Top 5 Steps Towards Skills Transformation: The LinkedIn Perspective
In this blog, we explore The Skills Advantage report for insights on why a skills-based approach is a must to help employees grow
The last two years have been a historic time for the world of work. Across the globe, there has been a tremendous amount of disruption and displacement including changing of roles at a record pace. Amidst this, organizations are realizing that the future had arrived yesterday and skills transformation is the need of the hour!
The skills that your employees need today to flourish, may not be the same tomorrow. In fact, 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025, as technology adoption rises, according to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report. A Mckinsey report too has pointed that 50% of leaders have faced business issues due to an unforeseen skills gap; the majority believe that upskilling and reskilling are the crux of the solution.
Meanwhile, employees too are craving for growth opportunities to stay relevant and excel in their careers. They have a good enough idea about the rate at which change is happening and want to keep pace with it just as much as their leaders. Many believe their skills are not being used in the right manner in their current roles. Given The Great Resignation and its effects on the business world, giving people opportunities to leverage their skill sets is actually an essential way to retain talent.
That brings us to the importance of a very solid investment in skills as a mandatory insurance if companies want to continue staying relevant and become powerful engines for future success. Needless to say, a majority of L&D pros already know this very well and rank upskilling and reskilling as their most pressing priority. As many as two-thirds say L&D is no longer a “nice to have,” but a must-have as a driving force for transformation.
LinkedIn recently released a report titled The Skills Advantage that offers strategic insights on why a skills-based approach is must to help your employees learn and grow. In this blog post, we will examine the LinkedIn perspective on 5 most important steps you can take to harness the skills advantage.
Step 1: Keep Pace with Digital Transformation
The last two years have shown us that strong digital skills are going to be the be all and end all of business atleast in the foreseeable future. The World Economic Forum has stated that 85 million jobs will be displaced and 97 million new jobs created by 2025 due to increased automation and economic uncertainty. Salesforce too says that 14 G20 companies could face a crisis of nearly $11.5 trillion in GDP growth if they are employing workers who are not skilled enough for the digital age.
Unfortunately though, while digital skills are a must to lead businesses in virtual work environments, not many employees actually have them. But it doesn’t help to make a list of 500 technical skills that are required and then lose focus. It’s better to choose the top 50 business-critical capabilities your organization needs, for current times as well as for the future, and then decide what approach to use to achieve them. It’s important for companies to go about creating an effective L&D strategy to take care of the digital skills gaps in their workforce.
Step 2: Rethink Ways to Assess and Measure Skills Impact
The first step while planning a skills approach is to define and assess skills so that it is possible to map the impact of learning to business outcomes. It helps to focus on data and metrics instead of relying on guesswork so that you can target areas that are critical to achieve business results and generate ROI.
To assess skills and keep a track of progress on closing skills gaps, it is necessary to apply a mixed bag of techniques, including aspects like certifications and feedback, engagement surveys and so on. There might be a host of data in separate HR functions, so compiling all of it together and then making sense of data could a challenge. It’s necessary to have a synergy between various teams across the organization, so as to achieve data consistency.
Step 3: Create Impactful Learner Experiences
Learner experience has always been a seminal element in learning and development, but its importance has been reiterated by the rapid changes in the way training is being imparted. However, modern learners are a busy lot balancing professional and personal lives. They do not have enough time to fit learning into their workday, despite the myriad benefits that training provides. Learners always look for training that adds value to their life. They do not appreciate training that’s just a mandatory activity that does nothing to engage them.
They want learning experiences that are personalized, interactive, and social to keep them engaged. And to truly drive learner engagement and success, learning needs to be accessible and inclusive. At a time when learners are inundated with so many learning resources, it is important to offer them strategies like content relevancy.
Content relevancy is an important part of L&D strategy because it helps learners save time, adopt learning faster, boost their engagement and productivity, and develop a sense of continuous learning. Filtering through and picking the best and most relevant content is key to designing a more time-effective and targeted training program.
Step 4: Focus on Skills for Diversity & Inclusion
While academic degrees and personal connections have most often been considered testimony of a person’s credibility and capability, this should not always be the case. Doing so may limit a company’s capacity to explore talent of historically underrepresented groups. A skills-based approach is more suitable to help companies better understand and match people to opportunity.
It helps to offer employees a clearer target to direct their learning, growth, and career path. There’s so much that a company can achieve when it has the right kind of teams in place because, after all, employees are a company’s greatest asset. As L&D teams focus on plugging knowledge gaps and upskilling employees, people from all sections in the company have a larger likelihood of development. To this end, it’s important to undertake regular training and development sessions that can engage all employees as well as help them upskill.
Step 5: Ensure the Focus Is Always On Learning
As L&D becomes more strategic, there is now a bigger need to deep dive into business issues right from DEI to talent retention and acquisition. However, between all of this, it’s more critical than ever for L&D teams to continue focusing on continuous learning opportunities across the organization.
Employees too view learning and development opportunities as a key requirement to perform their job better. As per the 2021 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, Gen Z – one of the newest entrants in the workforce - is highly motivated to grow their careers, with 76% seeing learning as the key to their advancement.
Plethora houses an exhaustive catalog of skill courses that can help you achieve skills transformation. With the help of seasoned eLearning content experts, Plethora is able to custom build individual learning plans for employees to achieve a specified business objective. As these courses are off-the-shelf eLearning courses, companies don’t have to invest a lot of time and cost on their development and can just be procured and deployed for their employees to consume.