijken, Learning Director, CrossKnowledge

HEINEKEN, who has worked with CrossKnowledge for several years now, went through the assessment process to understand its progress to date and where the gaps remain, in order to support its ongoing L&D strategy development.

Nicole Stead, Global Learning Partner for HEINEKEN talked to UNLEASH about its digital learning transformation which started back in 2018. Originally, only a small percentage of its people had access to online learning…but fast-forwarding to today, all 85,000 of its people now have access!

The COVID-19 pandemic massively accelerated this journey and it took an agile approach to make it work.

We had to really change our ways of thinking and working so that we had more of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach rather than going for a big bang implementation. Instead we looked for incremental wins to get to our goals. And that was a big shift from an L&D capability perspective.

Nicole Stead, Global Learning Partner, HEINEKEN

Nicole and her teams have also really listened to the needs of their people as they first worked remotely then began coming back to a hybrid workplace.

They’ve worked hard to analyze the different ways people are choosing to learn post-COVID-19. More virtual classrooms and online collaboration tools might be obvious but chatbots and technology that supports more learning in the flow of work have also risen in popularity across HEINEKEN. And this understanding has enabled L&D to continue to increase and expand its offerings around experiential and social learning for example.

We’ve empowered our L&D teams to leverage the technologies within the CrossKnowledge LXP, for example BlendedX is a blended learning format that has enabled us to deliver high impact learning at scale.

Nicole Stead

It’s also important to understand that HEINEKEN has also fully integrated its CrossKnowledge LXP with its core HRIS platform too.

This has meant that learning data is pulled through onto the organization’s business intelligence dashboards, which in turn not only highlights the impact of learning on the broader business – but also provides actionable insights for L&D on what’s really making a difference.

Despite scoring highly across so many aspects of the digital learning maturity assessment, Nicole reflects that their findings showed there are strong opportunities to build on their success by driving more involvement in teams’ learning and development through their line managers. And empowering employees ownership of their development. Self-driven learning has long been a hot topic in L&D circles and it’s exciting to see how the digital learning maturity model is accelerating the potential in these important – but often overlooked – areas.

And it’s this understanding but also the action that CrossKnowledge aimed to trigger with this approach to digital learning maturity.

In terms of key L&D capabilities going forwards. The research shows some new skills coming to the fore alongside core foundations, including:

• Digital security
• Content creation
• Digital facilitation
• Data analytics
• Performance consulting

In addition to the L&D capabilities progressing, we believe it is important to build a new culture in organizations with leaders actively supporting employee development in a psychologically safe environment.

Jan Rijken

It’s clear that digital learning is powering so much more than just the L&D agenda today, which opens exciting opportunities tomorrow – if you know where and when it’s best to invest your time, energy, and resources to make the biggest difference.

Don’t miss out on your exclusive chance to speak to Nicole and Jan on all things digital learning in our executive roundtable later this month.

 If you’d like to learn more about the digital learning maturity research, download the brand new report now.