The COVID-19 pandemic forced employers to manage several new realities all at once, including an accelerated digital transformation, a shift to remote or hybrid work and a tight job market. Most organizations are building new skills to address these new realities.
Even before the pandemic, the need to invest in employees’ skill development was becoming clear. In a 2018 McKinsey study, 62 percent of executives in the United States expected they would need to retrain or replace more than a quarter of their workforce between 2018 and 2023 due to advancing automation and digitization. Retraining on this scale most certainly requires new investments to support L&D. It will also require companies to reshape their cultures to deliberately foster learning and development, and skill acquisition.
The simplest way for employers to invest more in L&D and build a stronger culture of learning is through more actively promoting programs they may already have in place, such as tuition assistance. Many workers don’t know their employer may already provide such benefits; they’re often buried deep in a benefits guide the vast majority of employees reference only once a year. Promoting these benefits internally and making them easy and convenient to use can help employers attract and retain their best people.
Companies need to move training opportunities and tuition assistance programs out of the benefits guide, and integrate them into the routines and systems of the workplace with incentives that drive employees to participate and tools to measure progress. In short, a workplace should double as a learning place
To effectively transform a place of work into a learning place, employers should focus on three things:
Be flexible and eliminate barriers. Many organizations have analyzed their skill gaps and know the capabilities they need to build. With that in mind, it is tempting to constrain employee access to L&D programs that explicitly address these areas of need. In my experience, adult learners value choice, relevance and autonomy in their learning experiences. When employers restrict their choices too greatly, it can significantly limit interest in L&D programs.
To address this, employers should work with L&D partners who can curate offerings that help address their organization’s skill gaps, but also feature a diversity of program choices to satisfy each individual worker’s desire to choose a program that best fits their unique needs.
In addition, whether it’s a mandatory professional development course or an elective benefit, it’s important to simplify the process for employees as much as possible. That requires eliminating barriers, such as out of pocket costs, or clunky technology that make it difficult for employees to find the L&D opportunities available to them.
Connect L&D to opportunity. Employers should make their reasons for investing in learning clear. Employers usually invest to build skills in critical functions or job families. Employers should highlight these functions and job families as areas of strategic interest and outline pathways for employees to move into or upward in these areas. These pathways should include a variety of L&D programs an employee could take part in to build skills and access new opportunities.
In the context of remote work, employers can also promote participation in learning programs as a way to build connections with colleagues. Many L&D providers offer blended learning experiences. These combine the flexibility of online, asynchronous coursework, with social elements such as company-specific learning cohorts and robust discussion features that encourage community building.
Track return on investment. Measuring progress is critical to any successful L&D program. Today, many employers do this manually through a tedious and expensive process and there is a lack of visibility into the spend and impact on the organization. Employers should look for an L&D partner that can track the uptake and spend against the employee skills that are gained and the impact of those skills on the business, as well as the impact on hiring and retention. Look for an easy, central interface that reduces HR workload and allows you to easily access data and insights to inform decision making.
Most of us agree that today the workplace must also be a place of learning. The new world of remote and hybrid work requires a program that is flexible, engaging and accessible. If done well, employee L&D programs can be a powerful tool for managing the new reality of recruitment, training and retaining a workforce.
