To promote growth and survival, gardeners prune their plants regularly. Budgets require similar care. Cuts need to happen to ensure an organization thrives. But cut the wrong branch and you’ll hinder growth.
HR budgets are often the first to be cut, and the organizations doing this right now need to cut carefully. The demand for new skills cannot be greater. Digitization at scale due to lockdowns, jobs resetting across sectors and organizations struggling to keep up with market uncertainty are all forces driving a critical need for well-funded upskilling — not to mention the emergence of automation and artificial intelligence causing widespread job and skill shifts.
Simultaneously, some forward-thinking organizations like Unilever have doubled-down on their investment. As Unilever CEO Alan Jope explains, “We [Unilever] are stingy deployers of capital and operating expense, but there are three areas where if someone comes forward with a proposal the answer is ‘yes.’ Those three areas of spend for us are in green technology, in upskilling our people, and in IT investment and digitalization.” The “L&D Global Sentiment Survey 2021,” likewise, places reskilling and upskilling at the top of learning leaders’ agendas.
Leading organizations view the current climate as ideal for sowing seeds, ready for their next move. Others that fail to grow their people during this time will soon find themselves outpaced.
Workers want upskilling too
The pressure to learn is also felt by workers, with six in 10 stating that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased their need to build new skills. A majority (55 percent) say their daily work tasks have changed due to the pandemic. And 26 percent feel their jobs will be permanently different once the crisis passes.
Failing to upskill people during this time will have a negative impact on productivity (41 percent of workers feel their tasks take longer to complete when they don’t have the right skills). It can also damage employee loyalty (46 percent of workers will leave if they don’t see an employer commitment to upskilling) and negatively affect stress levels (55 percent feel that a lack of skills makes their job more stressful).
Even though the business case for maintaining upskilling is clear, cuts sometimes can’t be avoided. In these situations, learning leaders can get more creative in how they upskill their people. One effective way to ensure your learning strategy is delivering the best results for every dollar invested is to continuously analyze your skill data.
Skill data holds the answer(s)
Skill data is the measurement of what your people can do. It is the data your learners create during their work, their learning and even your recruitment process. It comes from many different sources, including HR and recruitment systems, learning platforms and resumes — and it covers everything from employment information (like location and role) to work experience, current skills and learning, performance data and personal career goals.
The list of all the things that skill data is or can be is a broad one. Unsurprisingly, it takes a bit of work to make skill data insightful. To begin using skill data, the first step is to collect it. Next, store it in an accessible place for your analytics software or data science team. After analyzing it, it helps to display it in an easy-to-digest format.
How skill data can help
Despite the complexities, the payoff of working with skill data is worth the effort. Analyzing your skill data can give you, in granular detail, insights into what skills your organization needs now, what it will need in the next one to three years, what skills are missing and what skills are currently being developed. It can help you prioritize resources, build a learning strategy that aligns with your business goals and add value to your bottom line.
When the first global lockdown was implemented, having access to learner feedback and data on skills needed immediately by the business was invaluable to Cargill. The learning team had to consider additional factors that impacted their people’s learning as well, such as family pressures, their well-being and a sudden move to a remote work environment. Learning resources were created and launched within a couple of days to support people in everything from communication and collaboration to stress management and leadership.
Additionally, skill data can stop you from overlooking the critical skills that are needed to achieve your future business strategy. In turn, this can make getting buy-in for your learning strategy much easier, as stakeholders can see the impact upskilling is having on the business (and they’ll be less likely to include learning in future budget cuts).
Helping people learn
Overlaying these insights with learning data can further help you tailor your content to individual learning preferences. Many corporate learning programs simply aren’t satisfying workers. Only one in five people would recommend their organization’s learning opportunities to a friend. Nearly half wouldn’t. If your people aren’t happy with the learning on offer, they won’t engage. And that means wasted resources.
Sometimes, practical challenges can prevent people from accessing your learning resources. In a lockdown, this might be the pressures of juggling work and family commitments. For Vale, understanding where people were engaging with its learning content helped the team realize that having supporting infrastructure was vital. Truck drivers are now able to learn “on the road” while internet connections in Vale’s mines and ships ensure that no employee is missing out on virtual learning opportunities.
Divesting what doesn’t work
Knowing what content and topics are resonating with your workforce will help you divest learning tools that aren’t working. If, for example, your data finds that people engage more with videos and TED Talks compared with instructor-led classroom teaching, you can invest in in-house video content and video subscriptions. Many people also prefer peer-led learning (55 percent of learners will turn to their peers when seeking new skills). Yet, less than half of CLOs say that they offer peer learning opportunities.
Divesting also ensures (and highlights to your C-suite) that every dollar being invested in learning is assessed and optimized.
A continuous process
Analyzing your skill data is a continuous process. The skills needed in a role can quickly change depending on the needs of your team, your products and services, market pressures and macroeconomic conditions. A biannual or once-a-year review isn’t enough to keep you abreast of changes. Plus, your understanding of skill requirements (and progress) will evolve as your data grows and analysis matures. Your depth of insight will look very different at 30, 60 and 90 days.
To embed this analysis as a regular part of your work, consider making a cultural change. Your learning team might need to become more data-driven and comfortable looking at reports and dashboards. That way, when there’s a decision to be made, their first port of call will be data. Likewise, they’ll likely need to be more open to making tweaks and changes throughout the year — to continually improve your strategic alignment, returns and cost-effectiveness.
Keeping updated with skills
Getting the right data and maintaining it over time is also useful. Skill profiles can help you achieve this by giving individuals ownership of a unique profile that “follows” them throughout their careers. That profile dynamically updates with each role, each course completion, all learning content they’ve engaged with, manager feedback and more. It updates with new experiences as they work on new projects and with different teams. This gives you a completely up-to-date view of all workforce and team skills.
Because the profile is individually owned and populated with data from day-to-day work and learning, it’s more accurate than a resume that’s updated sporadically. And if workers see the value they gain from it (through more tailored learning and work opportunities, for example) they are more likely to engage with it — at a time when 80 percent of workers fail to complete their HR system’s talent profile.
Prioritize your learners
Person-centricity is often the key to a smart learning strategy. Learning and development is, after all, deeply personal. Leveraging your skill data helps you to personalize your learning to all workers, making it more likely that they’ll engage with your plans. In turn, this reduces wasted resources and drives better results.
The final step is to ensure your strategy aligns with your business objectives. This creates fertile ground for everyone’s growth. Individuals get learning that’s tailored to them, you get a cost-effective strategy that delivers results, and the business gets the skills it needs to succeed.
