Here are the 10 most sought-after skills your organisation’s tech talent needs to be equipped with to support the digitalisation process.

1. Agile mindset

The digital age emphasises an agile mindset that is not anchored to a loop. This trait promotes multifariousness in terms of handling different challenges that may arise concurrently. It focuses on dissecting tasks into smaller milestones that are easy to conquer. This approach reinforces easier scrutinisation that keeps the goal in sight.

2. Cybersecurity

Data is crucial to all organisations and jeopardising its sanctity can affect businesses in multiple ways. A fraudulent mail purportedly routed through an esteemed organisation is all it takes for an employee to fall prey to a phishing trap. Any unsolicited link can expose a company’s entire network to cyber threats directed at extracting priceless data. Cybersecurity has assumed even greater importance in an era wherein hackers are, unfortunately, actively using sophisticated tools to carry out malicious cyber-attacks, leveraging global crises.

3. Analytical/data-driven mindset

According to the IBM Marketing Cloud study, 90 per cent of the data on the internet was created in the period since 2016. Hence, there is no dearth of data for companies to access each day. However, the challenge is that they fail to draw actionable insights from the massive datasets available at their disposal. Today, organisations require a skilled workforce that not only understands data by analysing it, but also utilises it to make better business decisions. Data being supreme, a wide variety of industries and jobs are bound to become more data intensive. Hence, data literacy must continue to advance.

4. New media literacy

Social media presence has taken centre stage for survival of businesses in this digital age. As multiple communication channels sprout, so evolve the approaches to target customers. Curating an effective media strategy according to the media channel and the target audience is very important. For this, a deep understanding of the platform is crucial. For instance, both Twitter and Instagram will have their own sets of users and their unique modes of communication, as one dwells on formal statements while the other is informal and picture-based. Modern businesses require a workforce that can leverage social networks and applications to effectively communicate the brand’s offerings and announcements, and promote brand awareness amongst the masses.

Digital readiness requires content construction and delivery that effectively engages each of these systems. Download this research report to find out why Skillsoft’s digital transformation portfolio effectively drives digital readiness.

5. Virtual collaboration

Undoubtedly, the future is digital! Due to the current change in working norms, adopting ‘digital’ has been the go-to plan for many businesses. Leveraging effective tools and techniques suitable for business operations that keep the entire workforce on the same page is essential in the new normal. Work will transcend boundaries and organisations will continue to operate irrespective of the official premises. Therefore, a mix of tech infrastructure, along with the knowhow can ensure business continuity in the long run.

6. Passion for continual learning

Upskilling and reskilling will hold priority for organisations, as there will be an inclination towards hiring talent with diverse skill sets. And why not? The ever-evolving digital space demands that an employee stay abreast of the latest technology. Quick learners and even those with a zeal to learn, adapt, and grow with newer trends will have an edge over a thousand others in the future.

7. Design thinking

Design thinking requires the individual to deep dive into the customer’s wants and explore every stratum of possible solutions. The client may exhibit refinements that they wish to see in the end-product. It is the responsibility of the leader to scout implementable solutions that escalate client retention. The team leader must be able to formulate plans that contribute to customer satisfaction in the longer run.

8. Customer-centric orientation

The consumer is what drives the company to innovate and bring quality products to the market. The customer is the utmost priority and should be kept in cognizance while devising a new product. The team should meticulously strive to unravel the problems faced by the consumers and work on tactics to eradicate them.

9. Computational thinking

As more organisations ride on AI and Deep Learning technologies, this skill has specially attained a superior demand. It is all about differentiating useful data and deriving actionable insights from it. In short, this attribute requires the employee to draw a conclusion from the accumulated data. The information should be used to formulate concepts that could be the next big move in the foreseeable future. Data-based reasoning requires meticulous efforts and patience along with a deep understanding of AI-driven technologies.

10. Cross-functional dexterity

Though cross-functional dexterity takes time to achieve, it should, however, not deter any individual’s resolve to master it. The approach helps mitigate the dilemma faced while operating in non-experience projects. The employee should be able to devise a plan of action and cycle between multiple roles to provide effective solutions.

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So, how can leaders catalyse this big reset? What are the top imperatives for them? Let’s take a look.

Reimagine the new normal

Like it or not, remote working is here to stay. Information technology organisations in India have mandated their workforce to continue working from home till the year end. Some have even pushed the return date to March 2021. They have also started to hire and on-board new team members from a remote location, thanks to digital tools. Leaders need to make many such shifts if they wish to lead through rapid changes. But the first shift needs to happen within themselves. They need to reimagine the vision, their partnerships, resource optimisation and communication mode, as they lead through the challenge of change and innovation

Accelerate digitisation and automation for distributed workforce

Even before the remote working policies came into effect, organisations relied on digital collaboration tools and understood that potential digitisation had to lead them into the future. Today, organisations are pushing towards a more digitally-enabled distributed workforce that is well connected and equipped with the latest technology. If the organisation is on the cusp of digitisation, then the leaders become even more important. They need to actively accelerate digital transformation processes, right from the core of the company, that is, the talent pool, to the business processes. In case they are still pondering, now is the time to act and launch that digital tool which they were always planning to do in the first place. Afterall, leaders who are digitally strong, move fast, and act decisively will always be at the forefront of competitive advantage.

Download this eBook to learn how you can provide the content and learning experiences for leaders that’s effective, engaging and personalized in a way that they can step up to lead.

Ensure collaboration, flexibility, inclusion and accountability

It is a well-known fact that the team will only be half as effective when it is half as inclusive. For a leader, the key to building a truly diverse culture in the organisation begins from the top management. Diversity improves innovation and employee engagement, and brings in new talent to contribute to the bottom line. Leaders should take a closer look at how their distributed workforce is progressing and whether the employees are engaged or not. They need to begin by focusing on them as real people and not as just employees working for them. They have to connect with them on a personal level, forge relationships and bonds while giving them the assurance that they, and the organisation, are always there to support them in these times. Giving them enough flexibility to handle their work and avoiding micro-management is a plus. Employees who have strong social connections at work can be more collaborative and can boost productivity levels.

Build team resilience and adaptability

Individually, resilience is born from positive attitudes and growth mindsets — providing workers with the tools they need (whether that’s technology or safety equipment), supporting productive relationships within and without work, providing them with a clear and meaningful mission, and giving them the freedom to perform, achieve and grow. Only those organisations will thrive, which are adaptable, agile and swiftly pivot to the changing demands of the consumer.

Encourage agility and innovation

If leaders truly want to see their teams respond with agility and innovate more frequently, then they need to focus on their outcomes rather than the time spent. Innovation can only be achieved when the teams working on a specific project have flexible roles, cross-functional knowledge, and relevant training. Leaders, who provide their teams with clear directions, instructions, a playbook, necessary resources, and the tools they require to build upon their ideas, will end up innovating.

(The author Kamal Dutta is managing director Skillsoft, India.)

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Almost 90 per cent of the workers in the Asia-Pacific region, including Australia, Malaysia and Singapore, are against returning to the ‘old normal’ way of work. It can be gathered that few aspects of the new normal have been greatly beneficial for employees.

Around 59 per cent want to see flexible working hours introduced permanently in the future as well. Another 58 per cent would like working from home to be a permanent feature of the post-COVID world. There has been a shift towards more focus on one’s self during this time. Employees are more concerned about taking care of their mental and physical health, with almost 47 per cent in support of it.

It has been found that women are more concerned with taking care of their mental and physical wellbeing, with more than half desirous of the opportunity for it in the future. In contrast, among the male employees, only 43 per cent want to focus on their health.

Overall, in terms of priority, health and wellbeing seem to be the number one among APAC workers and 27 per cent have citied it as the most important aspect they want leaders to focus on.

Increase in family time is also a much-desired feature among the people as spending more time with their loved ones has been a fortunate outcome of the current situation. This is especially true for the younger generation aged between 18 to 24 years (57 per cent) as compared to those above 50 years (47 per cent) and even less for those above 65 (37 per cent).

Only around 11 per cent of employees appeared to be happy to return to how things were before the pandemic began.

At the same time, apart from health, workers are also focussed on other areas, such as work-life balance and job security. More than four in ten respondents are eager to see a reduction in unnecessary work meetings and outside commitments (43 per cent). Around 48 per cent of women are more eager to see a reduction in outside work commitments than men who number at 38 per cent.

Close to one-third of the lot also want to see lesser travelling in the name of business.

One surprising aspect emerged in terms of upskilling opportunities. While leaders have constantly emphasised the need to learn and upgrade, only 38 per cent of the workers have cited online professional development avenues as a necessity.

Overall, health and wellbeing, job security and work-life balance are the three areas, which workers feel need to be prioritised upon.

Rosie Cairnes, vice president, Skillsoft, APAC finds the emergence of a more inward mindset among workers across APAC interesting. According to Caines, there appears a trend to reject the conventional way of working — whether in terms of deciding when and how to work, prioritising family over work and travel, focussing on personal health, or taking charge of professional development.

She further mentions that there is a trend towards genuine self-care. For companies to reach the other side of this pandemic in a good place, employee well-being and wellness must become a permanent focus, and not just something that gets addressed during crisis.

Gender, age, and racial diversity also in focus

Supporting flexible work for both working parents and hiring more older workers are among the top issues that APAC workers want leaders to stress on. Around 38 per cent want more flexible work and close to 33 per cent want more support for older workers.

The younger workforce comprising Gen Z, is more geared towards increase in learning and training around racial diversity, and almost 38 per cent want their organisations to support the issue. The younger generation, including the Millennials are also the most in favour of equal maternity and paternity leaves for parents, numbering around 34 per cent, as compared to their older counterparts. Only 25 per cent of workers between 35 to 49 years deem it an important issue, and the figures drop further as we move up the age ladder.

Women are more in favour of equal gender representation and reduction in the gender pay gap than men, numbering around 28 per cent in both cases. Among men, the figures rest around 20 per cent.

“Across APAC there is a strong push for policies and practices that promote greater gender, age, and racial balance,” reveals Cairnes. With more youngsters set to join the workforce, this push will only grow stronger. Organisations that revise their hiring and policies and concentrate on their future learning and development in these areas will benefit immensely “in terms of available talent, employee engagement and retention,” concludes Cairnes.

The study has been conducted by Skillsoft through a survey of more than 2,300 workers and people about to enter the workforce across Australia, Malaysia and Singapore.

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Agile methods and frameworks have existed for several decades and the concept is nothing new. When you look at agile teams, they are typically associated with being in the same offices, meeting daily and undertaking necessary changes to projects as one collective team. However, the agility is evident in not only the manner of solving complex problems but also in transforming the way of working. It also requires a change in mindset, demands giving up the traditional ways of operating and learning a lot of new things on the way. Organisations that have taken this route tend to move faster by embracing collaboration, driving innovation, and optimising operations even while mitigating the risks. In fact, teams that use agile methodologies experience nearly 20 per cent higher project success rate than those who do not rely on a proven approach. In short, once you go agile there’s no looking back.

With entire teams now stationed at their homes, listening to various market needs and navigating the change can be a daunting task. So, how do you ensure the teams have an agile mindset? Most importantly, how do you lead an agile team to success? Well, here are the basic elements to build and lead your agile team.

Lay the foundation for high-performing teams

Start by transforming your methods of communication and collaboration amidst the teams working remotely. Most importantly, you will need stable internal systems and processes put in place; ones that can be clearly understood by everyone and ensure smooth day-to-day operations. Then, you need to form your teams and equip them with the necessary skill sets that get the task completed on time. To optimise your team, make sure its membership remains in the five to nine-member range. Ensure your teams are well-coordinated and collectively respond to the tasks ahead. Lastly, assign managers and scrum masters to guide the team and help improve their performance.

Create a growth-oriented environment

For your teams to perform at their best and deliver great results, as a leader, you need to provide them with context. This will be an ongoing task for you to improve things, remove any hurdles or even impediments. You also need to provide the teams with the necessary resources to avoid loss of productivity. Encourage the teams to share their wins and even failures, which will be essential learnings for everyone. To bring out the best in your teams, you also need to provide the right conditions for them to grow.

Coach your teams to success

As a leader, your role is not limited to only inspiring, but extends to providing effective coaching. Relieve yourself from a commanding role to become a mentor and coach them to collectively solve complex challenges. Avoid telling teams what to do. Instead, ask powerful questions that can open up avenues, while demonstrating empathetic listening skills.

Practice transparency in communication

One of the hallmarks of a powerful leader is effective communication. With so many pressing situations that demand a leader’s attention, having a clear communication plan is vital for success. By conducting regular meetings, you will be able to keep the team together and open communication lines. Encourage everyone to ask questions and respond to them appropriately. At times, you will need to deliver news that is not so good; do it in a way that is sensitive but at the same time gets the message across.

With an agile mindset, your organisation will be well prepared to quickly respond to changing market dynamics, turn disruptive situations into opportunities, and also manage to deliver on customers’ needs.

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We now live in a world where learning has become a part of our everyday life. With the unforeseen changes in store for the future of work, the strategic role of talent-development professionals has become more important than ever. Apart from helping employees continue their path of learning, they need to focus on reducing their stress and keeping them engaged and productive with their work. To implement the renewed digital strategy, what is required is a comprehensive Learning Management Solution that is contextual in nature, and helps to keep the workforce engaged and productive. A solution that propels the organisation’s growth in the future and does the following:

Makes things easier – one tool, multiple applications
The learning and training needs of new hires and seasoned leaders may be diverse, but organisations need to fulfil them constantly. For newly-hired candidates, part of the onboarding process often includes the completion of specific training. Considering the current scenario, where most of the new hires have to virtually do everything from their homes, the processing of all required assignments, including the welcome letters, forms, first-day schedule, and recommended learning, can be conveniently achieved by them thanks to the inbuilt automation functions of a modern LMS.

Delivers personalised learning paths
For the employees, their learning and career-development needs are top priority. These have changed with today’s evolving business landscape and cannot happen in a silo. Employees are constantly looking to gain skills that they need for roles of the future. However, ignorance about where they stand and how they can progress ahead, can prevent them from taking any action. Through personalised learning paths, employees can view their learning progress and also receive individualised recommendations. This will ensure that they know what they need to do to reach their next role and stay engaged throughout the process.

Download the whitepaper to learn the step-by-step process of addressing all your learning challenges, building alliances throughout your organization, and making a successful business case for LMS.

Fosters communication
As recently-formulated work-from-home policies continue to evolve and adapt, organisations need to create a structure to ensure that the remote teams are constantly updated and stay engaged, while maintaining productivity levels across all the virtual collaborations. Communication in times of crisis is critical to an organisation’s ability to continue business as close to normal as possible. This increases the need for every employee to want to stay abreast with critical updates from the management and the HR department. Utilising an LMS to distribute critical policy updates can help ensure that each one is aware, updated and informed. While a robust LMS has almost the same penetration as an email, it offers significant advantages, including trackability, discoverability and comprehension.

Meet your learners where they are
The Gen Z workforce is not like the Millennials and not even close to the Baby Boomers. Manpower Group’s research suggests that, by 2020, Gen Z will account for approximately 24 per cent of the world’s workforce. Meanwhile, India will become the world’s youngest country with 64 per cent of its population in the working age group by the same year. Nearly 80 per cent of Gen Z consider their smartphone to be their most important device, with which they feel they can do / achieve everything, even their learning. This next wave of talent expects their mobile preferences to be carried over to the workplace. Equipping them with a personalised learning experience, right in the palm of their hands, can increase their ability to gain knowledge efficiently and access practical means for on-the-job skill development.

As we now take time to settle into the new normal and prepare ourselves for a future world of work, there’s a lot that needs to be done, especially when it comes to keeping our workforce engaged, happy and emotionally invested. Filling the skill gaps, launching learning programmes, and keeping their human capital happy and emotionally invested should be the top priority for all employers. But as we navigate these unusual times, what is most needed is a forward thinking learning-management solution that will help disseminate critical information in a secure and trackable manner. A solution that will provide employees quick access to business-continuity resources, drive organisational culture and improve employee engagement.

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Since the age gap between the youngest and the oldest employee, at the workplace, is nearly 30 years, there cannot be any one strategy to engage all of them. Baby-boomers and Gen X have been interested in hierarchical growth and have always craved a career path that would take them to the next level. Millennials, on the other hand, not looking for linear growth, are more interested in engaging experiences and challenging opportunities.

With a focus on today’s diverse workforce, there are multiple possibilities to engage them with different types of learning programmes. With new and emerging digital technologies like AI, ML, IoT, Analytics and others; tech employees need continual upskilling to support organization’s stay ahead of the curve and achieve their business goals. When organizations provide opportunities to continually advance their proficiencies; employees feel empowered.

Organisations are making learning a strategic priority for their talent pool and here is how!

• Ensure that learning is relevant and continual: The L&D teams have to continuously update their learning programmes, to keep pace with the volatility in the technology space. Employees are interested in future-skills, leaders have to ensure that the learning modules are continuously upgraded. Moreover, continuity in learning lessens redundancies and skill gaps amongst the employees.

• Integrate learning into employee’s workplace: There is no dearth of learning avenues in today’s workplace, as business processes are changing continuously due to the emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, such as internet of things, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Change always brings in a great opportunity for the employees to acquire new skills, adopt new methods and techniques. The ones who are eager to put their thinking hats on, love challenges, use them as a trigger to upskill and then apply them at work.

• Support micro-learning: The intuitive learners require small doses of everyday learning. They like to learn in bite-sizes, which enables them to learn between tasks. By offering them a digital learning platform, learning is approached in a holistic manner by the organisation.

Download the guide to know how coordinated learning and talent management strategies can enable companies to succeed in this emerging workplace.

• Enable self-directed learning: When leaders invest in a futuristic learning infrastructure for their talent pool, they are able to engage the most engaged employees. This talent pool is highly motivated and likes to self-learn, all they need is a platform and updated modules, they are ready to learn anytime anywhere.

• Provide guidance: Employees also learn on the job from their mentors. Having skilled leaders in the organisation has a direct impact on the new hires, who can learn directly from their bosses. This also helps them to align their personal goals, such as job satisfaction, with the organization’s goals. Not only the boss, having competitive team members also helps these employees develop a keen eye for learning.

• Provide cross-functional experiences: Employers need to constantly provide learning opportunities to their most curious employees. By leveraging cross-functional movement, they can provide them with an organisational structure that encourages them to self-educate themselves and grow within the organisation. Moreover, in order to retain these employees, they must be given challenging work, otherwise, they could either leave or look for side projects.

Organizations also need to ensure that learning & development programs are directly aligned with their goals

• Define organisational needs and areas of future growth: The challenge-oriented employees need well-defined goals to work towards. It will help them if their employers have clearly outlined career paths for them. By communicating to their employees, the areas that will be high in priority for growth, employers will be able to keep the interested learners motivated.

• Integrate learning with talent management: These employees also have the potential to become future managers. Organisations have to gauge that the learning programmes are helping the talent to develop managerial skills so that an effective leadership pool is getting created.

• Quantify training ROI, monitor progress: Since all organisations have a business goal, to make a profit and improve its return on equity. It is imperative that the L&D teams have to calculate the ROI of their learning investments.

Challenge-oriented-inquisitive employees require continuous upskilling, organisations which have an effective learning system in place will be able to quench their thirst for continual learning.

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Such leaders are experts in people sciences and focus on continuously upskilling their employees. They rely heavily on technology-led learning and development (L&D) programmes to develop their internal talent.

The L&D solution for each individual is personalised, based on her/his requirement. It is seen that employees lose interest in learning programmes when they do not find them aligned to their goals. How can organisations and business leaders ensure that the training programmes initiated by them keep the employees engaged and generate positive outcome?

Competency mapping
Competency mapping starts with the manager breaking each job into key behavioural incumbents and grouping them under the ‘core competency’ bracket. Then, the team members are assessed on the basis of these core competencies regularly. Data is collected and analysed for each individual and the same helps the managers to initiate L&D programmes.

Training employees is an investment, and sometimes organisations fail to reap benefits from it because the training programmes are not designed to meet individual upskilling requirements. They are merely a check-the-box activity for management who demonstrate no flexibility in scheduling these programmes, and employees are forced to attend them on a rotation basis.

Modern LMS and competency mapping helps team leaders customise learning even when the team sizes are large. This keeps the business and the teams competent even when jobs and processes change due to digitisation or disruption in the industry.

Performance management
With the complexity at work increasing and competition continuing to put up a tough front, leaders are using L&D solutions to provide their teams with razor-end sharpness to fill up the competency gap.

A competency-based performance management system ensures that individual learning goals are aligned with the training programmes offered by the leaders. They initiate L&D programmes on a continuous basis and learners are given the freedom to choose and opt for the programmes they like.

In comparison, the periodic performance-management process of the past is too laid back and does not affect performance in a meaningful way. It only serves as a summary of past performances and is too closely tied to salary adjustments.

The performance-management system has evolved significantly over time. Today, with technology-aided tools, timely feedback to employees is possible and developments can be tracked. Technology also enables short bursts of L&D interventions on a digital platform that motivates learners to upskill at their own convenience. Moreover, individuals receive quick feedback from the leaders, and an acknowledgement goes a long way in keeping the employee motivated at work.

The learners are more aligned toward introspecting and self-directing themselves to improve their strengths, work on their weaknesses and look for development opportunities.
Only organisations that provide learning opportunities that take care of individual learners’ needs will be able to attract competent talent from a competitive market. Tech-based learning solutions also allow employees to apply what they learn at work through virtual reality and other sophisticated learning tools.

Organizations are scrambling and can no longer depend on traditional talent management practices to grow and retain employees. Read this white paper which covers the scope of the talent crisis, including the industries and regions affected; its causes; and steps HR leaders can take to combat it.

A good performance-management system balances employees’ developmental needs with the organisation’s objectives.

Competency-based performance-management systems are very popular because of the following advantages:

Developing internal talent: Developing internal talent is a mandate of all senior leaders. There is a huge business and resource loss attached to attrition and hiring new talent. Most leaders spend a big slice of their work time in creating opportunities for positive growth for their teams.

Upskilling: To unlock maximum potential, employees need continuous upskilling. Since technology-led redundancies are very common in all industries, employees require continuous upskilling to keep themselves relevant in the market. Organisations align the L&D programmes to take care of the personal needs of individuals as well as the business objective.

Agility: Employees are quick to adapt to new tools and technology and are open to moving into new functions and domains. Competency-based performance-management systems help leaders to keep their teams a step ahead of what is practised by others in the market.

Goalsetting: When employees see positive outcomes from attending competency-based learning programmes, they feel gratified. This encourages many to opt for self-directed learning and upskilling. A continuous feedback process is part of performance management and that keeps employees engaged and motivated.

We can safely conclude that competency mapping and performance management reveals where the employees are lacking and how upskilling can help them perform the job better. Upskilling will play an increasingly important role in an organisation’s ability to achieve business goals and reach high performance.

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Not only do organisations compete with each other to get the best slice from the talent pool in any industry, they also devote time, energy and resources to retain the existing talent. Team leaders and HR play a very active role in keeping the attrition rate low. Business leaders roll out a volley of engaging activities periodically to keep the employees engaged.

Such activities ensure personal and professional development. Further, automation is helping leaders to customise learning and development (L&D) solutions and reward programmes to suit individual interests. Moreover, by providing the workforce with a work-life balance, organisations can improve retention.

According to recent research by Work Institute, the following were found to be the prominent reasons why employees voluntarily quit their jobs.

• 22 per cent employees leave for career development.

• 12 per cent leave due to work-life balance.

• 9 per cent leave due to compensation and benefit.

While 22 out of 100 people leave due to lack of opportunities, only nine out of 100 leave because they are unhappy with the rewarding. Clearly, lack of career growth is a primary reason for employees to leave any organisation.

Employees have a continuous need for upskilling, not only to better their performances at the current job but also prepare themselves for taking bigger responsibilities in the future. A sense of growth is very important for today’s workforce, and organisations that do not have a well-developed learning system fail to retain employees.

Flexible learning opportunities that are enabled by new-age learning management systems (LMS), help to keep employees engaged and growing continuously. An LMS uses data whereby leaders can track performances and intervene in a timely manner to provide upskilling.

Be it the line managers or the senior leadership, an LMS is leveraged pervasively within an organisation to create leadership pipelines and tackle attrition. The following are the LMS features that take learning to the next level:

• Flexibility in preparing the learning modules.

• Learners can choose from multiple options available, and an
interactive interface also helps them to communicate their preferences for learning topics.

• A dashboard helps them see the courses they have enrolled in, their progress and assignments.

• The entire cloud-based software can be accessed from anywhere and the learner can learn anytime.

Download the guide to know the key factors to consider when choosing an LMS to ensure effective learning across the entire employee lifecycle.

Faced with the relentless acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI),
cognitive technologies, and automation, 86 per cent of respondents in this year’s Global Human Capital Trends survey by Deloitte believe they must reinvent their ability to learn.

Thus, organisations that fail to offer their employees a digital learning platform, that can be leveraged to upskill, will not be able to retain talent. They will lose them to their competitors. To overcome the attrition issue, leaders must provide an LMS that help all employees to track their professional growth with a clear vision for their career progression. Technology can be an enabler to streamline the mobility process such that employees can move between functions, jobs, projects and geographies.
Developing leaders is the perennial issue of our time. HR plays a key role in tweaking people policies to enhance the employee experience, keeping in mind the unique requirements of the four generations of employees present in the workforce today.

In the 21st century, retention is taken more seriously as voluntary turnover is increasing, adding significant operational cost to organisations, and thus, diluting the profits. As a result, business leaders churn out policies and practices that constantly change, to enhance the people experience at work. Opportunities for experiential learning and soft skills development form the larger chunk of employee expectations from any employer. Automation is helping to create LMS software that enables leaders to offer opportunities to all workers across an organisation.

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Cyber security, networking, storage and backup have been found to be the top priorities for organisations along with cloud expertise, Internet of Things (IoT) experience, data and business analytics knowledge, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) expertise.

Modern-day technology professionals are interested in learning and developing their enterprise skills. Byte-sized learning and curated learning programmes are making it easier for professionals to avoid demanding and cost-intensive in-person courses. They have access to cheap and personalised learning to stay abreast of the industry trends. Individuals today can readily access curated learning channels that combine video learning, hands-on practice labs, virtual mentoring and a host of learning material.

So what exactly do these enterprise professionals want from their L&D programmes?
A recent survey of 250 enterprise-technology professionals, including research and in-depth personal interviews, shows that professionals are eager for quality training and learning opportunities from their employers.

Enterprise technology professionals are seeking out organisations that offer comprehensive learning and development avenues. They cite cybersecurity, networking and soft-skills as the top three areas in which they desire training.

Cybersecurity

With the rise in technology and digital integration across all spheres of business today, it is no surprise that security and cybersecurity top the list of best paid and most sought-after skills in the modern world.

Tech companies are increasingly hiring cybersecurity first responders (CFR) in response to the growing danger of cyber-attacks. According to a media report published in March, 2019 which quoted a UK based survey, India received the third highest number of cyber-attacks after Mexico and France.

In India, there is growing demand for cybersecurity professionals due to the rise in start-ups, in-house cybersecurity operations and IT services. The demand is so great that even major organisations are finding it difficult to hire professionals with merely two to three years of experience because the remuneration asked is almost two to ten times a normal engineer’s salary, according to a media report.

According to another piece of US-based research published by a technological company in July 2019 , technical training organisations need to include more security training in their courses. The demand for cybersecurity professionals is overtaking the supply of skilled workers.

According to media reports citing CISOs of major companies, the cybersecurity industry is growing faster than the IT industry. However, clients are increasingly facing shortage in supply of highly skilled professionals capable of solving today’s security challenges. This is why they are being hired at nearly 100 percent hike in salaries.

According to Nasscom, India’s cybersecurity market is projected to grow to $35 billion by 2025. HR experts estimate around 30,000 cybersecurity jobs are available in the country. Just last year, job portal Indeed reported a jump of 150 percent in cybersecurity jobs between 2017 and 2018.

Networking

The world is fast moving towards greater inter-connectivity and with it, the demand for development, maintenance and optimisation of network systems is also on the rise.
The skills needed to stay current in networking are fast evolving and experienced professionals will be wise to up their code game. Popular trends nowadays are public, private and hybrid cloud, IoT, AI and ML. Success today is based on preparing the technology team to expand and innovate, and a strong L&D programme to upskill them.
India, being the IT hub of Asia, will always have high demand for networking professionals. The growing fear that automation will take away jobs is not going to hit networking professionals as hard. Automation will instead make work less complex by taking over menial and repetitive tasks.

Soft Skills

The new-age workplace is dynamic and requires employees who are fluent in power skills, once referred to as soft skills. These include effective communication, project management and people management. With greater overlap amongst functions in business, the ability to collaborate with others — be it designers, marketers, HR or sales —is a must. Employees will have to adapt to the organisational workflows.

Surveys have shown that enterprise professionals recognise that power or non-technical skills are necessary for career growth. And industry leaders are aware of this. Many of the tech and IT companies require different sets of skills to grow their businesses. Therefore, instead of hard and core skills, they prefer to hire people with more power skills— such as articulation, critical thinking, communication skills and problem solving.

Infosys, the major Indian multinational IT giant was in the news just last year because it was hiring people with background in the liberal arts for their ability to work well with others, their knowledge of the social sciences and their creativity in helping professionals to design user-friendly applications.

With the business landscape today enveloped in technology, professionals have become acutely aware of where the demand lies and what skills they must acquire. This urges organisations to go beyond traditional compensation and benefits, and offer comprehensive and robust learning and development programmes to attract and retain the best talent.

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Leaders need to recognise their employees who are enthusiastic and make use of every opportunity to grow in their careers. They are the ones who do thorough research before venturing into a new challenge and learn about things which are unrelated to their work as well.

Today’s employees believe in changing the world and connecting their work experiences to their personal lives. They love to innovate and tread on paths seldom explored. Junior and mid-level employees today are passionate and motivated about their jobs and have no qualms about working long hours if they are rewarded and recognised for their efforts.

So how do employers ensure that the workers are equipped to learn?

Work cultures today need to be exciting and engaging for employees to give themselves fully to their work. Organisations need to provide employees the means to educate themselves and devise a reward system to recognise their efforts. Without adequate recognition, workers will not see the value in their efforts and most likely will concentrate their energies somewhere else.

Leaders can adopt learning methods which enable individuals to develop their capabilities and have a positive experience while at it.

Allow employees to choose their path

One of the ways companies can ensure their employees continue to learn is to provide them the space to learn on their own accord. Offering online courses and relevant content which is accessible to the employee on demand is a good way towards enablement. Companies organise conferences and training sessions for employees who are not mandated to attend them. Such events are a way for HR leaders to know which employees are motivated to learn.

Customised and curated learning

Almost every organisation faces a skills gap and tough competition in hiring at one time or the other. It would be easier if the required skillset could be developed within the organisation itself. Companies should arrange for a platform which can provide that developmental journey.

The roles most commonly found in organisations today should be taken up and a sequenced path of learning should be developed for them which move the employees towards a more aspirational role.

These should not be looked at as curated merely because each step in the learning path is related to the final goal. Instead, these should be journeys that build upon each other and contain new content which is specifically designed for each individual role.

Download this report based on research conducted by HR.com in partnership with Skillsoft to know today’s L&D trends and challenges, and suggestions for how organisations may boost learning effectiveness to close skills gaps which are a result of poor learning cultures and inadequate learning and development (L&D) functions that many organisations suffer from.

Clear communication about company goals and values

Before designing any learning program or taking on board any learning service provider, it is essential to communicate the company’s goals. Each employee in every department should have a clear idea of how their effort to develop new competencies and learn new skills can benefit for both themselves and the company. Make learning personal and an experience

Make learning personal and an experience

Today’s workers are learning for more than career progression and are looking beyond work experience. Learning has become more personal and integrated. HR must reinvent itself accordingly by supporting continuous learning, providing incentives and focussing on helping employees identify and develop new skills. Employees need to be enabled to fulfil their own needs and the needs of the market. It is the human experience which pro-learning employees look towards that an organisation needs to provide. It enables learning to have an impact beyond work and into the personal sphere of an individual.

Feedback and follow up

Last but not least, it is vital to research new market trends and follows up with employees about their learning needs. HR needs to maintain a learning quotient for every employee so that pre-learning activity and post-learning activity can be measured accurately. Accordingly, new content can be designed, which suits the employees’ learning capabilities and can enable him/her to deliver quality results.

Every organisation has employees passionate to deliver their best. Therefore, organisations should provide learning that enables them to realise their full potential.

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While organisations seek to reimagine their operating business models by leveraging disruptive technologies, they must not underestimate the importance of fostering a culture that endorses such sweeping changes. Indeed, building a digital-ready enterprise through constant adaptability and evolution with changing business dynamics can pave the way for increased innovation, agility, leanness and responsiveness.

The business case for companies to promote a culture of digital readiness and adaptability is compelling. A recently published BCG study found that almost 80 per cent of the organisations that emphasised on culture reported robust or best-in-class performance on a sustained basis.

And, talent transformation leaders in Indian companies recognise the imperative to instill a culture of digital readiness. They increasingly realise that rolling out contextual human capital management (HCM) and talent-development applications can not only enhance staff productivity and morale throughout the employee lifecycle, but also boost digital adaptability.

According to Gartner, digital dexterity in people must be placed high on the priority list. Companies must invest in studying existing skillsets and unearthing gaps, developing and acquiring the right skillsets through hands-on experiences, and inculcating an experimentation-driven ‘lab’ mindset.

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Enhanced digital learning outcomes with digital readiness

How can companies then cultivate a culture that thrives on constant experimentation and fast-paced learning, in alignment with shifting marketplace and customer requirements? The key for chief human resource officers (CHROs) and learning & development (L&D) leaders, such as you, is to evaluate your enterprise’s digital readiness to reskill and redeploy talent.

It’s important to bear in mind here that merely rolling out the latest learning technologies will not lead to the institutionalisation of a robust learning culture. You need to first gauge the readiness of your staff to embrace new skills, then define and articulate a coherent vision for implementing such learning modules, and then, finally, build awareness.

Assessing audience willingness involves, first and foremost, talking to each employee, and understanding their unique learning requirements. For instance, ask questions, such as which learning approaches they liked in the past; what previous learning experiences have shaped their attitudes; and how they pick up new skills at work and outside of it.

Without undertaking this exercise of capturing employees’ actual learning needs, you might well build learning platforms that will be irrelevant to the former, and as a result, impede the organisation’s digital readiness.

Once you have assessed employees’ willingness for new learning structures, the next step in the journey of promoting a culture of digital readiness is to secure buy-in from the leadership. The senior management giving financial backing via budgetary allocation will not suffice on this front, though.

A critical mass of top decision makers in the organisation must become ‘learning evangelists’ to encourage and motivate employees to upskill and reskill. The way to spot such advocates is to ask your leadership team as to how learning can help address some of the teething business problems they are seeking to resolve. For instance, ask them which learning modules are delivering on their mandate, and which ones are not. Also, pick their brains on what new skills are required to drive business excellence.

Finally, you need to define a sharp, coherent vision for your planned digital learning initiatives that will further embed the concept of digital readiness and adaptability throughout the organisation. It’s vital here to judiciously combine the business imperatives with the real-world learning requirements of your employees. So, factor in things, such as just-in-time learning, social and collaborative tools, self-directed learning platforms, and synchronicity between at-work and outside-work learning.

Conclusion

No matter how great a company’s strategy, business model and customer engagement initiatives are, all of that will count for nothing if the organisation fails to institutionalise a culture of constant digital readiness. With uncertainty becoming the new normal, you must embrace disruption, and leverage digital learning platforms to reimagine workforce and talent management. Doing so will not only help you strengthen your competitive advantage, but also ensure superior employee productivity.

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However, internal talent also comes with a price. The talent is not always ready to use, and it may require an investment to develop the talent. Having said that, this investment would be much less than the cost involved to acquire external talent.

Most CEOs around the world — according to a 2018 IBM report — have ranked investment in talent as the most effective way to accelerate performance. And it is easy to understand why.

Employees within a company learn faster and at half the cost of an external hire. They produce high-quality results and effective delivery on target due to their know-how of the system. Moreover, by developing talent internally, companies can fulfil their exact demands for skill shortages within the workplace, all the while becoming an attractive place to work for the best talent in the market.

Companies now have systems in place to foster learning and development for employees and develop talent for critical roles. However, despite having the required programmes, learning initiatives may not always work as planned. According to a report by SumTotal, most C-suite executives acknowledge that developing talent from within is the best approach. Although in practice, they find it hard to follow this principle.

Formerly touted as “added benefits” of employee learning, increased engagement and retention of your workforce are imperatives in the current talent market. In this white paper you’ll learn how coordinated learning and talent management strategies can enable companies to succeed in this emerging workplace.

While companies may tout learning as a priority, most may find it hard to follow it as one. Engaging in developing activities may disrupt daily routine tasks, and that is why managing both can prove to be a tough juggle both for the employer and the employee. This can occur if there is no structured learning programme in place.

The lack of a programme can disincentivise workers from learning, and they may even be wary of learning and development programmes. Without clarity and communication, employees will not be motivated to join such programmes because they may not provide them with a definite purpose and goal.

Companies can address these challenges by ensuring that employees find meaning and purpose in engaging and learning. Without a clear vision of how such programmes can fuel their career progression, they will remain disinterested. Learning programmes also have to make business sense and be aligned with the company goals in mind. There are two ways in which companies can ensure that employees continue to learn and deliver high-quality results.

Fostering enablement

Employees will refuse to see value in a learning programme if it does not enable them to rise in their career, acquire new skills or perform at a higher level. Enablement can be achieved by designing an environment where the worker thrives and sees value in learning. The goals and objectives of any programme have to be effectively communicated to them so that disengagement can be avoided.

Effective communication and clarity are of immense importance in the process. Employees want to see which skills are the most relevant for them, and it is up to the employer to provide this ability. Having clear knowledge will drive employees to learn on their own and choose the programmes that benefit them the most.

Again, learning programmes need to be readily available to employees so that they can learn whenever they want and at their preferred pace. Also, targeted and personalised programmes for the workers ensure that they can learn skills which are immediately relevant to them.

Aligning learning initiatives with business priorities

Company learning initiatives have to be structured so that they align with the organisation’s business goals. Learning heads need to identify strategic objectives for different departments to find out what kind of learning initiatives are needed according to market competition and internal requirements. Subject matter experts in every department can be consulted while devising such programmes.

Learning and development programmes need to evolve in response to business needs. Only then can they be beneficial to the employees and the company. Business needs may shift, and with the rapid evolution in technology, training programmes will need to be regularly updated. Although it may be difficult to quantify whether training leads to better performance, it has certainly become easier with the arrival of AI and big data.

Quite often, the business’ priorities may clash with the employees’, in terms of what they want to learn. Especially with the arrival of Gen Z, it is up to companies to ensure that there is harmony between learning for business and learning for self.

Lastly, a continuous feedback stream is essential to keep the employee motivated and aware of what needs changing and what works. This will also ensure that the company knows if and when to change the course of learning to deliver better results.

Developing talent internally can have many hurdles, but effective communication and clarity between the management and the employees can help solve them. Clear communication can enable the employees to be self-driven and the employers to understand how to design policies, which align with the goals of the business and the personal goals of the employees as well.

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The ongoing struggle of organisations worldwide to fill open positions only further underlines this imperative. The percentage of companies unable to find qualified workers for vacant roles hit an all-time high of 45 per cent in 2018, according to Manpower Group’s latest annual Talent Shortage Survey. The situation in India is not much different, as many enterprises continue to face challenges in sourcing and retaining the right talent for their digital transformation initiatives.

The Digital India push

The good news, though, is that both the public and private sectors have started getting their act together. For instance, the Central government’s ‘Skill India Mission’ intends to train 400 million young people in industry-relevant, technical, digital and soft skills over a decade, with a view to enhancing their employability. Similarly, Nasscom, through its ‘Futureskills’ programme, aims to upskill one million IT professionals in eight emerging technologies, such as IoT, virtual reality, big data and robotic process automation, by 2022.

Upskilling makes business sense

All these large-scale initiatives are intended to train and prepare a workforce that is well-equipped to handle the transformative impact of automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and so on, in the coming years. For instance, employees will be able to acquire the relevant competencies to perform the non-automated part of their jobs, in addition to smoothly transitioning to new kinds of jobs.

And, upskilling will yield substantial business benefits too. A survey published in July 2018 by Capgemini revealed that enterprises with advanced upskilling programmes and high automation maturity will likely save $270m more than those having subscale upskilling and similar automation maturity.

Moreover, upgrading the skill sets of your employees will help you save significant time and costs incurred in recruiting talent from outside the organisation, apart from driving workforce productivity and loyalty higher.

Upskilling with digital learning

So, how should you design and implement upskilling programmes for your organisation? By leveraging the digital medium aggressively, to deliver targeted and customised learning content for each of your employees.

Why? Because, as compared to conventional, classroom-based learning courses, online learning programmes offer several advantages, including the flexibility to pace their learning, and personalised and interactive content. In fact, more than half of the organisations surveyed last year by Manpower Group said they have embraced digital learning platforms to develop their talent pipeline.

As the L&D community continues to idealise best practices for resource development and consumption, the industry still faces a lag from learner participation. Learn from the research report, how best-in-class companies are using consumer UX practices to increase engagement from their learners.

While preparing the modules, you must get authorised subject-matter experts and industry leaders on board, to validate the content and augment it with real-world case studies and other projects. For upskilling to be truly personalised, your learning management system (LMS) should facilitate adaptive learning, wherein individuals can tailor and reconfigure their modules as they deem fit. In tandem, LMS needs to offer ‘consumerised’ learning experiences so that each worker’s skill-building path is configured based on her/his engagement with different modules.

In order to track the progress of the upskilling programme, you can conduct instructor-driven live virtual classrooms, as well as pre- and post-course assessments and certifications, to incentivise employees.

Also, you could lay out various potential career paths for employees based on the upskilling programmes they opt for. As a case in point, AT&T has built an employee portal named ‘Career Intelligence’ that lets workers visualise open positions, requisite skills, prospective compensation, and the likely demand for such roles and skills in the future. Such a setup enables the US telecom giant’s staff to take informed decisions regarding which training to take up, and accordingly plan their transition to new assignments.

Don’t forget the ‘soft’ part

Effective upskilling entails a healthy combination of both functional and soft skills. Therefore, alongside technical and functional training, you need to inculcate skills including communication, collaboration and time management among your workers. Simultaneously, get them trained on aspects, such as problem solving, creativity, ideation, design thinking, and emotional intelligence.

Conclusion

Upskilling will not be a one-time affair. Rather, it will be an ongoing process in the digital era, as digital transformation gains momentum across industries and technology gets embedded in every aspect of business. The onus lies on you to harness the digital medium effectively to reskill and upskill your workforce, so that you can remain competitive and relevant in a dynamic marketplace.

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As per a Fortune magazine study, a mere seven percent of Fortune 500 CEOs think their companies are building effective leaders. A McKinsey study says that leadership development is a multi-billion-dollar industry, accounting for roughly one-third of all learning & development spending. While this clearly suggests that organisations are putting significant intent and investments into leadership development, it’s not working out for them. We ask, why?

The answer to this lies in the fact that the post-industrial age has ushered in a new way of working, resulting in the need for new leadership skills and competencies. Technology has created new job categories that were once the realm of science fiction. AI, machine learning, automation, and data science have gone from our imaginations to our realities. New functional areas like DevOps have emerged. New methodologies like agile and design thinking have taken a firm hold across organisations. Cross-functional work is now the norm. Advances in communication have connected global teams, collapsing distances and requiring effective global and virtual collaboration.

This sweeping digital transformation has resulted in a new work paradigm. Organisations are breaking down silos, redistributing decision-making, and flattening the corporate hierarchy into connected networks. Now that the business world is smarter, faster, more agile, and more democratic, and the leader of the past is rapidly becoming obsolete, organisations need to take a fresh look at how they develop modern leaders.

Here are six truths of leadership in the digital age:

1. No more leading direct reports. Leaders now guide agile teams and ad-hoc tribes

Conventional corporate hierarchy is now being replaced by flexible, cross-
functional teams that come together to execute projects that may spread out over weeks, months, or years. Rather than manage a group of direct reports who execute whatever is commanded from above, modern leaders are expected to guide and manage diverse, global teams which function with agility, autonomy and with a constant focus on innovation. Leading mission-driven teams requires a new set of competencies and the ability to lead through motivation and influence, rather than authority. Empathy is, in fact, the new authority.

2. Good leaders don’t command and control. They connect and collaborate

The leader of today can no longer be the hero, the absolute authority who decides the rules of the game and commands and controls the team to follow them. In an environment where teams are expected to be innovative, agile and collaborative in tackling complex problems, leaders need to be proactive and adaptive in understanding and accepting the nuances of team dynamics and how they impact work. Leadership in the digital age is all about coaching – encouraging and facilitating cross-functional collaboration to generate diverse ideas for innovative solutions. The ability to shape, influence and guide are hallmarks of a successful digital leader.

3. Micromanagement is dead. Managed empowerment is in

Leading is no longer about mandating and enforcing a predetermined direction for the team. Instead, the modern leader is expected to shape the team context and course-correct when required. Today’s leaders should nurture an environment of shared purpose and trust, where employees feel comfortable to exchange ideas and take risks. To take the business to another level, leaders must encourage a culture of collaboration and initiative, so teams are empowered to make decisions autonomously.

Read more about leadership development truths in the digital-age and how to develop leaders better. Click here. 

4. Leaders are measured by innovation, not just execution

As touched upon earlier, the leader role has evolved from merely overseeing
execution to fostering a culture of innovation. Technology has disrupted business models in so many ways that companies are feeling increased pressure to accelerate their pace of innovation. As a result, leaders must learn to recognise trends, identify opportunities and embrace promising ideas. Beyond simply adopting the latest software fads, digital leaders need to learn to appreciate and understand the potential of leveraging new technologies like AI, machine learning, RPA, and big data. By encouraging experimentation and keeping a pulse on external trends, leaders can position themselves on the frontlines to effectively support their organisation’s strategic agenda.

5. Digital leaders require new mindsets, not just skillsets

Developing effective leaders today necessitates a change in mindset as skills alone will not suffice. Since it is no longer just about execution, but also foresight, strategy and the ability to predict the future and plan accordingly, leaders certainly need a specific mindset to stand tall. While skillsets are one-dimensional, mindsets are contextual. Mindsets inform leaders’ actions and allow them to act and react in ways that drive innovation. Mindsets unlock the lateral thinking needed in times of change, uncertainty and ambiguity. They encourage innovative behaviours, which, in turn, reinforce expansive mindsets. While a skill may be learned once, a mindset must be regularly strengthened through continuous learning.

6. Leadership is democratising

In a workplace that has ad-hoc, cross-functional and project-based teams, a top-down leadership development strategy no longer makes sense. Because work happens in teams, organisations must develop leaders at all levels of an organisation. In many cases, this is already happening on its own. As organisations shift from siloed hierarchies to flatter networks, members of mission-driven teams are stepping up to guide and influence. Harnessing this organic trend, some companies are actively “democratizing” their leadership programs. They’re spreading leadership development more evenly across all levels of the organisation, rather than concentrating training solely on more senior executives. To build their bench of talent for emerging leadership needs, these companies are increasingly preparing individuals at all levels with foundational leadership training.

Having established the six truths of leadership development in the digital age, it is important to examine the steps required to achieving a new model of leadership. Skillsoft shares three actions to take. The first, it suggests is developing talent on their way to the top rather than waiting for employees to become managers to develop them as leaders. Next, teach coaching to managers since they may not instinctively know how to develop their people. According to Skillsoft, coaching allows managers to help their employees reach their goals by establishing rapport, identifying performance gaps, and using questioning and listening techniques. Coaching is becoming increasingly crucial to retaining top talent, creating a culture of innovation and growth, and realising the value of a workforce.

Lastly, it is important that organisations instill growth and learning mindsets as fixed or rigid mindsets often result in leaders acting on tried-and-true methods rather than taking risks. In addition to risk takers, modern leaders with the right mindset are able to learn, adapt and perform as the situation demands. Adopting new mindsets, says Skillsoft, requires continuous learning and reinforcement through modeled behaviour—and this sustained effort is essential to effective leadership today. By developing modern mindsets in their leaders, organisations can develop opportunity-spotters and opportunity-creators.

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And, with digital technologies disrupting each function differently, talent, workforce and learning management need to be looked at in a boutique, function-specific manner. Why? Simply because, these requirements are unique for each function, and each department works with specific business targets in mind.

Given this context, human resources (HR) has a new mandate—help each function become more productive, agile and responsive by empowering them with relevant tools and skillsets. Chief human resources officers (CHROs) should now reposition themselves as ‘change agents’ who can enable various departments to manage the employee lifecycle effectively, leading to enhanced business outcomes.

Read this eBook to discover why HR should live at the nucleus of an organisation’s innovation toward business sustainability.

For instance, marketing often works on specific, time-bound campaigns, pooling in various individuals from within the organisation to build dedicated teams for the duration of that exercise only. Here, HR can assist in project-centric team configuration by helping marketing assess its staffing needs for the given campaign, and accordingly source the right talent. If the in-house talent pool is well equipped to execute the campaign brief, then HR’s job is to identify resources dispersed throughout the organisation, and assign them to that campaign. In case the company lacks the requisite talent, say UX designers or PHP developers for mobile apps, then HR should work with marketing to recruit specialist freelancers on demand. In both scenarios, HR empowers marketing with the right resources, in time, to facilitate a high-quality, agile and responsive campaign, resulting in the desired RoI.

Let’s take up another example, of salespeople working in the field. For such employees, who often travel for work, and operate in an extremely demanding, target-oriented environment, taking out time to learn new skills can become a challenge. HR can address this pain point by provisioning self-paced ‘microlearning’ modules, which will deliver bite-sized learning for mobile sales staff. By building microlearning around a mobile-friendly user interface (UX), and structuring the content around ‘snackable’ sections, HR can make sales more productive and responsive to emerging business needs.

The third example, that is, people analytics, highlights the significant potential for HR to empower other departments. Line managers in the operations function play a vital role in keeping the workforce morale high, to minimise employee attrition. However, most often, these supervisors work with their gut instinct. They lack data-driven insights required to make informed decisions in relation to talent management. HR can help solve this problem by harnessing people analytics solutions to deliver actionable insights into employee engagement, which the line managers can then use to handle their staff better.

As a case in point, line managers can leverage analytics to enhance their talent management practices, by clearly outlining the key result areas (KRAs) and requisite competencies for each role, and measuring workers’ performance. Doing so will not only substantially reduce manual workflows, but also avert the probability of unconscious biases creeping into decision making.

Conclusion

Organisations today must foster a work culture where HR and other departments work in cohesion, as business partners, to achieve the company’s strategic objectives. Persisting with the traditional model of each department working in silos, with HR restricting itself to a corporate-level mandate, will not be effective anymore in the 21st century.

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A survey by DevOps Institute, titled ‘2019 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report’, outlines the most valued and in-demand skills needed to achieve DevOps transformation within enterprise organisations of all sizes. As per the survey, the respondents agreed that automation skills (57 per cent), process skills (55 per cent) and soft skills (53 per cent) are the most important must-have skills.

Since DevOps is focused on tools, collaborative culture, processes and numbers, it is critical that organisations look at a multi-modal approach to upskilling talent. With diverse areas such as these, a combination of learning material and methods can ensure learning that sticks—books and labs can provide more in-depth information, while videos or short instructional documents or DIY guides can offer quick revisions or updates. Here’s a list of skills that DevOps professionals need to build for transformational growth and sustenance.

Tools: The world of DevOps is so on the rise that new tools and technologies are introduced quite frequently. That said, for a DevOps engineer to stay abreast with the changes and to be able to perform with new tools at hand, learning and upskilling becomes critical. Introduction of new tools, such as Jenkins, Chef, Puppet, and so on, makes it all the more important to learn and implement new workflows and frameworks.

Business & leadership skills: The DevOps survey suggests that automation process and business & leadership skills are the ‘must-have’ skills for a DevOps engineer. The role of DevOps involves streamlining and transforming the functional work experience between the development and operations teams. This requires efficient communication and collaboration, for which the softer skills are critical. While people skills are important in every field, especially in DevOps, where collaboration is key, organisations cannot just do without developing business & leadership skills in employees.

Process automation: Two terms being widely used in the development world currently are, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). Organisations are developing CI and CD pipelines with the goal of automating code deployment. This is a new concept and the existing talent requires significant learning and upskilling initiatives to be able to make use of these.

Read this to know 8 questions to ask when deciding on training for your Technology and Developer employees.

Collaborative culture: A culture of collaboration is crucial to successful implementation of projects and updates. And to build one, organisations need to re-look at their culture and instill skills such as team management and leadership with collaboration. It requires breaking down silos and uniting the teams to perform together. A DevOps engineer who understands the importance and impact of collaboration, works in small batches so that others can also do their bit efficiently, from performing code reviews to writing acceptance tests.

Speed and numbers: Response time, speed and agility along with adaptability are extremely important to service delivery. The technical side of DevOps values different metrics for measuring the success of a project. Knowing how long the CI process takes is important. The average response time of the representational state transfer services (REST) or the number of concurrent users at any given time represents useful data that may change the way developers solve specific problems.

Apart from these, the 2019 Upskilling Survey suggests that cloud and analytical knowledge are the top technical skills for DevOps engineers. Enabling the DevOps teams to take up future challenges and deliver efficiently is what will determine the future success of organisations. That said, upskilling is a viable strategy to help meet the demand of a marketplace that requires the best of the best to get ahead.

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That said, the ideal worker of the future will bear T-shaped virtues. Now, what makes a T-shaped worker? The T-shaped worker is an expert in at least one field, but has a working knowledge and can converse in the language of various other disciplines as well. In simple words, a Jack of all trades who’s also a master of one, fits the future worker expectations. There are various advantages to having T-shaped workers.

A whitepaper by Skillsoft explains that the T-shaped model for talent development helps organisations develop master problem solvers and innovators. Since they have deep functional expertise in a single field, the T-shaped employees maintain a high level of proficiency in their domain, along with being able to adapt to and expand into various other areas with a range of significant capabilities.

Developing a T-shaped workforce solves the challenges involving talent mobility and business sustainability. The ability to adapt and understand a variety of functions and domains, is what defines future leaders.

Gear up for the future of work. Read this whitepaper by Skillsoft to know more about T-shaped workforce, its benefits, and how to build one.

Achieving the T-shape

Teaming up for T-shape

The T-shaped model may initially have been just about an individual employee possessing the virtues that define T-shape, but it is more effective with well-knit, collaborative, high-performing teams. With team members coming together for a shared vision, the diversity of experience and ideas results in great outcomes, which in turn ensure sustainable growth. Successful organisations are those that encourage the idea that every project is an opportunity. They focus on developing digital dexterity to optimally gain from the same, by drawing upon the skillsets of each team member. This, combined with supporting a mindset to learn new skills further strengthens the possibilities of a successful outcome.

De-centralising decision making

Doing away with the traditional corporate ways, where only the top management is responsible for most strategic decisions, the T-shaped culture encourages distributed decision making, where leaders at all levels participate in the process or at times even take control of the decisions. The traditional decision making is plagued by delayed information flow and stringent approval systems, especially in organisations that follow a top-down, hierarchical approach.

Team leaders across verticals have a better ground-level understanding. Hence, they are able to quickly understand what ideas resonate, which products work and that increases the overall pace of innovation. The employers with T-shaped workforces encourage collaboration, democratised leadership and adaptability. With T-shaped employees having the autonomy to make decisions, they are able to affect change immediately.

Enabling leaders at all levels

Innovation thrives in an environment where talent development involves encouraging and enabling leaders at all levels and not just at the executive levels. Democratisation of leadership yields great results, as it acknowledges individual employees who are leaders in their own capacity, leading projects or programmes. They may not have the titles or formal designations but they are the ones who bring in business benefits and should be supported for honing their abilities and growing their own strengths and style to drive business impact and innovations.

The T-shaped philosophy, when put into practice across levels, will help organisations scale up for growth in the volatile and dynamic times ahead. By implementing the T-shaped framework for learning and development, organisations will never have a shortage of those ready to step up and take the reins.

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The only way to stay in the race in this dynamic environment is through continuous learning.

In fact, in these times, learning and development will be a deciding factor in the success of not just businesses but employees as well.

With the business environment constantly feeling the need to reinvent and innovate at every juncture, change can happen only through the employees and not necessarily through the leadership team as always.

For employees to be able to innovate and reinvent, they need to unlearn the old stuff and learn the new regularly. Critical thinking has to be encouraged and inculcated within the team. In order to stay relevant and remain in the race, companies will have to create a culture of continuous learning within them.

For every business, the challenge is always the projects in hand and the deadline to deliver. But this will only sustain them. If they have to grow, companies will have to encourage employees to look beyond and inculcate a learning habit. There has to be an open – mindset and an independent quest for knowledge.

A report by Deloitte suggests that companies with a continuous learning culture, experience 37 per cent higher productivity and 92 per cent of them are more likely to innovate.

Now the big question is, ‘How is a culture of continuous learning cultivated in a company?’ Should it have a top-down approach or the other way around? Should it be through classroom learning, online learning, or just shared learning?

Engaging employees in ongoing learning pays big dividends—including enhanced on-the-job performance and talent retention. But fostering such engagement isn’t easy. How can organisations meet the engagement imperative? Read this whitepaper Learning and Development for All: Making the Most of Your Modern Workforce to know.

The best way to practice continuous learning in a company is through a flow of work. This way people enhance their skillset and abilities proactively instead of being guided by a specific programme, wherein learning is not voluntary and the outcome is half-baked.

Similarly, when continuous learning is pushed from the top, it can create an environment of resilience. This may cause friction as well as fear because employees shy away from getting out of their comfort zones.

What leaders should do is turn themselves into lifelong learners, and that will motivate all employees in the organisation to follow suit. Everyone wants some personal benefits from the learning, and hence organisations’ and employees’ objectives need to be aligned – only then can success be achieved.

Next, organisations need to promote shared learning among employees. Peer to peer learning has traditionally proved to be the best way. The task in hand for the learning function is to help people get comfortable with the process so that there is a free flow of information, sharing of tips, insights and also praise for one another.

All employees are good at something. If a company creates a peer-to-peer coaching ecosystem, it will allow people to share their expertise and benefit others.

It is also important for employees to create a review system on learning. Companies can put in place a learning review system, similar to a performance review system. This will help the employees set goals and that will promote a learning culture in the organisation. One thing that companies need to ensure is that the learning review has to be transparent, realistic and achievable, else it may backfire.

The other important aspect of promoting continuous learning in an organisation is that learning is a democratic process and it’s not the sole responsibility of the learning managers to single-handedly drive the culture of learning. They can be the facilitators, but both the leadership and the employees have to play a proactive role.

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These companies are the ones seeking new skills, learning new trades and acquiring new knowledge about the latest technologies. These organisations are providing adaptable and actionable learning plans with a visual timeline of priorities and tasks. Learning is accessible to all employees, with engaging and responsive mobile design for convenient use on-the-go or from remote locations, whether online or offline.

Digital transformation affects an organisation’s ability to attract top talent and drive employee engagement. After all, top digital talent is attracted to where they can experience a sense of fulfilment from the work.

In an era of exponential change, traditional organisational structure will not be very effective. The need is to have adaptive structures. Moreover, technology is changing so rapidly, that adaptability has to keep pace with technology.

Disruption isn’t new, but the speed, complexity and global nature of disruption is at a scale we’ve never seen before. Digitisation is also expanding the competitive marketplace to a global level, where even small businesses and employees compete digitally across borders.

The prediction of employee success is focused on the adaptability quotient (AQ). Fast Company believes its ‘adaptability quotient’ (AQ) will become the primary predictor of success, with general intelligence (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) both being less important. Why? The average life of business competency has dropped from 30 years to five and is reducing still.

Only 60 companies remain on the Fortune 500 since 1966. In 1965, the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 was 33 years. By 1990, it was 20 years. It’s expected to shrink to 14 years by 2026. About 50 per cent of the S&P 500 will be replaced over the next 10 years.

Also, we don’t really know what the new roles are going to be. A report by the McKinsey Global Institute found that technology can eliminate large swaths of the US workforce in the coming decade. It noted that by 2030, up to 14 per cent of the global workforce (375 million workers) may need to switch occupations or digitally adapt as their occupations evolve along the increasingly capable machines, says the report.

At the same time, employee skills are becoming outdated faster than ever before. According to the World Economic Forum, 35 per cent of the skills that employees will require to do their jobs—regardless of industry—will have changed by 2020.

An example of digital adaptability is the widespread use of chatbots. Organisations are now considering how chatbots’ unique functionalities can transform communication, internally for enhancing employee engagement or externally with new and returning customers. Chatbots are being increasingly adopted across industries, granting marketers unprecedented, personalised access to consumers. While older generations may opt for minimal input, preferring multiple choice and voice-driven options, younger consumers crave geotargeted recommendations, ongoing dialogue and a sense of immediacy.

Therefore, being able to hire and develop adaptable employees is key for companies to remain relevant.

“Continuous learning lies at the heart of thriving in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” says the World Economic Forum. “The skills required for most jobs are evolving rapidly, but our adult education and training systems are lagging behind.”

92 per cent of companies are attempting to build a digital culture, yet 86 per cent are uncertain of how to tackle the challenge. How can you develop a digitally-dexterous workforce? Watch this Webinar On Demand to know how you can accelerate transformation through the speed of learning.

By coaching and changing our mindsets, we are creating new workplace cultures that can adapt and thrive despite the speed of technological change around them. The five ‘mindsets’ we believe are necessary to foster in today’s workplaces include:

• A team/collaboration mindset: where the team is the primary organisational unit, as opposed to traditional work hierarchies

• A growth mindset: where the team is accustomed to constant upskilling

• A technology-adaptive mindset: encouraging people to continually work with technology/machines to get the most out of both

• Data-literacy mindset: whereby algorithms and data-driven decision-making becomes routine

• Critical thinking mindset: allowing people to cope as work becomes less routine

There is no blueprint for success, of course, but companies that fail to even make an attempt at transformation will not be in business much longer.

Sources: Fast Company , Fortune 500 , World Economic Forum ,  S&P 500

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A one size fits all learning plan does not yield the desired outcomes. In fact, it can have adverse effects. Customised learning has a broad range of possibilities — from customised interfaces to adaptive mentors, from learner-centred classrooms to learning-management systems. Customised learning based on the learner’s needs, coupled with the right mode of content delivery makes the learners feel in control of their own learning and respond better. Add mobility and on-demand factor to it—Voila! You have a perfect solution that has the potential to revolutionise learning.

HR professionals are working closely with the businesses to customise learning based on the learners’ need and the business requirement. They are increasingly turning to large-scale data collection and analysis to enable technologically-mediated learning solutions. Customised learning adapts to the learners’ unique combination of goals, interests, and competencies and the ongoing process of shifting instruction as these conditions change. The new data-driven learning technologies help achieve the following:

Accelerate learning and optimise resources

By providing the learners a precise objective and flexibility to learn from anywhere using any device, we see that the engagement factor grows manifold. For instance, creating a consumer-like experience for the learners and empowering them with the ability to make a choice, is moving a step forward in the right direction. Moreover, nugget-sized learning (three to five-minute videos) helps the learners to fit it into their busy schedules.

Are you looking to improve business outcomes by transforming learning in your organisation? This report from Bersin, Deloitte LLP, explores learning experience platforms (LXPs) and the five key capabilities to consider while selecting or upgrading LXP solutions.

Are you looking to improve business outcomes by transforming learning in your organisation? This report from Bersin, Deloitte LLP, explores learning experience platforms (LXPs) and the five key capabilities to consider while selecting or upgrading LXP solutions.

Reduce content, keep it relevant

Employees who seek to upskill in a given subject will get intimidated if they are given a module with pages and pages of words. They may feel put off and lose interest. Customised learning helps to reduce the content burden. It also makes it easier for learners to discover useful information that aligns with their interests, and learn as they wish.

Increase learner engagement

Companies use simple yet flexible digital interfaces to provide a platform for learning and development. Individuals can use their mobile devices to access the programmes. By using an interactive user interface, they can enhance employee engagement. Here, a learner can choose from multiple eLearning platforms and an engaging platform drives retention. Moreover, it provides more opportunity to apply and reinforce learning. By curating a module based on the preference of the learner, she/he will be more engaged to learn continuously and consistently.

Close critical skill gaps

A curated learning programme ensures upskilling in essential competencies that are aligned to an individual’s requirement, and that is what is most valued by leading organisations. Thus, a learner can prioritise learning paths, which come under core competencies.

Offer multiple learning modalities

Since learners are driven by different preferences, allowing them to choose how they want to learn encourages learning. A learner has multiple options to choose from, such as kinesthetics (moving), visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), and tactile (touching). Everyone is a little bit of each type, but in most people, one style prevails over the other three. Customisation ensures success in learning by offering a platform preferred by the learner. When using online training software, it’s even more important to remember that each person learns differently, so you need to build your learning content accordingly.

Demonstrate learning impact

Learning needs to manifest in work to make sure learning activity supports the key business objectives. Programme values need to be quantified with out-of-the-box reporting using charts and graphs. Customised learning helps the learners to practically use the skills and assess the progress quickly. A continuous learning environment is an important component of employee engagement and retention strategy. It helps to develop a culture that gives employees a sense of purpose and a workplace that embraces diversity and inclusion.

Maximise available time

There is never enough time in the workday for employees to accomplish all the responsibilities. It’s no surprise that employees struggle to fit learning into their busy schedules. According to Bersin by Deloitte, “One per cent of a typical workweek is all that employees have, to focus on training and development.” L&D leaders need to maximise what little time they have at their disposal, while employees must get the most out of learning. For this, it is essential to customise learning to suit the needs of the learners. Organisations risk employees losing interest in learning if it is not something they feel the need for.

Deploy and manage easily

The new-age learning modes utilise a cloud-based application that is continuously updated. A learner can take advantage of development in any topic and stay updated. The new intelligent learning platforms keep the learners stimulated, while push notifications and periodic reminders help them learn consistently.

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For a workforce that is becoming increasingly sophisticated in its expectations, and for a business environment that demands agility and flexibility, traditional training methodologies are no more the right fit. As organisational demographics change and as people get used to superior technologies enhancing their personal lives, their demand to experience the same at their workplaces is no surprise. Learning modalities are no exception to this trend of ‘consumerisation’.

It is a well-known fact that the most engaged and high-performing employees are those who are well recognised and rewarded. Also, human psychology tends to gravitate toward things that can give them a reward–in other words, fun–instead of something that is only hard work. Traditional learning, seen as a corporate mandate than an individual-driven initiative, ignores both these realities.

Boosting learning engagement and outcomes

This is where gamification of learning offers new hope. Gamification is the integration of gameplay elements into a training environment to make the learning experience interactive, attractive and engaging. By satisfying the individual’s need for instant gratification through rewards and recognition, and making it fun, gamified learning is completely reshaping the future of corporate training. Similar to how video games are designed to keep the players hooked, training gamification recognises its users through badges, points and leaderboard scores at every step as they go through the training programme. Employees will even be able to proudly publish their achievements to co-workers and compare their scores with that of peers.

Even as they enjoy accumulating the rewards of gamified training, employees retain a higher part of what they learned owing to the overall pleasurable experience associated with the process of learning. This naturally converts into better performance as learning objectives are met without difficulty due to higher knowledge retention. What’s more, training becomes an employee-driven activity, fulfilling business expectations on multiple fronts including employee engagement, learning and development and company performance.

Gamification is one of the most effective way to address engagement as well as help connect employees’ actions to business outcomes, decrease absences and turnover, and lead to improved performance. Watch this webinar , which will help you learn how to use gamification to better develop your people by encouraging them to more actively participate in learning and talent activities.

Gamification is one of the most effective ways to address engagement as well as help connect employees’ actions to business outcomes, decrease absences and turnover, and lead to improved performance. Watch this webinar this webinar you’ll learn how to use gamification to better develop your people by encouraging them to more actively participate in learning and talent activities.

Characteristics of an effective gamified learning practice

Gamification, however, should not be misunderstood as just a superficial point system. A truly gamified learning environment should give complete control of the learning speed and path to the user, and hand out credible recognition that gets acknowledged inside as well as outside the learning environment. It must also improve the intrinsic motivation of employees to take up training, and most importantly feature updated and relevant content. Some of the other core characteristics of effective training gamification include incorporating challenges inside the training, ensuring personalised learning, giving progressive rewards, setting up an instant feedback system and scoring and leaderboard mechanism, and mapping the game levels to advancements in training knowledge.

Addressing varying learning needs

There are multiple ways in which organisations can use gamification in their L&D function. Along with addressing specific learning outcomes, gamification can be used to onboard and induct new recruits, change employee behaviour, boost the efficacy of compliance training, and convert e-learning into compelling, self-driven training options. It can also be used to roll out company-wide programmes for skill development and make routine work more fun by tying actual work goals with learning goals. Other related use cases can include fostering competition between teams based on their learning achievements and integrating such initiatives with leadership programmes.

Tracking progress and effectiveness

One of the most important factors that make learning gamification a convincing business case is its ability to track, measure and publish training effectiveness. As the entire system is built on an interactive platform, where feedback and scoring take precedence, the management can quickly see how many employees are actively engaged with a training programme at any given point in time. Once participation and real engagement rates are tracked vis-à-vis just an attendance system in traditional training modules, linking actual business results to the training becomes that much easier. This also ensures smooth rollout and measurement of time-sensitive programmes, for instance, compliance or new product launches.

Today, when managers are grappling with a large number of disengaged employees while simultaneously facing aggressive business targets, gamification offers a renewed way of bringing back fun to work. In addition to improving engagement, the ability of training gamification to improve actual productivity without the need to repeatedly invest in newer training programmes makes it a must-try for leaders who realise the value of training in business performance.

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While some argue that robots and artificial intelligence (AI) remain a long way from completely taking over human jobs, routine manual labour continues to be replaced by machines at a rapid rate. This trend is accelerating as companies pursue increased speed, innovation and operational efficiency. Be it blue or white-collar jobs, employees across the board are losing out to their much sleeker, flexible and tireless non-human counterparts as computers get increasingly sophisticated at mastering complex tasks.

In contrast, even as employers are forced to retire from certain type of roles performed by humans, they face a significant shortage of skills that are required to operate the very machines behind the automation. On one hand, there are workers fearing for their jobs, and on the other, there are organisations struggling to maintain their technology edge due to lack of relevant talent. As it turns out, this gap between the requisite skills and those available can well be the silver lining in the cloud, reassuring worried staff and employers that they can embrace technology innovations in a mutually beneficial manner.

However, doing so will not be easy. Just as the labour upheavals in the past required a major revamp of education systems for making workers appropriately skilled for the technology age, reallocating existing human resources to new jobs will require committed efforts. Employers and employees will have to collaborate and recognise that humans and machines working together can achieve higher outputs — rather than seeing machines as mere cost-saving opportunities or job-replacement avenues.

Digital is everywhere and it’s catalysing the need for investment and realignment of technology, business models and work processes to create innovative experiences for customers and employees. How can you develop a digitally dexterous workforce? Read this free whitepaper to know.

Reskilling employees

The workforce of the future will most definitely need to be technology savvy and be able to operate and control the automated processes and robots well. With most manual jobs set to go away, except for those that require complex communication and broad experiences, such as cooking or gardening, employees performing manual roles will require on-the-job training to reskill themselves and fit into higher skill brackets that are in demand. Beside ensuring jobs for workers, reskilling will also enable them to move up the value chain. It can even increase their compensation levels in accordance with the new roles they take up, resulting in a win-win situation for both employees and employers.

Focus on continuous learning

While immediate reskilling will take care of job certainty in the near future, as with any technology innovation there will come a next wave that may make a new skill irrelevant as well. In order to address this threat, organisations must focus on continuous learning. As output efficiency and cost control influence the adoption of machine intelligence, human performance will have to be measured more in terms of strategic decision-making capabilities and their ability to learn quickly.

Organisations should offer employees connected and intelligent training avenues that will keep them updated on innovations related to their roles, and help develop in synch with industry trends. As a result, workers can become more flexible, performing multifaceted roles that let them easily switch between jobs as per requirements. For employers, providing a continuous learning platform and incentivising employees to use it will result in lower cost of reskilling and training in the long run, than spending on one-time programmes post new implementations.

Training on creative and emotional intelligence

While the level of automation organisations can adopt will depend on their respective sectors, it is a common fact across the board that machines cannot replicate tasks that require what humans are naturally adept at — creativity, ideation, problem-solving, and emotional intelligence. Though automation will require humans to complement machines, it will free up more time for employees to focus on value-added work, where their human skills will be more in demand than their task-related ones.

In current employment scenarios, these skills are hardly valued or recognised as game changers. However, as the machine-man collaboration continuum increases, organisations must assist employees to improve and excel at their human skills as well, in tandem with developing other essential job skills.

Though AI and automation may eliminate millions of jobs, they will also result in the creation of millions of other jobs. It will be in the best interest of organisations to empower employees to reskill and continuously keep themselves updated. This will not only help them position themselves as responsible employers but also gain more agility and sustain technology-assisted growth.

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In the Indian context, digitisation of business is happening at par with the West. We are very much collaborating with them in taking this digital revolution forward.

While all the functions of a company are seeing disruption, HR is taking the lead. Every aspect of the function is incorporating technology to improve employee experience. Thus, HR can focus more on taking up a strategic role for driving business goals.

How is HR benefitting from digitisation?

Plays a strategic role in business: Today, HR is playing a more strategic role in business by making reputed talent available to an organisation. The talent pool of a company is what differentiates it as a successful one or otherwise. Data- led decisions will enable HR to compete more efficiently for global talents.

There are many advanced talent management systems for automating employee life cycle management – hiring till retiring. HR is embracing automation in its processes to drive business objectives through digital tools.

A right integrated human capital management (HCM) system will help organizations in transforming their HR processes so that HR can reinvent itself to play a more strategic role for business and not just perform daily administrative work.

Enhances employee experience: Technology solutions provide the HR a better understanding of its people through complex data analysis. A digitally- empowered HR can predict behaviours and aspirations more accurately, and this will help them design better employee experiences— from onboarding, to offering learning and development programmes. Based on data analytics, the HR can deliver customised solutions tailored to individual strengths, which is more meaningful.

Facilitates precise and accurate decision making: The primary benefit of automation in the HR function is the improvement in the accuracy of decisions. For instance, digital software can convert attributes to numbers and process large volumes of data instantly for a desired outcome. Not only it is impossible to do it manually but chances of making errors are negligible. For this to happen, HR managers need to make themselves and their teams digitally literate. They need to take ownership and responsibility of their IT assets and fortunately, with so many analytics tools and cloud-based SaaS HCM solutions available, it is quite possible.

The SaaS option is ideally suited for organisations that always want to be on the latest version and take advantage of the latest enhancements and new features.

Ensures positive candidate experience: Finding the right talent will be the most important factor that will enable a company to stay afloat during digital disruption. While companies will compete with each other to attract skilled and agile talent for their organisations, automation in the process will provide them the edge over others by:
• Enhancing candidate experience
• Improving employer branding
• Reducing hiring timelines
• Providing effective onboarding

Lack of communication forms the basis of candidate grievances/dissatisfaction during recruitment. Use of tech tools will help resolve this problem.

If you are interested in a particular candidate, recruitment solution will assist you to process selection faster by generating automated emails. You can personalise these emails with the logo and company colours to reinforce the brand.

Applicant-tracking systems allow recruiters to create and store templates of all the past job requisitions within the system. These can be used repeatedly without the need to create a requisition from scratch every time a new vacancy arises. This not only reduces the error rate but also reduces the workload for recruiters.

Read this free whitepaper to learn how a Winning Candidate Experience Can Help Companies Win the Talent War.

Improves internal communication

Employee feedback is an important factor in establishing the effectiveness of internal communication within an organisation. First, automation should be used to create feedback surveys and data analysis tools should be applied to interpret the same.

Artificial intelligence and robotics are used to create software that help improve communication in the following ways: –

• Live chat – Employees can use this digital interface to participate in live chats and get instant answers to their queries.

• Updates – They can receive important information/news, which the company would like to broadcast instantly.

• Discussion forums – There can be brainstorming for ideas, with certain topics being thrown for discussion.

HR can track and monitor payroll processing, employee attendance, leaves, absence, talent development and labour-law compliance all in one place through automated tools. This, along with powerful analytics and reporting tools, helps them make sense of what they’re tracking.

Here are few examples to show how predictive analysis can help to solve recurring challenges in the HR domain: –

• Only organisations that are truly inclusive will be successful in future. Technology, data and analytics are essential to help us to identify unconscious bias and remove it from the workplace. They will play a key role in changing the mindset of people at the fundamental level.

• By leveraging people analytics, a subset of AI, leaders can create a prospective view that directs how, where and when talent must evolve to meet future business needs. The success of transformation depends on talent thus AI will help to speculate to balance data and emotional intelligence. This will help the leaders to make the right decisions.

• To identify the right leaders and plan their development path, it is critical that leadership development programs now incorporate highly sophisticated self-assessment platforms and other cutting-edge analytical tools.

HR can partner with IT consultants and build on their expertise in talent management to onboard older generations into digital processes, and to meet millennials’ expectations. HR plays a decisive role in capturing and transferring expertise within the company through AI. The challenge for HR leaders is to shift their view of AI from an enabler of speed and efficiency to a key that will unleash human potential.

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While all industries are affected by the change, the IT industry takes the responsibility of spearheading the transformations to facilitate change in other industries as well.

The automation process across industries has created a new demand for IT products and services. Technology cycles are very short, leading to redundancies in certain processes. Equally fast, newer processes and products are getting invented for which upskilling of the workforce is mandatory.

Marketplace shifts and changing demand of the customers also pose a threat to the IT industry. The thrust is towards reskilling and upskilling the workforce.

The employees in the IT sector say that they must continuously upskill to keep pace with innovations in machine learning, coding, logical thinking, problem-solving and integrating different technologies.

Continual learning is an organisation’s most important tool preparing for the unprecedented technology transformation where new roles are rapidly evolving, new skillsets are required and business and technology sides of the business are increasingly converging. Skillsoft Aspire learning journeys will help you keep your tech talent ahead of the curve.

The way forward is to upskill, and this is how an employee benefits from it:

Improves employability

The only way employees can keep pace with changes in the IT sector is to upskill regularly. This will not only give them job stability but also improve their employability prospects. The ageing workforce must reskill and upskill as technology evolves. Soft skills and being up-to-date with newer processes will play a key role in getting employees future ready.

Avoids redundancy

Automation is responsible for rendering jobs redundant in the IT sector as machines replace humans in many jobs. The IT industry, which once drew employees in large numbers, has suffered from large-scale layoffs recently, which have made it volatile. Upskilling is the only way to stay abreast with new methods and remain relevant.

Ensures agility

When employees in the IT industry upskill to learn the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, robotics and blockchain, they become agile. They quickly adapt to the changing needs of the business. They are able to meet market demands and assist in driving the change, which not only impacts their industries but all businesses.

Drives innovation

Upskilling and reskilling open new doors for employees in the IT industry. Many have been able to conceive ideas during these sessions and have successfully been able to convert them into projects. These projects have also played a role in taking the transformation process in business ahead. Trainees receive stimulations during these learning sessions, which can create immense passion within them to pursue these topics for further research.

Encourages collaboration

When you are open to learning new skills, you also open new avenues for yourself in the form of a partnership with like-minded people. These collaborations help individuals spearhead projects and advance their networking. This also improves their future job prospects.

How should the upskilling process be initiated?

Upskilling should be aligned with individual’s needs and not be a tick-the-box exercise by an employer. Employers who nominate employees for training should pay attention to the time they have in hand, their interests, learning goals and future plans for effective learning.

Upskilling can happen internally too. Employees tend to learn a lot at work from a manager who enjoys coaching, although a majority find more value in learning from outside the business.

Bite-size learning is gaining popularity with the newer generation, which finds day-long training boring and difficult to retain. Little learning nuggets in the form of micro learning and nano learning also help them learn quickly and precisely.

E-learning platforms are attracting many users because of the mobility they provide. They cut travelling and accommodation cost, thus making this platform more cost effective for organizations.

Other popular platforms are workshops and webinars, which employees can attend and participate in to upskill regularly.

Disruptions in business because of technology have made human beings more dynamic too. Although machines are replacing humans in mundane jobs, there is a shortage of talented employees who are acquainted with these machines and technologies. Clearly, it is time for employees to reskill and upskill to bridge the gaps in the IT industry.

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Let’s take a historical approach to decoding the Industrial Revolution (IR) 4.0 by establishing an understanding of the other industrial transformations that have taken place in the past:

The First IR harnessed power from coal and steam to replace human and animal power with it.

The Second IR was characterised by a new form of power—electricity— that accounted for mass production.

The Third IR witnessed the mass consumption of computers, the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The use of technology in every aspect of life has revolutionised the third phase and brought us to the fourth one. Here, technology is smarter, sharper and strategic. Artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, internet of things, machine learning, cloud computing and other advanced technologies can quickly capture and analyse a wealth of data giving us unimaginable information to work on.

The world is changing and it’s changing fast. What’s fascinating, amidst all the discussion of technologies powering digital transformation, is the growing realisation that leading this transformation is the least digital part of every organisation: people. Read more in the white paper, The Digitalisation of HR.

In Industry 4.0, general-purpose technologies (GPT), hypercompetition
and aging population will make the diffusion faster and wider. Although Industry 4.0 technologies are more evolutive than disruptive, their combination and the context in which they develop promise major impacts on economy and society, which would in fact characterise a revolution.

Industrial Revolution 4.0

The main technology of Industry 4.0 is the Cyber-Physical System (CPS. That is, everything that happens in the physical impacts the virtual, and vice versa.

The pulse of innovation and globalisation has generated a hyper-competitive business environment. This means, shorter life cycles for products and services, and this requires flexibility and agility to keep pace with technological disruptions. The impact of IR 4.0 has started becoming visible at all levels of supply chain functions, from product conception to production and distribution. The shift is immense in the way companies are adopting artificial intelligence to create, dispense and appropriate value within the organisation.

The three-fold advantage of IR 4.0

(1) Pervasiveness— used in multiple fields

(2) Improvement— gradual upgradation of quality

(3) Innovation— results in spawning, as new creations are made easier

All the functions of organisations will benefit immensely from the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The HR function has already got impacted as a large chunk of mundane administrative work will be done by AI and bots. HR will focus on initiating learning and development programmes and facilitating transformation in the organisation.

What impact will the Fourth IR have on the HR function of an organisation?

Useful information

IR 4.0 will provide HR with vast amounts of useful information needed to make appropriate decisions regarding talent acquisition, compensation and benefits. Interconnectivity allows it to collect immense data and information from all points in the industry. This aids functionality by identifying the key areas that can benefit from innovation and improvement.

Effortless execution

Artificial intelligence will help to process large amounts of information with precision. It is capable of aggregating, visualising, and comprehending huge volumes of data to assist humans in the process of decision making. This will help HR to complete job responsibilities faster and with precision. Not only this, it accomplishes tasks that are not only exhausting for humans, but unpleasant, and unsafe. For intance, algorithms will help to identify potential candidates for a job from a large database and help HR to find a suitable candidate for a job.

Predicts failure

The technology used in the Fourth Industrial Revolution can help to predict failures and start maintenance processes so as to minimise damage from any loss. These autonomous and self-organised actions are initiated by smart machines. HR will be able to bring down attrition rate in a company with the help of this feature.

Upgrading skill-sets

The fourth IR equips the HR leaders with a radar to sense what people want and a compass to go forward. Here, HR will play a key role to initiate upskilling of the employees through various programmes within the Fourth IR to develop a character among its employees to establish the outcomes. Developing leaders is the primary goal and HR will persevere to develop a crew that can collaborate with them to carry the revolution forward.

Developing soft skills

The workforce of IR 4.0 will depend more on developing soft skills than content-driven traditional education of the previous century. HR will focus on developing soft skills to help employees develop agility for jobs that do not exist today. These skills can be utilised across a wide range of industries and will ensure the longevity of work in a very volatile business environment going through rapid changes.

Creativity

Creativity will become an exclusive domain for human beings. Robots and artificial intelligence cannot replace human creativity, but rather depend on it for precise functioning. With the volley of new products, new technologies, new processes and automation, workers will need to become more creative in order to benefit from these changes.

Problem-solving

The workforce of IR 4.0 needs to be trained to think critically to be able to solve problems. There will be new sets of situations and events that will require original thinking and unique solutions. One significant change will be processing time— the new workforce will have to be quick, sharp and strategic.

People management

Since more than three to four generations will be working together, there will be a greater focus on developing talent to manage and collaborate with the others in an organisation. Here, HR will play a role to ensure the above. IR 4.0 offers a multitude of platforms for learning and development in the form of nano- learning, design thinking, and so on. These will train the workforce and empower them with skills to manage, collaborate and motivate employees.

Developing a mindset

HR will help to develop the mindset of the workforce to slowly but surely change the processes within the organisation. The workers need to understand and deal with the fact that change is constant; it is the nature of the new world and the technologies of IR 4.0. They must develop a mindset that equips them with a desire to be eternal learners.

The HR function will play a big role in determining the fourth revolution’s success as the Fourth IR is being defined even before its processes and effects have reached the finishing stage.

The post The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here appeared first on HR Katha.

With the advancement in science and technology, learning has significantly evolved. Not only have companies kept pace with scientific and technological advancement and embraced contemporary learning forms, they have also innovated programmes to flatter Gen-Next. Microlearning has given way to nanolearning.

How is nanolearning different from microlearning?

Microlearning

Micro means very small and learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, and preferences. Thus, microlearning refers to short programmes, usually ranging from three to five minutes, which help employees learn on the job, on the go, using their preferred digital platform. Flexibility makes microlearning different from other traditional learning methods.

Nanolearning: Innovation in learning – ‘less is more’

There are times when you need to know a very specific piece of information, say how to set up a pivot table, or save a template, and so on. Nanolearning is learning that takes a minute or two – or even less. It’s about the immediate requirement for training — right now and in the moment of need— to solve a specific problem, such as creating a pivot table in Microsoft Excel. When learners learn from little nuggets of information to enhance their skill in a specific topic, it comes under the purview of nanolearning. The e-learning mode allows the learner to select a precise field for upskilling and the time taken for the entire process is not more than two minutes.

Features of nanolearning
• Electronic mode of learning with text, pictures, audio and video
• Very short learning programmes from 20 seconds to two minutes, for instant learning
• Learners can choose any specific topic on which they would like to upskill
• Goal-oriented learning implies immediate benefit from the learning
• ‘Anywhere’ learning model allows flexibility to learners

As the L&D community continues to idealize best practices for resource development and consumption, the industry still faces a lag from learner participation. Read this whitepaper on The Future of Learning is in the Reflexes to learn how best-in-class companies are using consumer UX practices to increase engagement from their learners.

Why should we shift to nanolearning?

Quick and frequent learning

Technology has changed the way a business is run; certain practices and cultures are becoming redundant as we speak. Shifts are happening so rapidly that it is imperative that employees go through frequent learning programmes to be able to cope with changes and modify task execution. This has created a need for nano-size modules, that can be adopted quickly and frequently.

Very specific topic

Nanolearning allows upskilling in a very specific topic. This helps the learners choose the content precisely so that they can fulfil their learning goals. They don’t waste time going through topics in which they don’t require learning. Nanolearning eliminates subjective and comprehensive material, which can be time consuming.

This can be explained by an example: If the topic to learn is the size of a pie, nanolearning breaks it into four parts and offers each part as a separate unit. This way, the learner can precisely choose the exact part he wants to learn — when, how and why.

Learning modes

The digital transformation in learning modes has augmented the growth of nanolearning. Previously, learning was restricted to text but now with multimedia it has become easier to provide the learner with different platforms to enhance skills. Text-rich modules take longer to comprehend, learn and memorise; it is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. This form of learning incorporates images, audio and video that help the learners achieve their learning goals quickly.

New generation workforce

With the presence of GenY and GenZ in the workforce, the need for nanolearning has increased, as they learn differently. They are the first cohort of workers that grew up with the Internet from day one. They have always been guided by digital information, insights and recommendations to form decisions and create experiences. Against that backdrop, it should be no surprise that nearly half (43 per cent) of GenZ learners reported a preference for fully self-directed and independent learning. Nanolearning modules have helped companies extend tailor-made programmes to stimulate the young masters of tomorrow.

Exciting and innovative

Pages and pages of words, graphs and charts are converted into nugget-size punch in the form of nanolearning. This is precisely the reason why Twitter has become so popular. The digital interruption in learning has helped to create modules that are exciting for the user with tools, such as animation, interactive learning, catchy slogans and music.

80/20 principle

Nanolearning also aligns with the 80/20 principle from the popular book by Richard Koch. This principle explains that 20 per cent effort leads to 80 per cent output. For instance, in a company, 20 per cent people are responsible for 80 per cent productivity. Nanolearning, with very short learning modules, achieves greater output and skill development in comparison to traditional lengthy training programmes.

Nanolearning improves productivity

The business environment requires all jobs to use digital technology. Nanolearning helps to increase employees’ productivity and collaboration skills. Using this model of learning, the employees will enjoy tremendous gains in terms of innovation, work quality, and agility.

The goal of any professional education programme is to improve job performance, and nanolearning is no exception. Besides improving learning outcomes, a robust nanolearning library can help differentiate the firm in its recruiting efforts.

The post Nanolearning – changing the paradigms appeared first on HR Katha.

Digital dexterity is the ability to quickly overcome disruptions in the business environment by adopting digital solutions.

The business environment is encountering rapid and mammoth changes and that too, quite frequently. This is rendering certain businesses, practices, products and skill-sets redundant. So, how does a company ensure profit, customer-satisfaction and growth in these volatile times?

Continuous competition in business has forced companies to cut costs by re-structuring, removing obsolete practices and policies and improving the efficiency of resources.

But one thing is clearly established— there certainly is a need for companies to change, and change continuously to be able to stay fit in order and to survive. Humans have always been survivors, because we have adapted to change. That is precisely why our race continues to tread the Earth. We took to computers as easily as we took to apples. We are prepared to use robotics and artificial intelligence in every aspect of our lives.

Digital leaders understand that simply implementing certain technologies isn’t going to be enough to succeed in a world that is transforming every day, but need to implement learning interventions that will enable successful transformation. Get more insights and strategies from this webinar

So, the movement of companies towards digitisation and automation does not come as a surprise. The top management is harnessing digital dexterity to make their organisations future-proof with a competitive edge. These leaders are spending on technology to re-design their organisational structures to outperform their competitors. They are turning their organisations into digital organisations.

Advantages of digital dexterity

Research shows that organisations, which have redesigned themselves to adapt technology have reportedly outperformed their competitors on key performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction and innovation.

Digital capability is how companies achieve specific tactical objectives, such as providing services on a mobile application or facilitating customer self-service. Several organisations have developed digital capabilities to work in new ways.

Digital dexterity is the ability to rapidly adapt to change— new technologies, changing customer expectations, industry shifts, internally-driven resource allocation— to achieve high growth and performance.

Organisations that are high on digital dexterity are more responsive, better at finding talent, and able to fill gaps at speed. They also enjoy significant advantages in identifying and re-deploying expertise when required and are better at establishing partnerships.

The onus of making an organisation digital rests with the top management.

Digital mindset : The policy makers of an organisation need exemplary digital mindsets to be able to implement a culture of digital dexterity throughout the organisation. A digital mindset will lead to a digital first culture, where they seek digital solutions (first and foremost) at the onset of a problem.

Digitised practices: The top management prioritises the application of digital tools in operation, and decision-making is data driven. They encourage collaborative ways of working without regard to geography, function and hierarchy. Collaborative learning is very critical for digital organisations, as it embodies dexterity.

Empowered talent: The senior management perseveres towards raising the digital IQ of the organisation, developing key skills and increasing engagement. It puts a premium on building widespread digital skills, adopting behavioural approaches and practices that aim to involve, motivate and manage people’s potential in order to increase their level of digital aptitude and maturity.

Data access & collaboration tools: Digital dexterity helps access data and collaboration tools to drive innovation and share intelligence across the organisation. Digital organisations exhibit data-capability levels that are far more advanced than their peers. They use data to drive new levels of efficiency and customer responsiveness.

The top management is in a better position to green flag the digitisation and automation process in an organisation and monitor its progress. It needs to prioritise activities depending on the stage of evolution. Enterprises that have begun the process of digitisation have witnessed gains from cost cutting and improved employee capabilities.

‘Change’ is a certainty, driven by the top management and will result in a digital transformation. Technology will become the best friend to bother employers and employees—one that empowers them!

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Rama Krishnan, senior director, engineering, Skillsoft talks about the Percipio Learning Experience Platform (LEP) and how it is playing the role of a game changer in the e-learning space for organisations across the globe.

For eager learners today, there are thousands of books available on virtually every topic and ample online content to satisfy their hunger to learn and gather knowledge. So where does Percipio fit within the learning ecosystem?

Percipio is an easy-to-use learning platform with a consumer-led design and intuitive interface enabling self-directed learners to discover and consume learning content in multiple modalities -Watch (videos), Read (books), Listen (audiobooks and podcasts) and Practice (apply and reinforce learning with assessments, exercises and activities). Percipio is designed to nurture self-directed learning by allowing users to personalize their learning experience by setting their own goals and learning paths. Percipio also has intelligence features that provide learning content suggestions and recommendations based on an individual’s behaviour, interests and learning selections within the platform. Self-directed learning and personalization have been proven to increase learner engagement versus learning that is solely based on administrator assignments and requirements.

Percipio has been used by the leadership team at the Special Olympics. Can you please share a little more about how Percipio has helped deliver better than the other learning platforms?

Special Olympics wanted to enhance its current leadership development programme with a more modern and robust learning solution. Furthermore, to maximise usage, Special Olympics needed a platform that offered a consumer-led experience and promoted self-directed learning and development.

Using Percipio, Special Olympics learners gain access to extensive and authoritative business and leadership skills, digital skills and IT skills and certification training content. Percipio’s easy to use, step-by-step guide ensures that each learner gets to follow a personalised learning path. Skillsoft’s multi-modal content, which offers learners variety and choice, coupled with convenient concise courses, makes learning fun, easy and engaging.

Learning in many organisations is often targeted at the leadership team. Is Percipio also the platform that’s better suited for the leadership team rather than the employees at the middle and junior levels? If not, why?

Percipio is suited to automatically personalize and provide the right learning to the right person at the right time on the right device, whether it’s the leadership team, mid or junior-level employees within the organization. Skillsoft offers learning content available on Percipio on a wide array of topics that are suitable across all levels of the organization, depending on the content. Examples of learning content portfolios available on Percipio include Skillsoft’s Leadership Development Program, Digital Transformation, Technology and Developer content for IT professionals, Percipio Compliance, and more.

For organizations looking to improve outcomes by transforming learning, this report from Bersin, Deloitte LLP, explores learning experience platforms (LXPs) and the five key capabilities to consider when selecting or upgrading LXP solutions

How was corporate learning different before Percipio was launched? How has it brought a change in the overall learning method and also the ability to learn? Are all the reports around Percipio revolutionising learning, true?

Percipio offers organisations an effective way to elevate the employee experience by mirroring the UX of consumer brands in their learning initiatives. It has the key capabilities organisations should consider when shopping for a learning experience platform: content, integration, user experience design, and data analysis. Adding Percipio to their overall learning strategies and ecosystems may help organisations solve long-standing problems associated with disengaged learners, underutilised content, inefficient search mechanisms, and the lack of actionable metrics. For all these reasons and more, Percipio has earned a place in the continuing evolution of the learning experience platform landscape, moving from simply managing people, events, and content to humanising training in a digital world.

Percipio has a feature called ELSA, the Embedded Learning Synchronised Assistant, that recommends content based on an employee’s web activity. How does it work? Is the monitoring of web activity only restricted to their official devices? Has it been able to capture real-time data on the learning habits of people? What does the data say? Any significant surprises?

I would want to put it differently. ELSA is a browser plugin. It is what we call “Learning in the flow of work”. Often while employees are going through their regular day to day work, much of that time spent online, they frequently come across a term or a topic they may not have encountered before or may want to check their knowledge to ensure they have an accurate understanding of the topic. Using ELSA, users can simply click on the term, which is auto-searched in the Percipio platform. Related and relevant videos, courses and learning channels appear in the ELSA browser plugin window, providing instant access to the information they’re seeking. All of this happens without interrupting the individuals current flow of work. No need to leave the document or web page they’re on. No need to open a different tab or a window. They simply consume the content where they are and in the moment. As a result, Percipio ELSA brings learning to the learner rather than the other way around, which is the more typical and traditional learning experience. ELSA has been tremendously well received by our learners who have said ELSA has allowed them to pursue learning during the course of their workday, freeing them up from having to set aside a specific time and place to learn – time that can be tough to find for today’s busy workforce.

Percipio and learning are now getting deeply ingrained into our customers’ day-to-day activities and our users love what they see and do.

How has Percipio transformed learning management to real learning experience? How would you differentiate the two?

The fundamental difference between a traditional Learning Management System and a Learner Experience Platform like Percipio is the way users experience and own their learning. In an LMS, as the name suggests, the learner’s learning is managed or governed typically by an administrator who decides on what she/he feels is important for the employee to learn. Content is curated and served to the audiences as a part of their mandatory trainings or other courses that the administrator assigns to the learner. On the contrary, an intelligent learning experience platform like Percipio not only provides content based on the user’s expressed interests, but also automatically and intelligently recommends courses and channels that may interest learners based on content viewed. This type of immersive learning experience is based on brain science and mapped to cognitive processes showing that learners are engaged and more likely to retain what they’ve learned in a self-directed learning environment than approaches based solely on assigned, mandatory, and obligatory learning. Additionally, today’s workforce is busier than ever before. There is little time to carve out strictly for learning during the workday. Flexible, intuitive and always available on any device learning experience platforms like Percipio empower individuals to practice learning during the flow of their workday. Additionally, the content design and how it is displayed and delivered to the learner within a learning experience platform is well-suited to capture the attention of learners despite the increasingly shortened attention spans of individuals in today’s digital workplace.

What difference has adding third-party content to the learning system made?

Organisations today require the flexibility to customize the learner experience. Percipio is designed from the ground up to provide a unique and personalized experience for each learner. By enabling third-party content, Percipio has taken personalization to the next level for both organizations and their employees using Percipio who are able to tag, search, share, and recommend third party content that augments the learner experience.

How can a small company leverage a learning platform, such as Percipio? Is it meant only for the large global companies?

Regardless of size, Percipio is designed for organizations that place a premium on developing their talent through learning and training. With Percipio, organizations can offer their employees an intuitive and engaging learning experience that is available anywhere, anytime and on any device. Percipio is as simple as clicking on your favourite video streaming, music, or entertainment app and starting a video, audio-book, podcast or more.

The post Percipio guarantees a personalised learning experience appeared first on HR Katha.

According to a study by Singapore Management University in partnership with Tata Communications, DBS and KPMG, 87 per cent of the respondents admitted that culture created bigger hurdles in digital transformation than technology.

“A closer look at organisations that have undergone or are going through digital transformation will show that far less attention is dedicated to addressing the people and cultural aspects of change management and change leadership than the processes and technology behind the transformation. That said, conversations about managing employee experience as a core component of digital transformation have risen in recent years. The growing awareness and recognition of the impact of transformation on people and culture underscore the urgency to place cultural change at the centre of organisational transformation,” says Ram Lakshminarayanan, head of people & change, KPMG Singapore.

For digital transformation to succeed, cultural shifts are necessary. Throughout the transformation process, the people should take care not to ignore the values and purpose of the organisation. After all, digitisation does affect the culture of the organisation. For instance, there are organisations that emphasise on collaborative problem solving, team work and establishment of human bonds and relationships. For such organisations human interaction is an integral part of their culture, which can be threatened by digitisation. Around, 92 per cent of the respondents of the survey believed that human intervention will continue to be important in the digital age.

To ensure smooth transformation, there are some simple steps that can be taken, as per the Research Report on Transformation in the Digital World.

Lead by example

There are positive impacts, provided the leaders take it upon themselves to lead by example. They should behave just the way they expect their workforce to behave. Therefore, they should be the first to welcome and adopt digitisation before they can expect their teams to do so.

Leaders of today will need to be adaptable, and be well aware of what they know or do not know. They will also have to be willing to learn from others and not be afraid of making mistakes. For this, the organisation has to follow a culture of trust and belief in relationships. Since ownership and accountability will now be of utmost importance, the culture will need to evolve to enable employees to be open to risk taking, and feel safe even if they happen to fail. These things will have to be first demonstrated by the leaders, only then can the employees feel secure.

While 41 per cent of the leaders surveyed felt they possessed the skills required for the digital age, 71 per cent admitted that they needed to adopt new leadership behaviours.

“As a leader, you must have an appreciation for technology, deep appreciation for any change, the creative thought that comes along with that and be able to aid and nurture that thought process to take it to its logical conclusion,” says CR. Srinivasan, chief digital officer, Tata Communications

Awaken employees’ interest

One way of making employees comfortable is to introduce an economical digital platform that will let the employees experience the joy and value of engagement, sharing knowledge and practices, and so on. Such interactions over digital platforms will help the employees open up to digitisation and develop a positive attitude towards the same. In fact, such simple platforms facilitate positive communication and establish a bond amongst the employees as well.

Most senior executives believe that digitisation will never completely take the place of human interaction. After all, humans will be required for their ability to think critically and also apply their brains to implement and master the latest technologies to further create advanced solutions.

This whitepaper will help L&D leaders review and modernize their learning content and consider how best to engage and inspire their learners

Be agile, flexible and willing to adapt to change

A successful organisation is one that is agile, flexible and willing to adapt to change. These traits can only be found in organisations that have a culture of learning, and of embracing change. Organisations that tend to always preserve and protect their existing state of affairs will not progress much.

Agile organisations are the ones that have a culture of learning from their mistakes and failures; a culture that facilitates a growth mindset.

“Agility and experimentation are really important and with that creating an environment for people to learn, and not feeling like failure is a failure, but a part of a journey,” says Tina Lawton, regional director, Asia Pacific, Syngenta.

Take baby steps

Taking baby steps is the right approach to transformation. If something drastic is introduced overnight and the employees are expected to simply accept, adjust and adapt without any questions, they may actually fear the change and get intimidated.

Successful digital transformation can be brought about by first bringing in smaller changes that do not make a very drastic impact on the culture of the organisation all at once. This is where small, internal agile teams come into play, that indulge in small-scale experiments that do not require a huge investment. Simply put, digital transformation should be first tested through small pilot projects at the level of a small unit, department or team. The success of these experiments can then determine the application of the change on a much larger and wider scale in the organisation.

According to Atul Khosla, senior vice president, Mondelez International, “It is important to make the process digestible… rather than a big digital shift, make it more as an enabler. If you make it a big deal and say everyone needs to start using it tomorrow, it does not really stick; people get intimidated, they sometimes feel threatened.”

Provide incentives to employees to change

Employees often seem unwilling to adapt anything new because they are afraid of failure. Therefore, leaders should look at providing them incentives to give up their conventional ways. Also, with digitisation, data becomes more accessible to everyone, which affects power dynamics across hierarchies.

Those who once felt powerful because of the information they had in their possession, may end up feeling insecure and tense. The focus shifts from who requires the information to the reason why the information is required and the significance of the same.

Encourage tech savviness and spread the excitement

With 11 per cent of the respondents believing that digitisation was a passing fad, it is up to the head of the organisation to lead digital transformation from the front, for which she/he will need to engage with the employees.

Such a leader should also appreciate technological advancement and do everything possible to allow change to enter. Such a leader is able to nurture an organisation culture conducive to embracing digital transformation and ensuring its success.

The leader need not necessarily possess digital expertise or high level of technological know-how, but he should be able to convince all the stakeholders of the positive impact of the transformation and also ensure the right environment for successful implementation of the same. He should have the right talent in place and enter into appropriate collaborations that will take the goal of digital transformation forward. The head of the organisation, the CEO, should be so convinced about the forthcoming change that he should be able to get his followers excited about the same.

The post Does organisational culture impact digital transformation? appeared first on HR Katha.

At the same time, businesses are looking at great learning resources that improve business outcomes, support their people and improve both internal and external customer experience.

Organisations have understood that to promote learning amongst their people, they will have to go the multimodal way. They will have to use a learning method that uses more than one mode or media to engage the brain in multiple learning styles. This allows instructional elements to be presented in more than one sensory mode. Here are some of the most common training modalities available to learners today:
• Live instructor-led training (in classroom and/or virtual)
• E-learning courses
• Videos
• Books (print and/or online)
• Audio (podcasts and/or audiobooks)
• Mentoring (in-person and/or virtual)
• Practice environments (on-premises or virtual)
• Assessments and practice exams
• Resource files (PDFs, PPTs, Docs, and so on)
• Social learning (discussion groups, community sites, and so on)

Also, organisations need to be cognizant of the fact that learning modalities at work can differ, as per the need of the hour and the learning need itself. Take for instance these few cases:
• If your company is hacked, you need to quickly figure out a prevention technique. Having someone take an hour-long course to figure out what to do will not help. In such a situation, the team needs quick access to a short video or a section of a book that describes how to stop the specific attack. Another option is to let the team have access to a mentor who has faced a similar issue before and can provide a few quick tips on what can be done to help control the attack.

• If someone needs to learn a new programming language, a few five-minute videos or a few sections of a book will not help. The person will probably need at least one course (or maybe a series of courses), supported by in-depth books, practice coding environments, access to source code samples and so on, to be able to learn the language well.

• In case people need a quick refresher on a particular skill they already possess, retaking an entire class or reading a whole book will be a waste of time. A few targeted videos and a section or two of a book may be all they require to get back up to speed.

This whitepaper will help L&D leaders review and modernize their learning content and consider how best to engage and inspire their learners.

Clearly, the biggest benefit of a multimodal learning programme is that it allows unlimited, continuous, scalable learning at a reasonable cost. What an average company will spend in one day on a training session for its employees can suffice as the annual budget for training and learning round the year, through a trusted learning partner that offers a multi-modal programme. However, finding a single partner that offers all of it together isn’t easy.

Most learning organisations or vendors provide one, two, or at the most a handful of learning modalities. That puts buyers at the risk of huddling up too many vendors to get a mix of all modalities for their people.

This can create a disjointed user experience with multiple instructional styles, formats, navigation, and so on. This is why, organisations need to shop smartly and look out for the select few vendors who can provide a wider range of modalities and at the same time help address niche learning needs. There are also a few players in multimodal learning, who not only impart knowledge but also provide the facility to test and demonstrate the new skills or insight.

Lastly, multimodal learning not only allows people to analyse the effectiveness of a learning programme or a session, but enables understanding and optimised learning in real-world environments. According to a research, an average learner’s scores on basic skills assessments increase by 21 percentile when engaged in multimodal learning in comparison to single-mode learning.

Hence, it makes sense for organisations to proactively create a learning environment, which is conducive to various learning preferences by delivering the same content in multiple formats or multiple content in the same format. The fact remains that in a diverse work environment, everyone has their own interests, readiness and learning style, and multimodal learning is the way ahead.

The post Benefits of multimodal learning and how to choose the right learning partner appeared first on HR Katha.

The general prediction and assumption is that automation will take away jobs. However, the focus should not be on job gains or job losses, but on job content, because that is where the impact will be seen.

Take the Indian telecom industry for instance. On one hand, there has been a loss of 15000 jobs in customer support and finance, and on the other telecom companies are also hiring in large volumes in the areas of project management and IT infrastructure. Profiles including data team leaders, technical directors and network installation are expected to be much in demand.

In the past, technology was used to improve process efficiencies. Now, in the new world, all that has changed — AI systems can sense, communicate, interpret and learn. They can help businesses move beyond automation to elevate human capabilities that unlock new value.

Morgan Stanley, for instance, is augmenting the work of its 16,000 financial advisors through the introduction of AI agents. By learning about their clients, the intelligent advisors continually interact with their human co-workers to proactively recommend a range of options that take into account their clients’ changing financial situations. Financial advisors are consequently better placed to contact clients at the right time with more relevant advice.

Experts say that while technology will take away certain jobs and create new ones, the main issue will be that the number of people equipped with the skills required to do the new jobs will be scarce.

The newly-skilled workforce

The big question is whether organisations are training the existing workforce and preparing them for the future or whether they are waiting for that new generation of skilled workers to be created on their own?

The truth is that every organisation in this world will be affected by automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the internet of things. So, it is high time organisations realise that they need to reinvent and prepare their workforce for the future.

Constant learning is the only way out. What we learn today can become obsolete in the next few months. We have all been witness to how companies and services which became overnight global phenomena, lost their fizz in the bat of an eyelid.

The best way to truly prepare employees to meet organisational objectives is to focus training on three major areas of skill development. Download this Field Guide to learn the 3 major skill areas to focus on.

Organisations need to worry about people and not jobs. While jobs will be available, there should be people to perform the same. Organisations cannot protect jobs rendered redundant by technology – but they can nurture agility, adaptability and reskilling.

Only those companies and businesses which are able to estimate the radical changes and prepare accordingly, will survive. A depth of understanding and keen insight into the changing technology landscape is a must.

It’s natural for people to be anxious about their future. However, it is the responsibility of the organisation to initiate a mature conversation about the future or else, the anxiety will kill confidence and the willingness to innovate among people. This will affect the business in the present itself.

Whenever the big question about the future crops up, most commentators focus on technology, and the role of automation in jobs. However, the answer lies in how humans decide to use technology.

The fact remains that predicting the future will be a complex task. Linear predictions are too simplistic. Businesses, governments and individuals need to be prepared for a number of possible, even seemingly unlikely, outcomes – especially when there are too many complex forces at play.

Many people believe that automation will mainly affect the production pipeline and lower strata of workers. But this denial will not solve the purpose. The fundamental theory remains that jobs will be affected across levels and verticals. Accountants, lawyers, doctors, long-haul truckers, cab drivers and even teachers will need to brace for change.

Growth for the workforce will not be linear either. Rather, it will depend on what problems they can solve in the future.

Reconfiguring jobs is now inevitable. Organisations will have to identify tasks and allocate them between machines and humans. This will help the workforce move beyond functional jobs to specialised, insight-driven, multiskilled roles. Employees will take on work of higher value. They will get a chance to be more strategic and perform more satisfying work.

This will lead to a situation, where operational roles will become insight-driven roles; mono-skilled roles will change to multiskilled ones and technology-oriented roles will turn into creative ones. For instance, a leading Indian telecom company redesigned certain jobs in customer support and logistics support, and provided training to its employees to operate these technologies in an efficient manner.

New Business Models

Turning savings into investments for the future workforce will propel new business models.

With people doing lesser repetitive work, companies will have to adopt an open culture to encourage experimentation. In an agile workplace, hierarchies will collapse and cross-function teams will assemble and disassemble as per the projects. This will lead to an environment, where leaders will become co-creators and collaborators with their people.

Therefore, companies will have to invest in reskilling and training their workforce in the next three years.

The post Shaping the workforce for the not so distant future appeared first on HR Katha.

How do you see the edutech sector evolving in the next few years, especially when AI, machine learning and digitisation are changing the rules of the game?

With a large number of companies already existing, and smaller ones starting up at a rapid pace, the sector will see a massive shakeout in terms of smaller companies being acquired or integrated with the more established players. However, what will not change is the fact that user experience remains at the centre. Content should be designed and delivered from the perspective of user experience. It’s the same as any other HR process where it’s the end-user experience or the people that matters more than the process itself.

Of late, the annual performance review has been replaced by the ‘monthly 30 by 30’ initiative. Under this, every 30 days, there is a 30-minute discussion with employees about their job, growth path and so on, because employees cannot wait for a full year’s review about their performance and then decide what to do next. This feedback is more immediate and comes with a level of intimacy. For example, if an employee does a fantastic job or is an inspiration, the company can send a digital postcard where the persona is recorded on the internal directory. It’s all about enabling and empowering people through technology. The process is eased out by technology resulting in a culture of appreciation and learning, which ultimately means celebration of an individual.

What role do you see Skillsoft playing in the new eco-system? How has brand Skillsoft grown over the years?

Talking of some of the focus areas for Skillsoft, one of the things that we are trying to do is get people to learn faster, with greater recall and learning retention. Digital transformation is key to operationalisation and innovation in how learning is received.

Leadership is another aspect that has drastically changed over the years. Earlier, leadership- development efforts revolved around a bunch of people taking a three-day sabbatical, once a year, to take up some lessons from a mentor. Now things are different. It is not possible in the current times as no one knows when they will need to lead.

Companies now need to ensure that their employees are trained to lead a cross-functional team and take on leadership roles. It’s about enabling people such that even in times of skill shortage, there are managers who are ready and equipped to take up larger roles.

It’s extremely important for L&D or learning and development professionals to see how content can help the business grow. Unlike a few years ago, L&D is also seen as a significant contributor to the business- growth agenda and is responsible for the same. It is equally important to have the right people in the team. Ultimately, it is about getting everyone to understand the same language, with digital dexterity in every element of the organisation, and this has to flow from the top.

Of late, the annual performance review has been replaced by the ‘monthly 30 by 30’ initiative. Under this, every 30 days, there is a 30-minute discussion with employees about their job, growth path and so on, because employees cannot wait for a full year’s review about their performance and then decide what to do next. This feedback is more immediate and comes with a level of intimacy.

With other players in the B2B learning segment offering similar kind of services, how and where do you place Skillsoft? Which attributes of the brand differentiate it from the herd?

We’ve been around for over 20 years now, and over the years, we have been able to build and analyse unique data about how people learn and what they like to learn. Additionally, it is the multi-modal approach that gives us an edge. We have worked extensively on concepts such as micro-learning and now on ‘nano-learning’. As part of this, we have crisp 20 -second content.

On the other hand, we also have long-form content and a mix of resources according to the learning course one wishes to take up. For instance, one cannot learn Java coding only through micro-learning. One may need a mix of podcasts, manual learning, books, demo- labs and so on. It depends on what the person really wants. Contrary to the general belief, millennials love books and that proves how critical the depth of content really is.

What this means is that people learn differently and we understand that and offer scenario-based learning. This is a unique approach that brings in the essence of classroom or instructor-based learning in a virtual format. We have script writers, who create scenarios that explain concepts in a different way so that the learning gets embedded. For instance, there are actors who help us create relevant and easily-relatable content involving transgender employees or employees with disability, and the respective compelling scenarios, which people deal with at the workplace. There is a lot of animation as well, but everything largely depends on the topics being addressed.

Having trained over 450 million people already, we develop content which is right for the learner and keeps them engaged.

With aggregation, integration and personalisation of content and services ruling the roost, how do you think learning delivery is changing?

Aggregation only delivers content and does not guarantee learning. Content alone isn’t enough to ensure that people really pick the best or whether it addresses their specific needs. More content does not equal to more learning. In fact, it will at times lead to confusion.

Keeping that in mind, Percipio, Skillsoft’s online learning platform, looks at 20 years of data along with subject matter experts, to chart out 500 learning paths for various topics/courses through curated content. While aggregation of content is commonplace, most lack curation.

More than execution, the problem with digitisation is still the slow pace of adoption. How do you think organisations should drive a change in learning culture, to be able to optimally utilise the new-age learning solutions?

Adoption is certainly a tricky game, considering that people are busy most of the time and require easy access, along with a meaningful and comprehensive interface to be able to make the best use of a learning solution. It’s all about how convenient you make it for the user. That said, the Percipio Elsa app allows users learn in the flow of work – to access learning anywhere, anytime, permitting them to do multiple things at a time, as they do in general. This can help drive adoption at the workplace as well, enabling friction-less learning.

It’s extremely important for L&D or learning and development professionals to see how content can help the business grow. Unlike a few years ago, L&D is also seen as a significant contributor to the business- growth agenda and is responsible for the same.

Skillsoft has grown and transformed over the last two decades and so has the talent development and talent management space. How do you see it further transforming the way organisations look at talent?

We need to keep pushing the requirement for innovation. We want to make the development and practice for L&D professionals easier, and micro learning is important in that context.

It’s critical to consider that with new technologies disrupting the work environment and how businesses are being run, new jobs will emerge in the coming times. More responsiveness to these fast-approaching changes in job descriptions is required, for which, we need to predict and recommend learning that’s proactively futuristic and relevant.

Workplaces and how we work have seen a tremendous shift in the last few years and it is being feared that automation will further change the nature of jobs, or may be even take away a few. How do you think reskilling or upskilling will help, and what should organisations be doing now to prevent their talent from becoming redundant?

Studies have pointed that millions of jobs will become redundant and more jobs will be created at the same time. It is the employers’ responsibility to educate employees and help update their skills.

Recently, the World Economic Forum pointed out that women may be more impacted by AI and machine learning, as a majority of women function in roles that will be displaced by technology, such as in the retail shop-floors. They need to figure out new roles for employees based on their personality type and suitability for the job. Employers will have to be the prime educators for readying the workforce for the future, preventing any redundancies.

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Organisations often stress on the need for compliance and see it as a regulatory affair. In doing so, they fail to evaluate the benefits that come with it.

Some companies view the creation of a compliance culture as an expense that does not produce enough return on investment. This perception may be created when companies spend large sums of money on poorly-planned compliance programmes that produce disappointing results.

What companies need to believe, accept and practise is the integration of compliance as a key component of their culture. Not only does this result in a higher satisfaction level for employees, but should also result in improved productivity and employee retention. Eventually, there is an increase in reputation and brand perception, which results in better economic performance in the marketplace. In addition, as safety records improve, it reduces both cost and risk.

“Organisations fail to embrace an ethical and compliant culture, it can damage an organisation and result in financial and life-changing consequences for individuals within the company. Over-programming of compliance also deprives the organisations of the benefits of an ethical, people-centric culture,” says John Arendes, VP & GM – Global Compliance Solutions, Skillsoft.

Know the six elements of an effective compliance training program and try Percipio compliance to make compliance learning enjoyable and engaging.

Compliance issues may result in the loss of lucrative government and third-party contracts that have stringent compliance requirements.

“If a violation does occur, organisations that have consistently demonstrated strong compliance cultures may be treated more favourably in court. The Department of Justice declined to prosecute a major bank because of its effective, pre-existing compliance programme,” he quips.

However, as companies start realising the benefits of compliance, the big question raised is how to integrate the same into the company culture.

Organisations fail to embrace an ethical and compliant culture, it can damage an organisation and result in financial and life-changing consequences for individuals within the company. Over-programming of compliance also deprives the organisations of the benefits of an ethical, people-centric culture.

Once a company has a mindset to embark upon a compliance journey, it helps to have a road map to ensure a clearly-defined route to the destination.

The Skillsoft Compliance Maturity Model provides a framework for organisations to follow.

There are five stages in the journey to achieve a fully mature compliance culture:

• Stage 1: Awareness of compliance requirements

• Stage 2: ‘Check-the-box’ to meet minimal requirements

• Stage 3: Top-down behavioural change

• Stage 4: Self-driven behavioural change

• Stage 5: Full integration of compliance and business strategy

Now, once organisations have stepped in to embark on the compliance journey, here are the five things that it should do:

Get leadership buy-inYour compliance journey must start with commitment from the leadership team in order to achieve behaviour change. Executives need to define and own the risk management process.

Identify Risks Risks to the organisation should be identified and prioritised. High-risk issues will require the greatest commitment to training and to achieve behavioural change. Low-risk issues should receive minimal attention.

Align Risks to Business GoalsOnce the risks have been prioritised, they should be aligned to support key business goals and incorporated into the strategic plan for the organisation. Key goals may include revenue growth, expense reduction, risk reduction, and employee safety.

With the compliance strategy in hand, a training programme should be planned to train the right people, on the appropriate subjects, in the right way. The learnings from the training should be embedded in the daily routine of employees and practised on the job.

Be Strategic with TrainingTraining courses should be designed to appeal to the mind as well as the heart. Many compliance training programmes overlook the emotional aspect of training. Emotional training messages help team members feel that the company is looking out for the safety and well-being of the employees, their co-workers, and even their families and loved ones. By instilling pride in working for an ethical company, employees will stay longer and work harder to support company goals. People enjoy feeling that they are a part of something good and bigger than themselves. Help employees understand that bad behaviour may have dire consequences.

Be RelevantYour compliance training programme needs to target the right job roles for each training format. Nothing will turn employees off faster than wasting time taking a training course that is of no help to them in their roles.

Develop Metrics  Meaningful metrics for the compliance programme should be established at the onset. Metrics should be aligned around the key company goals that the compliance programme has been designed to support. The compliance programme should be implemented in such a way that data for the metrics can be easily collected and reported. Targets for the metrics should be realistic and achievable. When targets are unachievable, people are not motivated to reach them.

The benefits of creating a compliance culture are clear, but some organisations find it difficult to overcome inertia and get on a path to improvement. A common mistake in planning compliance programmes is to spend too much time and money on training that does not support high-priority business goals. Compliance training for low-priority goals should be minimised.

Also, compliance-driven organisations should mandate learning officers to educate employees on corporate ethics and compliance policies.

A people-centric compliance culture can help organisations reach important goals, such as revenue growth, cost and risk reduction, and improved safety. To proactively manage compliance and help the organisation become ‘always audit ready’, compliance information, training, work management and tracking should all be integrated into the systems employees use every day.

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A famous quote states that to motivate employees to learn, you have to first get out of their way. We all remember times when we found a mandatory learning and compliance module in our inbox which was impossibly hard to sit through. On the other hand, it is so much more enjoyable to sit through learning courses that are self-chosen, tailor-made and personalised for us. So, how do companies bridge the gap between these approaches and integrate the same into their learning and development (L&D) programmes?

Today, the global L&D industry is worth $140bn and counting. In order to meet their human capital development objectives, companies must motivate employees to opt for learning management systems (LMS) often, and effectively. That is, however, easier said than done in the ‘attention economy’, where a hundred distractions exist. Modern digital services have transformed user expectations, with employees now demanding consumerised versions of training that are easy to access, available as micro and nano learning, and work seamlessly across devices.

Companies are thus turning to ‘Spaced Learning’—modules that can be completed in a few minutes and can be resumed at a later stage— without sacrificing value addition over different channels. 

Moreover, today’s multigenerational workforce is dominated by millennials who expect their LMS platforms to deliver the same user experience as a Google or a Netflix. So, companies need to evolve the methods of learning delivery and make the learning experience engaging and intuitive for the modern consumer. And of course, they need to add value for a generation that is more focused on career advancement than ever.

Companies are thus turning to ‘Spaced Learning’—modules that can be completed in a few minutes and can be resumed at a later stage— without sacrificing value addition over different channels. At any given time, employees can access videos, courses, tutorials, podcasts, TED talks, webinars, research papers and so much more. Employers must embrace this disruption and enable the plethora of content availability as curated learning paths for employees. To excel at this, companies thus require platform-based learning models with high-quality micro-learning content that is pre-curated and available on demand.

Watch this to gain insights into best practice for aggregating, managing and promoting this content.

First and foremost, this model must deliver training content that is hyper-personalised, available on-demand for every employee, and can automatically sync across multiple devices that are generally used to access content by the multigenerational workforce. This involves embedding digital technologies that require significant investments, and companies should not shirk away from incurring such costs. Learning on-demand functions is a long-term investment for employees, and organisations should do all they can to provide personalised and hyper-segmented content in the 21st century.

Debasis Dutta

Second, employers must also focus on aggregating and curating learning content from multiple sources. IBM has released several studies stating that knowledge doubles every 12 months worldwide. Therefore, employees are constantly opting for tools that enhance their knowledge. Thus, employers must also adopt this methodology, and reach out to users where they go to learn. This can be done when their organisational development efforts support and leverage external learning activities by ensuring that they can bring in, curate and track non-traditional learning material from a wide range of sources—from YouTube to Massive Open Online Communities (MOOCs) to specific custom content appropriate for their organization.

Third, companies need to adopt xAPI, or Experience API technology and standardise the tracking of learning activities within their organization, and plug xAPI enabled content with their learning platforms. This will ensure that every digital click of the employees works towards their learning and development objectives by adapting to their unique learning needs. Companies can also encourage collaborative and social learning by integrating xAPI effectively. Maintaining Learning Record Stores (LRS) that track all digital activities and tailoring training accordingly within their learning ecosystem can allow companies to boost a learning culture and developmental opportunities for their workforce. By adopting xAPI technology and an xAPI conformant, LRS is a leap towards future value and ROI of their learning programmes.

None of this can be achieved without aggregating and analysing data around employee usage with preferences at the heart of it. Knowing what motivates workers can help organisations evolve their LMS platforms to satisfactorily meet the engagement needs of the 21st century platform economy.

Doing so also would encourage discoverability and peer recommendations, ultimately making the platform function successfully in a self-sustaining manner. Employees are equipped to build their own learning models based on their aspirations, and shape their career path. Employers, on the other hand, can stay ahead of the pack.

(The author is V-P & GM, product management at SumTotal Systems.)

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Every organisation wants to jump onto the digitisation bandwagon. It’s the latest buzzword. Not surprising, since that’s affecting business like nothing else has ever done. According to a Bersin By Deloitte study, 90 per cent of organisations surveyed believe their core business is threatened by new digital competitors.

Digitisation doesn’t only affect the way we deal or interact with our customers but it also impacts the way organisations are structured, the way we work and what new skills are required—both now and in the immediate future.

Digitisation erases the legacy mindsets, and paves the way for more agile, collaborative, innovative and adaptive methods of doing business.

Unfortunately, 70 per cent of the companies surveyed by Bersin By Deloitte, agree that they do not have the right leadership, skills, or operating models to adapt.

One must remember that digital transformation is not just about implementing fancy new tools. A company successfully transforms itself into a digital company when people obtain digital skills. Of course that has to start with the leader of the organisation and should spread top to bottom.

Digital transformation is often owned by the chief technology/information officer with strong inputs from the chief executive officer.

It’s also important for companies to evaluate and understand what ‘digital talent’ means. Until the company fully understands the digital profiles, or job functions, available in the market and within the company, there can be no clear way to determine how many digital employees—and in what profiles—it must recruit, develop and retain.

However, the team needs to have the following skills for successful digital transformation.

1. Data analytics

Any digital transformation project will incur a high volume of data. Therefore, data analytics, market research analytics and database administration skills should be the most sought after skill sets.

Suppose a bank wants to implement a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution that uses intelligent software or robots to automate the repetitive and mundane data collection and entry tasks between the websites, banking systems, internal applications and other portals. The skills it should seek are those pertaining to data analytics, which is indispensible.

2. Digital literacy
Digital literacy is the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills. So it’s much more than just technical knowledge.

It’s not necessary for the digital team to be digital native, but the team members need to understand and appreciate the role technology plays in their daily and professional lives.

Click here for a comprehensive guide on the digital skills landscape for modern organisations.

3. Learnability

People with a creative bent of mind, and those with cognitive flexibility and emotional intelligence are important, but the most important aspect is learnability. Businesses need to recruit people who are willing to learn, upskill and keep pace with the changing skill sets digital transformation continues to introduce. In addition, they should not be afraid to take risks, fail, and innovate and it’s not just in technology but also in new management and leadership techniques.

4. Change-management skills

Yes, it’s a digital world, but the human touch and interaction is necessary. Digitisation could disrupt the lives of many employees, which is why people with effective communication and analytics skills and those who can manage change will be required. It is important to keep the team spirit alive with regular and personalised communication and face-to-face meetings as well.

5. Ability to facilitate, plan and inspire

The digitisation team is the mediator between digital immigrants and digital natives. Both are important for the business and the job of the digitisation team is to bridge the gap between the two so that everyone in the organisation benefits from the transformation.

The team should comprise visionaries, who also possess the ability to inspire others to believe in their plans.

6. Ability to motivate
Successful leaders possess a vision, and the ability to convince others too to believe in their vision. This means that digital leaders need to be great storytellers to be able to connect and motivate others. While there will be early adopters, there will also be doubters who will need time to acclimatise themselves to the new technology. The leaders will have to handle both.

Digital leaders need not only be technological experts but also be able to envision possibilities that don’t yet exist.

The digital team or the organisation undergoing digital transformation needs to keep one simple thing in mind–people come first.

Forcing people to use a new tool or to adopt new processes at a moment’s notice will only lead to them rejecting the new measures. It’s important to communicate the benefits of the new technology and processes to the team and offer sufficient training and coaching to familiarise people with it. Digital transformation shouldn’t be a chore, it should become part of the organisation and everyone should live it.

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Diversity at the workplace may have become the most talked about agenda across the globe. Yet, it remains a mere tick in the box for many. For years organisations have struggled to have a perfectly balanced diverse workforce, but only a handful have really got it in place. According to a 2017 report by McKinsey, only one in every four management positions is held by a woman. The gender gap is even worse when it comes to senior leadership positions in large corporations, with only 5.2 per cent of S&P 500 CEOs being women.

Fragmented efforts and one-off initiatives dominate diversity-building agendas in most organisations. However, it is not enough and will never be, for organisations looking to really leverage the power of diversity.

Additionally, the question of accountability for the D&I agenda also haunts many organisations. Is it the CEO or the CHRO, who’s responsible for putting the good mix in place? Or is there really a need to have a separate resource for the same? Is it time for organisations to consider appointing a chief diversity officer? If yes, then why? These are some of the pressing concerns of many organisations.

Experts believe having a chief diversity officer on board can significantly change things for businesses and for good. Also, organisations that do have a dedicated resource are able to take a planned, outcome-driven approach to diversity building, in turn resulting in a more productive and engaged workforce.

Roopa Wilson, diversity & inclusion leader, IBM India/South Asia, shares what it takes to create a truly inclusive workforce. “It’s not just enough to have the right policies and infrastructure in place. A dedicated resource whose primary job role is to ensure diversity and inclusion, is key,” she says. In addition to a resource, a dedicated budget for the diversity team ensures more accountability and commitment to the purpose. It also offers ease of operations for planning and executing the right strategies.

Gender equality has long been a challenge of organizations worldwide, and in spite of awareness efforts and education, a challenging environment still exists for women leaders in the workplace. Read this Women in Leadership Research Report to learn about Brandon Hall Group’s top 5 findings.

Sodexo just released an expansive five-year-long study of 70 entities spread across different functions representing 50,000 managers worldwide. This study found out that organisations with better gender parity perform better, boast of a high retention rate and also a 14 per cent higher employee-engagement rate than others.

Focussed largely on gender diversity, Sodexo itself has 50 per cent women on board. 32 per cent of senior leadership positions are held by women globally, while middle-management and site-management positions are balanced at 46 per cent. Currently, 59 per cent of the total workforce works within gender-balanced management. Along with a strong vision for a gender-diverse workforce, Sodexo also has a chief diversity officer who ensures everything is in place.

Rohini Anand, Ph.D, senior vice president-corporate responsibility and global chief diversity officer, Sodexo, says, “A balanced talent mix combined with an inclusive culture helps to enhance innovation, engagement and productivity to achieve the right business outcomes.” While suggesting the core benefit of ensuring inclusivity, Anand also hints on the role of a diversity officer.

With regard to reporting, Wilson recommends that ideally the chief diversity officer should report to the CEO. “The accountability for the agenda should not lie with HR. While HR can always be a huge support, the ownership should lie with business,” she opines. Even at IBM, Wilson and her team report into HR currently. However, their manner of working is such that they are aligned to business largely, and hence, it is more like a dual reporting structure.

Wilson shares that the chief diversity officer has to be a change agent —one who questions the status quo—and this function interacts with not just various other HR functions but other business lines as well, to ensure the same.

Needless to say, organisations that do have a dedicated resource for ensuring diversity and inclusion are able to do a better job of it. Most progressive organisations are now investing in a chief diversity officer, who is responsible for bringing in focussed efforts leading to measured outcomes. This certainly reflects in their diverse workforces.

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We have all been there many times. Faced by an impending deadline, staring at the screen and reading through files to see what we’re missing. And, then reading through hordes of e-mails to find that one critical one, which is lost in the clutter. As per Carleton University, workers around the world spend a third of their time in office and half their working time at home, reading and answering e-mails that are neither urgent nor important. That equates to an average of 17 hours a week. So, how do companies address this inefficiency and make their workforce more productive?

The answer, now more than ever, lies with the community. We are in an age of collaboration. With so much information available at breakneck speed on multiple devices, today’s workforce has the advantage of working with team members from any corner of the globe. Thanks to modern technology, workers can get solutions through smartphones, social media, online communities and more, to resolve the most mundane or complex of tasks. However, the Everest Group says that India commands only $600–700 million of the global $54 billion human resource technology space . So, there is room for massive growth.

Thanks to cloud computing, portals such as intranets and wikis are dominating the idea-sharing space. No longer do teams have to physically congregate for weekly meetings; they simply post updates or meet via Skype. Employees no longer need to plan catch-ups with colleagues for insights; they can simply post a question online and get dynamic ideas and solutions within minutes.

Social collaboration at the workplace
Suppose you wish to dine out. You simply visit Zomato and quickly read through the reviews of a restaurant you are considering. The law of averages convinces you that if a restaurant has mostly positive reviews, it is probably worth visiting. You end up deciding in about five minutes. This is how the crowdsourcing economy works, and this is how the modern workplace also functions. Though the term has only been coined recently, its adoption has been immense, especially amongst the millennial generation. The decision-making process is now a part of everyone’s daily lives.

Companies are taking note of the changes and providing their employees with access to collaborative tools. These tools create a level of engagement for both employees and consumers, leading to a rise in performance-related business outcomes. McKinsey states that a minimum of 93 per cent of companies use at least one social technology tool for internal or customer-facing operations to boost productivity.

To compete effectively in a global economy, organisations are recognising the need to adapt and innovate as open cultures. Read this to know how adoption of social technologies enable users navigate seven Cs while remaining meaningful to the workflow of the business.

Most of the tools employed are cloud-based and designed for real-time interactions. Using these, employees can search through gigabytes of documents or conversations, enjoy a customised user experience and integrate functionality with related technologies, such as file sharing or social media, at the workplace. It is not hard to imagine a future, where such tools completely eliminate the need for e-mail as the default mode of written communication.

Collaborative tools, such as Slack, Yammer and Facebook for Work enable employees to ask for what they need and get it instantly. Whether it is a document, an idea, a training module or any other resource, this process almost guarantees quick responses. Some of the clear benefits of social collaboration that companies are now enjoying are:

• Fewer biases

• Better ideation and brainstorming

• Warm camaraderie between colleagues

Social collaboration tools at the workplace make it simpler to solve breakdowns in communication. They offer real-time agility by connecting people easily. This ultimately leads to improved team dynamics, leadership, teamwork and creativity. PwC calls this the ‘Orange World ’. Here, organisations create smaller groups that collaborate and network together to seek new opportunities and fulfill business objectives. This method brings people together on a task-by-task basis, helping enhance flexibility and boost productivity, while minimising costs.

This new way of working also compels organisations to post ideas themselves and invite inputs from their employees. This strengthens the internal trust and gives external stakeholders a glimpse into the inner workings of the companies they invest money and attention in. Proactive communication channels therefore drive knowledge sharing. In India, McKinsey has pinpointed 12 key empowering technologies that will contribute $1 trillion in GDP by 2025 . For that to happen, social collaboration is the key.

Technology alone cannot make people smarter or more productive. The key lies in how technology is used and implemented. For best results, the workforce needs to embrace new ways of working and adopt social collaboration at the same time. This can alter the corporate culture and make community-driven working a fabric of every company’s DNA.

(The author is V-P & GM, product management at SumTotal Systems.)

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At the recent World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, IMF chief Christine Lagarde said that higher women participation in the workforce could boost India’s GDP by 27 per cent. The significant potential of women to strengthen the global economy, and to enhance the overall quality of life, is now being acknowledged worldwide. And, progress indeed has been made in recent years, as far as promoting deserving and aspiring women executives in the organisations is concerned. Still, much remains to be done.

A major reason for the skewed gender representation further up the corporate ladder is that many women drop out owing to family pressure, motherhood, inadequate opportunities, or lack of sponsorship. Across Asia, 29 per cent of women quit their careers between junior- and mid-level positions. A combination of these factors has led to an alarming situation today, where women account for only up to 25 per cent of the C-suite in 70 per cent of companies worldwide.

A recent McKinsey report described gender inequality as an urgent “moral and social issue”, as well as a “critical economic challenge”. The global economy “will suffer”, if women—who constitute 50 per cent of the world’s working-age population—fail to realise their full economic potential, the report warned.

Of course, opinionated debates on this issue continue to take place regularly, as a greater number of women graduate with advanced degrees and possess the same skills and aspirations as their male peers. But what does it mean for the corporate world when only a handful of women climb the corporate ladder and reach senior executive positions?

Read this to learn How to Get More Women Into Leadership Positions.

Unfortunately, the systemic aspects underpinning this situation cannot simply be waved away. It requires sustained time and effort, something many organisations are reluctant to pursue. Done the right way, boosting gender-diversity ratios can increase the probability of an organisation outperforming its average industry competitor by 15 per cent, in terms of financial returns.

The root causes of skewed gender representation
Unequal opportunities, lack of structured sponsorship and insufficient maternity benefits have often been cited as key factors behind the woeful under-representation of women in leadership roles. However, one factor that frequently goes unnoticed is the expectation placed on women at home and at the workplace. Women, more often than not, are asked to ultimately make a choice–family, home or career. There are inspiring examples of women leaders who balance both, but many begin to burn out when faced with this binary choice.

Combined with the widely prevalent subconscious bias, this dynamic accentuates the problem of a lack of women entering the leadership pipeline. Integrated training has the potential to address this problem, but it is often forwarded to a select cluster of affinity groups of women without follow-ups or progress measurement. Programmes that fill specific leadership gaps and avoid the pitfalls of being under-funded and under-supported are rare.

Varied efforts do lead to tangible outcomes in the short term, but without organisation-wide integration they fall flat. That is because, enterprises fail to realise that removing gender bias and promoting women leadership requires effective post-session reinforcement. It is necessary to deliver these in an environmentally supportive manner that offers targeted development to evolve women’s leadership capabilities. Other factors that need to be overcome to achieve these goals are:

• Lack of role models in executive positions
• Boxed mentality of organisations
• Focus on gendered structural approaches to hiring
• Resistance to change and lack of effort
• Short-term financial focus

Holistic approach to nurture women leaders
In order to mitigate this workplace imbalance, organisations must adopt gender-equitable practices across the employee lifecycle. Focusing on hiring, mentoring and retention in a gender-neutral way is the first step that can make a world of difference. Seeing successful women leaders in the organisation can have a snowball effect, inspiring others to leverage their experiences and skills to perform in similar roles.

From an organisational point of view, putting in place mindsets, policies and infrastructure that encourage women leaders should be a core priority. These include flexi-time policies, opportunities to relaunch careers post maternity, long-term sponsorship programmes, and a growing impetus toward encouraging men to share responsibilities at home. Judging employees purely on outcomes is also imperative.

Progressive enterprises have already realised the business impact of balanced gender representation. The ripple effects of such a scenario create faster visible and vocal improvements as women fill more leadership positions. However, there is much left to be done to reach a stage where women leaders are the norm rather than the exception. Companies must holistically adopt an inclusive, forward-looking philosophy to build a diverse workforce, and change existing patriarchal mindsets permanently.

(The author is chief creative officer, Skillsoft.)

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Digitisation is top priority for businesses across the globe. However, where most companies flounder is in the rush to jump into the digitisation bandwagon without evaluating their preparedness.

Research suggests that only seven per cent of leading businesses exhibit a digital-first and dexterous mindset, wherein they can self-organise, create partnerships around new digital initiatives and hold significant experience and skills in digital technologies.

Evaluating digital readiness is a must. It helps businesses get an overview of the current status of the organisation and identifies any level of discourse. Digitisation is all about transforming capabilities across operations and customer experience, for which an agile approach is required. Organisations that can sustain both capability and agility are true digital organisations.

So how does any organisation evaluate itself on digital readiness?

Any business needs to answer the following questions in these four areas to evaluate itself :

Culture: Will digitisation empower its employees?

Technology: How will it use and adopt emerging technologies?

Organisation: How aligned is it to support digital strategy, governance, and execution?

Insights: How effectively can it use customer and business data to measure success and inform strategy?

One of the greatest challenges facing learning leaders today is successfully enabling the organisation’s shift to digital. See this infographic to know your organisation’s level of preparedness in addressing this challenge.

Once a business has positive answers to the above-mentioned questions, it’s time for it to delve deeper and further evaluate itself.

These are the 10 key questions, organisations need to ask themselves:

 Depending on the answers to the above questions, businesses can slot themselves into four broad categories of digital preparedness, as follows:

1. Does our competitive strategy depend on digitisation?

2. Does digitisation enable a better and well-defined cross-functional collaboration?

3. Does the board or CXO approve of and back the digital strategy?

4. Does every employee understand how their performance is tied with corporate digital goals?

5. Do the vendor partners deliver value that enhances our digital competencies?

6. Do we have the right leaders to execute the digital strategy?

7. Do we have enough budget to invest in targeted digital education and training at all levels?

8. Do we have a flexible, iterative, and collaborative approach to technology development?

9. Does the business have clear and quantifiable goals for measuring the success of digital strategy?

10. Is the technology team measured by business outcomes and not just system up-time?

 Level1

Sceptics: These companies have limited experience innovating or applying an outside-in approach to strategic planning. Their use of online sales channels is limited and they execute few digital marketing programmes. To adopt a more willing attitude towards digital adoption, such companies need to centralise their digital resources and at the same time, initiate a few path-finding projects to warm up their executives.

Level2

Adopters: Such businesses have more digital practice than the sceptics. They are willing to invest in the basic architecture required to fulfil their digital ambition. For this, adopters will need to get dirty with digital, which means they need to scale up their internal resources and limit their dependency on outsourced expertise.

Level3

Collaborators: These companies collaborate internally and externally to enable practice and innovation with digital. There is a strong coordination and regular communication between their marketing and IT teams. For these companies, the next level is to align skills and technology with the customer experience and master digital influence to drive sales.

Level4

Differentiators: These companies have a strong revenue growth and are heavily online focussed. The next growth opportunity for these digital experts is to perfectly eliminate the separation between the digital and physical worlds.

The strategy can then be framed, depending on the level of preparedness.

Heide Abelli, senior vice president, content product management, Skillsoft, is of the view that digital transformation enables an organisation to compete in the ever-changing digital economy, more effectively. Today, individuals, irrespective of the industry, are using advances, such as sophisticated data analytics, the Internet of Things, social media, smart embedded devices and a combination of new technologies and traditional technologies to change customer relationships, internal processes, business models and value propositions.

“This means that in a smart interconnected world, technical functions and traditional business functions need to join forces in new ways and organisations need to adopt new modes of operating,” she says. She further shares that companies that embrace digital transformation enjoy 16 per cent higher revenues, generate 26 per cent more profit and have 12 per cent greater market valuations. Still, however, less than half (46 per cent) of the companies are investing in skills to prepare the organisation for digital transformation.

“Clearly, L&D departments and HR functions have a lot of work ahead to ready their organisations for all the implications of digital transformation,” Abelli asserts.

Hence, it’s advisable to evaluate the business on digital preparedness and then take the plunge. A systematic self-assessment is a must. It establishes a long-term foundation for making investment decisions, and helps functions collaborate better, which is not only relevant for the company’s digital structures, but also for its product and service portfolio.

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The new-age digital world of work is different from how it was until a few years back, and in line with that, the definition of effective leadership has also undergone a sea change. In addition to inspiring and supporting people to achieve the desired outcomes, the digital era requires leaders to be more agile and nimble in adopting the new times, and yet be very grounded in ensuring the same human connect that brings people together to work efficiently.

This is why, developing great leaders is now one of the biggest agendas for chief executives across organisations. This hyper-connected, dynamic work environment now requires organisations to re-look at their long-held leadership-grooming models, and the foremost step in that direction is to redefine the traits of an effective leader in the digital era. Here are some key skills that leaders need to possess in the age of digital transformation.

Agility

This is one trait that has been really overhyped in how it has been used ins various contexts across business, while losing out its real essence and application in the real world. Agility in mindset, behaviour and actions is a key skill for leaders in the digital age. The ability to use iterative approaches to divide work efforts into short phases, for early and frequent evaluation; and the flexibility to pivot and transition between varied roles and activities is what makes one agile in the true sense.

Cross-functional dexterity
This is an important quality for leaders, to be able to effectively collaborate across a range of functions, ensuring interconnectedness and streamlined operations across the organisation. In addition, great leaders are capable of offering solutions to cross-functional challenges.

Is your business ready to adapt? Do your leaders have the required skills to take your business forward?

Design thinking
It is the ability to take a design-centric approach to work, while combining empathy, ingenuity and rationality, to address customer needs. This can be achieved by observing behaviour and drawing conclusions about what customers want and need.

Analytical/data-driven mindset
This is one of the most crucial and defining skills that leaders need to possess to be able to survive and be effective in the digital age. Using data and insights for better decision-making and the ability to take a balanced approach to make data-driven decisions have become vital to working in times of big data and analytics.

Virtual collaboration
With flexi-working and remote-working becoming increasingly common, the leadership rules for managing remote or virtual teams have also changed. New-age leaders need to be able to productively drive engagement and demonstrate the power of their presence, even as leaders of virtual teams. They need to be open to leveraging behaviours, practices, techniques and tools that facilitate ef?cient and effective cooperation among dispersed collaborators.

New media literacy
Being socially active and leveraging all media to effectively communicate is essential for leaders in the ‘here and now’ times. This skill entails the ability to leverage new media for persuasive communication and use techniques that target social networks and applications to spread brand awareness and promote products and services.

Computational thinking
This is a problem-solving technique that allows one to decompose a certain problem into smaller, more manageable fragments that are easy to analyse and then draw patterns to look for feasible solutions. It is the ability to understand and practise data-based reasoning, and translate data into abstract concepts. It is what makes leaders adept at finding effective solutions to complex issues in the digital era.

Passion for continuous learning
One trait that never fades out, but has become even more important in the fast-paced dynamic work environment now, is the zeal to learn more. The enthusiasm to seek out and acquire new information and knowledge coupled with a sense of curiosity and a willingness to continue to develop and grow is what will prevent leaders from getting outdated in times of digital transformation.

Team-based orientation
One of the evergreen and most essential skills that leaders need to display is the ability to understand and use behaviours, practices and processes that optimise team interaction and facilitate achievement of common goals. Being an accountable leader to the team and having a desire to achieve consensus and involve others in decision making is vital for any leader to succeed meaningfully in the present times, and more so in those to come.

Customer-centric orientation
A skill that is important for every employee in an organisation, but is a make or break for determining the efficiency of a leader is customer orientation. Great leaders consider customer experience above all. The skill involves using practices and techniques to identify and resolve pain points most critical to the customer.

Leaders in the digital transformation age cannot do without the new skills mentioned above. In addition to conventional skills that never run out of importance, these skills here will redefine effective leadership in the times to come. They will determine how good leaders function and organisations need to consciously identify and develop their leaders with a strong focus on these skills.

Skillsoft_infographic_Ten_Key_Skills_Required_of_Leaders_in_an_Age_of_Di..pdf

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Can you remember the last time you wanted to make an online purchase? You probably did a preliminary search on Google and read some online reviews, just the way 1.66 billion users (number of digital buyers worldwide from 2014 to 2021) have done so far in 2017. While you were still in two minds, you saw a digital ad that was specifically tailored and retargeted to you. This ad clinched the decision-making process and convinced you to go ahead and make the purchase on Amazon. You then rated the product and started browsing recommendations thrown up by the seller.

Now, think of the last time you were at your workplace and logged in to your company intranet. Was the experience just as intuitive or memorable? In all likelihood, it wasn’t. That’s because only about 13 per cent of employees log in and participate on their intranet on a daily basis. That leaves organisations with very little motivation to improve such portals to deliver the best experiences.

However, an engaged workforce is a more productive one, so there is no better reason for companies to start immediately.

At the heart of this deployment though, are the changing expectations of the 21st century workforce. Today, there are about 2.3 billion smartphone users in the world and hundreds of millions of apps.

So, it is fair to say that there is literally an app for everything. All these apps provide a level of personalisation and hyper-segmentation that have exposed users to intuitive services that just know what they want. Now, there is no reason for these users to not have the same expectations from their enterprise-grade applications as well.

To deliver the very best consumer-grade experiences, organisations need to adopt machine learning algorithms that study workforce behaviour and adapt accordingly.

We expect the same level of targeting, intuitiveness and UI-focussed design from our company’s communications. Facebook-like timelines, Google-like search results and Spotify-like people management are the standards we use to judge our enterprise-grade applications. For companies, this presents a unique blend of opportunity and challenge that can ultimately help them improve their offerings to create a loyal and productive workforce.

No company can deny that their employees are their greatest strength. In a world dominated by social media, every employee can provide an accurate reflection of the buyer personas and customers of the organisation. By studying the habits and preferences of their employees and by shaping their services around them, organisations can truly begin to understand their customers better. So, when it comes to things such as training, talent management, internal communications and workflow management, companies are aware that their employees now expect consumer-grade experiences.

Learn how a holistic HCM system will provide you with personalized tools that engage every employee in a unique self-directed path for career growth and mobility.

To deliver the very best consumer-grade experiences, organisations need to adopt machine learning algorithms that study workforce behaviour and adapt accordingly. This includes the adoption of push models that display recommendations to employees, either on their phones or on their workstations, about the tasks they should be participating in. This is in stark contrast to the previously dominant pull model, wherein an employee would have to actively seek out information as and when required. These machine learning algorithms enable organisations to learn all about the likes and dislikes of employees to display the most relevant information at the right time.

For instance, when new employees join an organisation, they can be given access to a centralised dashboard that shows all the designated training programmes for their level, reporting structures, compensation details and several other helpful references. As they complete their allocated training sessions, they could earn badges and receive further recommendations for continuous learning. Such an interactive system will enable employees to choose their own learning models, based on recommendations. This can help them chart out their own development plan, and achieve professional goals sooner by enhancing their job fitment.

So how can companies go about provisioning personalised, intuitive experiences to their employees? The solution is for organisations to undertake hyper-segmentation through interactions analysis with their employees, much like how they do with their customers. By doing so, they can boost proactive and predictive engagement for all activities and set engagement patterns for the existing and future workforce. By offering hyper-personalised applications, organisations can thus provide worker-enabled applications that meet consumer-grade expectations. Consumerised enterprise software ultimately provide great user experience founded on goal-based gamification. The end result — enhanced productivity, reduced attrition and greater user experience — can prove essential for every single organisation.

(The author is VP & GM – Product Management at SumTotal Systems)

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Digitisation is the latest fad in the business world. Not only is it highly overused but also used without context. Most people believe that digitisation will competently transform their business. Yes, it may do so but not the way one would expect it to. People associate quite heavy words with digitisation—amazing, fabulous, terrific, incredible, and the most commonly used term is revolutionary. HR Katha identifies a few myths associated with digitisation.

Myth #1: Every company should digitally transform
No! Every company or every function within it doesn’t need to be digitally transformed. For any initiative undertaken by a business, the final outcome should be governed by market share, revenue, and profit. Therefore, unless an organisation makes a convincing business case of the digital transformation, the entire effort goes futile. So, do not opt for digital transformation, just for the sake of it.

There will be a time when an organisation will experience a decline in the efficiency of its rules, processes, models and systems. That’s the right time for a digitisation drive.

Myth #2: Digital transformation is all about disruptive technologies
Digital transformation is about the operational and strategic technologies used in day-to-day activities, for instance, networking and database management, ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management software). The impact is maximum when digital transformation is applied to technologies that are widespread.

Myth #3: Digital transformation results in complete transformation, overnight
Absolutely wrong! Yes, digital transformation has transformed businesses, but certainly not overnight. Take the banking industry, for instance, where transactions have moved from a paper-based system to a nearly ubiquitous digital experience, where transactions happen through smartphones. A revolutionary change, indeed! But mind it, this did not happen overnight. And not just digitisation, there were several other factors that played a role in transforming business. In the case of the banking industry, the transformation happened via multiple incremental steps over nearly two decades.

Read this to know why digital transformation can’t succeed without people and HR.

Myth #4: Big profitable companies are most likely to get digitally transformed

True, but not completely. In fact, companies which are struggling are much more motivated to transform themselves, simply because they need to change something to survive. Studies suggest that most human beings are resistant to digital change in their place of work, as it displaces them from the comfort zone they have been used to. But they become receptive to this change when they learn that it is crucial for their very existence. Any kind of change is expensive, time-consuming, inexact, and painful, and when one is undergoing such ordeals, it’d better yield results.
Successful and profitable companies, on the other hand, are more cautious and are wary of any change or disrupt the tried and tested methods unless they are compelled to do so.

Myth #5: Digital transformation is all about improving IT
IT is only the delivery agent, but the change happens starting from leadership to grassroot level. Only then does the entire exercise become successful. In the digital age, strategy creates competitive advantage; people and a culture of innovation sustain it, and technology and communications are the means by which it is delivered.

With these common myths around digital transformation, organisations can at times stray away from their real purpose behind taking up the transformational journey. Hence, a careful analysis of existing processes and the challenges therein is the right way to begin. It is important that an organisation analyses and identifies its problem areas, carefully defining the need for digitisation and then seek the right technologies and expert help to embark its digital transformation journey.

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We have all been witness to the possibilities that a connected world offers—free flow and sharing of information, which translates into better commerce, and finally, growth. The same rule applies to organisations as well. When there is uninterrupted flow of information across departments, it spells growth. And what makes this possible is an integrated human capital management system (HCM).

Organisations have realised the importance of one single HCM replacing the numerous products one uses for different functions, processes and verticals. The companies which have crossed the fence are now reaping the benefits.

Picture this—a global electronics company has several subcompanies under its umbrella, primarily as a result of acquisitions. This means 40 different HR systems within the company. Truly a nightmare! Though all units and companies are part of the same group, they all work as independent entities, with separate processes and systems. This leads to inefficiency. The only answer to this problem is one single human capital management system for all.

Components of a unified HCM System The benefits of an integrated system are many. HRKatha has done an in-depth study to find out the five major benefits of a unified HCM.

Accuracy

When it comes to data, the first thing that people want is accuracy. An integrated system provides just that. It is a known fact that the more one copies data from one platform to another, the more are the chances of human error. In an integrated system, where the data is entered at the very onset of the job application by a prospective employee and remains intact throughout the process, any possibility of human error is minimised. One employee record, one user experience and zero interfaces eliminates siloed information. The outcome is accuracy of data. If the data isn’t accurate, it isn’t useful.

Actionable Insights

When a single data source is integrated across platforms, it offers a simple solution — better analysis and actionable insights. When information and analytics are brought in together, it allows employees to get the information they need. An integrated data captures all kinds of data for an employee, be it their performance, learning achievements, 360 degree feedback or compensation. This means one can integrate the learning and talent strategies with workforce management, and communicate the same to the employees. It encourages constant learning and skills development and provides the resources and tools required to impact workers.

Learn how a holistic HCM system will provide you with personalised tools that engage every employee in a unique self-directed path for career growth and mobility.

A collaborative environment The key to a successful business is when all its functions work in tandem with each other and not in silos. An integrated system fosters and promotes a culture that supports greater collaboration to reap the full rewards.

Imagine how leaders in all business functions—including CxOs, HR practitioners and line-of-business managers—need accurate and accessible workforce information to make the right decisions to support their objectives. To provide this level of visibility, organisations are integrating HR processes and information into holistic HCM systems. These systems encompass numerous strategic HR processes that enable companies to effectively plan, hire, align, develop, reward, manage, and analyse a high-performing workforce.

Empowerment for employees A tool for employees to work remotely, manage their schedules from their smartphones, and easily communicate with others on a project makes a difference in their productivity. An integrated HRMS system offers employees self-service tools, such as planners, document management, biometric timekeeping, and absence management. These not only increase employee productivity, but can also be valuable recruiting tools. As millennials begin to make up a large percentage of our workforce, business owners must implement tools that allow for the flexibility they desire.

Reduced Cost The biggest impact that an integrated HCM system has is on the cost. When information is available in one place using one user interface, workers spend less time looking for what they need, managers spend less time collating data and IT groups spend less time building and maintaining costly integrations between systems. All of these lead to reduced expenses.

Yes, there may be some initial costs to integrate systems, and these may seem daunting too. However, the actual RoI numbers prove that short-term investment leads to long-term gains.

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Digital transformation is not just two fancy words. It’s a full-fledged exercise that organisations need to undertake with clarity, vision and a lot of planning and preparedness. There are companies which equate digital transformation with a software upgrade. That’s the biggest blunder one can do. Digital transformation has to be a planned activity because even though a business is all set for this mega change, there could be digital shocks for functioning systems.

1. Assess and evaluate
According to a study, 90 per cent of CEOs know that digital technology is impacting their industry, but less than 15 per cent are digitally transforming with a clear plan. There is a lot of me-tooism that follows without a clear mandate and foresight on how the individual business is going to get impacted.
It is very important for any business to assess how and which part of its process, should undergo a digital transformation. Yes, there could be a few processes where digital transformation is not possible. There is nothing wrong in that. One has to identify digital models that simulate the nuances inherent in its procedures. It’s important to purposefully model processes with tools that enable creative and empirical simulations.
There is no hard and fast rule, which says that all processes of the businesses will have to go digital. The fit is necessary.

2. Business Plan
Yes, digital transformation is not an activity indulged in just for the sake of it. If certain processes or functions within the business cannot be digitised, let them be.

All a business should worry about is market share, revenue, profit and how the transformation will affect its customers. No digital transformation is worthwhile if any of these elements are negatively impacted. Every digital transformation should have a business case and an organisation should be able to foresee that the transformation will successfully streamline some of its key processes.

3. Prepare your team
People often talk about the skill set required for digital transformation of businesses and organisations. Yes, indeed it’s a great challenge to have and retain that skill set. However, what’s even more important is the cultural transformation within the company. Every employee should willingly and happily accept this transformation. Only then will the entire exercise be fruitful.

What organisations need to do is communicate what lies ahead. Every employee from across functions—be it HR or sales or supply chain—must anticipate the change, foresee the benefits that lie ahead, be in sync with the business strategy to get there and also be aware of their role in the entire process. All this can happen only when a company creates this culture of ownership and collaboration. One missing link can destroy the entire effort.

Look into these sample courses if you wish to successfully navigate the shift to digital and prepare an organization’s talent base for this shift, which are the most significant challenges facing today’s learning leaders.

4. There is no perfect moment
Now or later, digital transformation is bound to affect businesses across the world. If an organisation is waiting for the right opportune time to initiate this digital transformation, it’s digging its own grave.

Digital transformation has to start today, and now. Yes, there will be a few failed attempts, or mistakes on the way but organisations need to show agility and learn from their mistakes. Remember, technology changes faster than organisations can change themselves.

5. Traditional businesses can also transform digitally
Digital transformation isn’t only for new-age technology companies. There are a few examples where traditional brick and mortar businesses have transformed themselves. All thanks to data.

Experts call data the new crude oil and the currency of the future. Digital transformation will allow traditional businesses to collect more and more data, which can then sharpen the insights and business intelligence.

The paints sector follows a very traditional model of business. However, one of India’s largest paint companies has successfully digitised its business processes and reaped the benefits. It implemented call centres and mobile device deployments, utilised data-based decision making and expanded its service offerings along with its geographic footprint across Asia. The company gained on two fronts — revenue increased dramatically, while it also improved the speed and efficiency of its delivery.

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Gone are the days when learning was all about classroom sessions that lasted through the day. Learning is now sought in instant packets, easily consumable and conveniently applicable in dynamic work cultures. Same as everything else that has been transformed by technology to become more instant, interconnected and dynamic, learning in the digital world has also undergone a heavy makeover.

Organisations of the present and the future seek continuous learning and see it as the key to business growth and success. That is why, new-age learning organisations now need to invest consciously on solutions that help deliver learning that is available anytime anywhere over a range of platforms. The various e-learning or digital learning platforms that progressive organisations are increasingly leveraging are as follows:

Virtual Learning
In times when people work remotely and seek flexibility in everything from work hours to job roles, to learning opportunities, virtual learning comes in handy for organisations. It plays an increasingly important role in providing a new space in which to connect, engage and develop people. Virtual learning helps organisations preserve the beauty of traditional face-to-face learning in a modern virtual setup offering the benefits of flexibility, combining a strong learning architecture with virtual learning tools.

Mobile Learning
Although still in its niche stages of flawless implementation, mobile learning is gaining huge traction amongst employees as they see great advantages in the same. Organisations on the other hand are also developing stronger technology and content and course strategies to fully leverage mobile learning. While designing mobile learning programmes, learning professionals need to be mindful of the fact that course designs should consider small screens, and content production should support multiple devices and responsive design.

Social Learning
Many learning professionals are keenly interested in the topic of social learning but relatively few organisations have begun to implement it. One reason is that it is difficult to separate the hype from reality and focus on the elements that are really important. Successful social learning requires three elements— a technology platform, a vibrant community and great content.

In fact, social learning could prove to be the most efficient mode of offering learning as it helps engage and bring people together on one platform to share their expertise and experiences. Once fed with great content, employees feel motivated to jump in and offer their first comments on the social learning platform, and soon these comments turn into active learning discussions.

Gamification
Gamification is fast emerging as an effective technique to engage learners. It’s not simply about gaming and having fun while engaging employees, but about meeting serious business outcomes with the help of the learning programmes. It uses game mechanics and game design techniques in a non-gaming context and is a powerful tool to engage employees, customers and the public to change behaviours, develop skills and drive innovation. From immersive learning for induction and on-boarding to professional skills enhancement, compliance, soft skills enhancement, and behavioural change programmes, organisations are leveraging it well.

Having shared all the above, the most effective and the most convenient mantra to successful digital learning is  to think big, but start small. Focus on building a foundation of experimental experience before trying to fully operationalise an e-learning method.

Do you want to know how Best-in-Companies have implemented mobile learning? This report tells you what to consider if you decide mobile learning is right for your organization.

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While organisations are investing huge efforts in designing the best-in-class learning solutions for talent development, talent analytics is the catalyst that’s gaining immense importance in making learning more agile and accurate. Whether need-based or not, if learning is the prescription to a condition (or a probable condition), analytics is the diagnostic mechanism that helps get to the root of the condition, ensuring that the best prescription is offered. It is now a well-established fact that efficient talent analytics is critical to learning design.

In fact, analytics enables HR professionals to analyse, interpret, and make the best possible decisions and recommendations based on workforce data. It is crucial for organisations to determine what workforce-related problems they need to solve and how addressing those workforce challenges will impact organisational effectiveness. It is analytics that helps identify the same. 

Hemalakshmi Raju, head, learning & development, Cipla, says, “The power of analytics in making learning more effective is something that we will see going ahead. Using the power of data to see what kind of learning is needed, who needs it and when, can be a big game changer with respect to learning effectiveness.”

“The power of analytics in making learning more effective is something that we will see going ahead. Using the power of data to see what kind of learning is needed, who needs it and when, can be a big game changer with respect to learning effectiveness.”

Hemalakshmi Raju

In addition, business-aligned learning is also a requisite for sustained success and business growth, and it requires certain business acumen. While it is not likely that learning professionals will be expected to fluently analyse financial statements, understanding the company objectives and how the organisation evaluates itself is imperative.

It is also crucial to understand that HR professionals need a consistent analytical point of reference to make human capital decisions that impact business results. In that, analytics helps in identifying top and emerging talent, in turn mapping their career paths and learning solutions to their succession plans. It helps in:

• Identifying top performers with performance ratings, assessments and succession plans; and
• Developing top talent with career development and personalised learning paths.

“L&D professionals need to behave like product managers working for customers, who have unfulfilled needs, rather than simply designing courses that employees are required to complete.”

Guillermo Miranda

Using the power of analytics, the first thing an organisation must do is determine what workforce-related problems it needs to solve and how addressing those workforce challenges will impact organisational effectiveness. In doing so, here are a few questions that organisations should ask during this phase:

• Does my organisation have a sufficient number of individuals with the right skills to support a new product launch?
• What training interventions would be most useful to increase the productivity of my offshore contact centre?
• What are the factors that differentiate higher-performing managers in my most productive branches?

It is critical to answer these questions, as without clearly identifying problems that have a direct impact on business performance, organisations run the risk of investing time and energy in areas that are not a priority. The purpose of measuring any business process is to obtain actionable information for improvement.

Guillermo Miranda, global chief learning officer, IBM, says, “L&D professionals need to behave like product managers working for customers, who have unfulfilled needs, rather than simply designing courses that employees are required to complete.”

He also describes how talent management is now moving to ensure more enabled and multitasking teams instead of individuals. With that, the role of talent managers has also transformed. Five years ago it was focussed on how to create a career path for an individual, but today it requires them to create an environment for the team to succeed.

“The world, where everyone used to have a job role with repeat tasks, is rapidly vanishing and progressing into an agile methodology,” Miranda opines. In times such as these, talent managers need to be even more concerned about the teams they collate, and their learning and development needs. Analytics is undoubtedly the key to unlocking the true potential of an efficient learning culture.

Leverage data to change the game. Move from reports that say what is happening to analytics that tell you why. Read this informative and educational whitepaper to know how workforce-related problems can be solved.

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The talent management solutions provider, SumTotal, recently unveiled a range of new features and additions to the SumTotal Talent Expansion® Suite—the first in the industry to bring talent, learning, recruitment, and workforce management on one platform.

This release includes expanded access to learning content, enhancements to the visually engaging user interface, improved browsing and search capabilities, and deployment flexibility to meet the complex technical requirements of modern organisations, both in the cloud and on premise. The Suite simplifies and streamlines talent management for organisations and engages employees with innovative solutions to know, mobilise, develop, promote, reward, and incentivise global organisations of all sizes.

“Since the acquisition of SumTotal we have invested significantly in bringing a platform, that delivers rich functionality on a beautiful consumer-led experience, to the market. Last year, we brought learning and talent together in our Talent Expansion Suite and with this release, we have a unique proposition —delivering talent, learning, recruitment and  workforce management on a single, unified data SaaS platform,” said Bill Donoghue, chairman and CEO, Skillsoft.

“By bringing all the HCM components into one suite, we are addressing our clients and the market challenges of attracting, retaining, developing, and engaging this multigenerational workforce—delivering a state-of-the-market digital technology experience, with cutting edge functionality,” he added.

This release of the SumTotal Talent Expansion Suite features a number of new capabilities specifically created to allow organisations of all sizes to measure, understand, and maximise the performance of their global workforce, including

Career planning and job matching
Career planning: Advanced algorithms to support internal mobility, which recommends internal open jobs to employees that best fit their profile and career goals.
Job and competency matching: New competency metrics provide an at-a-glance dashboard, highlighting areas for development in both current jobs and jobs targeted as part of their career plans.

SumTotal Mobile
Smartphone-optimised access: Provides complete employee profile and resume information, including metrics and details of performance, goals, compensation, learning and development.
Seamless user experience for mobile learning: Users can now seamlessly download courses on the app and launch them offline, regardless of location.
Continuous performance feedback enhancements: With the new SumTotal Mobile App, managers and employees can provide and view feedback, anywhere, at any time.
Windows 10 and Windows Surface integration: Employees can now access content using Windows 10 on their laptop and Windows Surface devices—online and offline.

Next generation of performance management
New single dashboard: Now allows employees to easily review, search, and filter all feedback.
Connect feedback to development plans: Managers can provide feedback to select individuals, and can link users back to specific goals and competencies.

Learning process optimisation
Streamlined, form-based approvals: Allows organisations to optimise their learning management processes by supporting new forms-based approval workflows that comply with the SF182 and EHRI federal government standards.
Powerful content management tools: Administrative users can now easily publish, manage, and replace content without having to create a new version from scratch.

Workforce management
New appearance: Unified look and feel with single sign-on capabilities.
Workforce management enhancements: Simple streamlining of daily schedule and shift changes.
New single timeline for managing and completing tasks: New enterprise-search allows a single point for users to search.

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Present-day organisations have been investing hugely in reforming learning initiatives to suit the modern learner. While the agile, on-the-go learning needs of the modern learner are pushing organisations to rethink their learning strategy, not all organisations seem really prepared to take the plunge. Another concern is, whether the working population or the modern learner, is ready enough to embrace these contemporary learning methods.

May be yes, but not completely. This means there are gaps—both on the organisational front and at the learners’ level— that need to be addressed carefully. It has now become even more crucial for learning professionals to analyse and understand the underlying gaps in adopting new-age learning techniques. The first and the foremost gap that needs bridging is the perception about the modern learner, especially in the Indian context.

We, the current working population, have been brought up in an environment where there were no facilitators, but only teachers. We were taught, not enabled to independently learn. We attended hour-long lectures on various subjects, taking back stipulated homework, day after day, until we threw it all up in an examination that was far from practical learning. On the other hand, the dynamic workplaces today, treat learning very differently.

“In an ever changing VUCA world, knowledge and skills become extinct fast and frequent structure changes to address market needs become common place. In this scenario, learning will help the organisation stay agile. Just-in-time learning is a business expectation. For the learning function to stay relevant, it is essential for this need to be appreciated and delivered accordingly,” says Hemalakshmi Raju, head-learning & development at Cipla.

Although Raju’s description of the modern workplace is totally apt, there is no denying that the modern learner still hasn’t fully overcome a ‘Content Rich and Interaction Poor’ system. As Sunder Ramachandran, general manager-training at GlaxoSmithKline, describes the real mindset of the learner—“The dramatic change in pedagogy throws a lot of us off. We seek comfort in familiarity. So, as long as you put us in a room with other people and have someone teach us, that seems to ring a bell and gives us the confidence that ‘this, we can deal with’.”

It is evident now that the learner needs to transition and this is where the role of the enterprise learning team comes into play. As Ramachandran puts it, “Think ‘Learning to learn’ approaches for the employee.” This is the first step that learning professionals need to take in order to bridge the learning gaps in embracing modern learning.

In addition, Raju says that “Learner experience is key. Curated, customised content for different parts of the organisation needs to be looked at, along with the technique to aggregate content from different platforms so that learners have access to all that they need in one place and at one shot.” To ensure a seamless learning experience, organisations and learning professionals also need to have a meticulous approach for selecting the right e-learning content.

To address the needs of a wide range of formal, informal and social learning requirements, employees need a rich array of learning resources that encompasses a full set of business needs. When selecting the right eLearning content, one should always keep in mind that the content is instructional, informational, certified, multimodal and that which enables blending and reinforces learning.

As Raju shares, “Millennials say that their ability to learn on-the-job is their top driver when looking for a new position. Hence, it is essential that we tap this and make learning both relevant and engaging for the learners.” Unlike traditional classroom methods, eLearning can be directly embedded into the workflow and is immediately applicable. It is being readily adopted for a more engaged learning experience across verticals. This distinction allows seamless integration of formal, informal and social learning into the daily work efforts.

Last but not the least, learning professionals must remain constantly agile and aware of their landscape to assess and align business and individual learning needs. This allows them to provide the best solutions. Strong networking skills of learning professionals will also prove useful in providing learning solutions that are effective, engaging and efficient.

(Do you know eight essential questions you need to consider as you develop your learning program? Read this to know now!)

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Organisations need meticulous efforts to remain sustainable and self-developing in this VUCA world. An organisation that empowers its people to take control of their own development and career paths is a self-developing organisation in the true sense. However, this is easier said than done: it requires a unified approach and smart technology to enable employees to easily find and progress along their paths for growth.

With the present-day workforce comprising mostly millennials, who value learning opportunities, it becomes more important for firms to adopt the practices of the self-developing organisation. It just requires organisations to create an open environment where learning and empowerment opportunities are easily available to anyone.

Only by leveraging an efficient technology solution can employers provide staff the right kind of environment to learn and grow independently. To create a self-developing organisation, firms must help employees understand their current capabilities as well as the skills required for future advancement. This means companies need to provide actionable information to workers through accessible platforms, so that staffs are aware of what they need to accomplish and what skills and capabilities they need to build to successfully meet their goals.

Having said that, it is crucial that organisations ensure their learning and talent management efforts and technologies are all connected for ease of access and application. In addition, leaders of self-developing organisations focus on how to keep teams engaged, productive and collaborative. They make time and effort to groom people on all the skills necessary for advancement, including professional and technical know-how as well as soft skills.

In that context, the strong combination of skilled employees, leadership talent and learning tools brings out the benefits of a self-developing organisation, enabling leaders to boost employee performance.

Technology provides organisations the ability to manage talent and deliver learning in various innovative ways. Moreover, with predictive and cognitive analytics-based decisions for talent mobility, organisations are seeing a more engaged and productive workforce as compared to the past. In addition, gamification, AI and virtual reality-enabled platforms are also providing employees more immersive learning experiences.

Learning and talent analytics can provide insights that help organisations create personalized learning and growth plans for all their people—individual contributors and leaders alike. A strong reward system can go a long way in encouraging independent learning. Employees should be periodically rewarded for self-development and helping others in their career growth. In this arena, organisations can rely on technology to keep track of the rewards and outputs for a calculated approach to boosting self-development.

Integrating the different tools to create a unified experience for employees is critical. Like any other ingredient for organisational success and growth, the tools that enable a self-developing organization cannot be effective in silos. Be it talent management, learning and development, on-boarding or performance management, the tools and technologies need to come together to create a cohesive foundation for a self-developing organisation.

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As per the laws of human life, people enter the workforce once they complete their education. As a result, it is only natural for them to think that their education is over but they are mistaken; their real education, in fact, is just starting. Theoretical knowledge just helps to get one started. Real-life ground experience is what true learning is. Organisations, in addition to being productive places of work, are the real-life B-Schools.

The more organisations focus on the learning and development (L&D) of their employees, the more they stand to benefit in the long run. It’s an investment that would pay off when the workers know they craft better than anyone and contribute their honed talents to better the bottom lines. Plus, if you’re worried about your employee retention, rest assured once you put an effective learning roadmap in place the retention rate is going to improve drastically. Employees know that they add immense value to the output of their organisation; it is only fair that the workplace contributes towards their learning and development.

In light of this, we have seen investment in leadership development, and L&D as a whole has grown over the last two or three years. While this is a good head start, organisations still have a long way to go in terms of L&D. Currently, the major challenge facing L&D service providers comes in the form of business metrics. Organisations need to see return on investments and hence they are constantly asking to show impact of L&D programs and how it changes the business outcomes. The need of the hour is for L&D service providers to step up their game to show the impact their programmes will have on the overall business.

As reiterated above, we now see a change in organisations’ mind-sets towards L&D programmes, which are slowly gaining momentum. Back in the day, organisations preferred investing in short- term training programmes, which did not yield maximum dividends. Over time, organisations now see the importance of investing right from the time an employee comes on board till they are in the organisation. After all, the key to success lies in constant learning. This is just the tip of the iceberg and a lot more changes are being seen at the grassroots level, especially with the emergence of newer technologies.

Below are some of the latest trends in L&D, which will transform organisations in the coming days:

Technology
The Internet revolution in the early 2000s has resulted in organisations using technology and social media. This results in new ways of learning and collaboration. These technologies are transforming our workplace, and more so, appeal to the younger generation who have grown up on these technologies. Thereby, giving an added advantage to businesses since they do not need to invest much time and resources in training employees in these technologies.

Mobile is becoming the new learning medium
The emergence of newer devices, such as mobiles and tablets is changing the way we learn in the 21st century. This has given rise to M-learning which is a convenient method of learning and at the same time is accessible from virtually anywhere. Sharing is almost instantaneous among everyone using the same content, which leads to the reception of instant feedback and tips. Further, as employees become increasingly time-poor, it’s no wonder they are after L&D content that is more accessible—learning that embraces technology, curates content and places the power of learning into the employee’s hands.

The role of Big Data
It is surprising to note that from the dawn of civilisation until the Internet boom in the early 2000s, mankind generated X amount of data. Post the Internet revolution and emergence of trends, such as BYOD and the e-commerce boom, we are generating 2X data almost every other day and this number is only accelerating. Almost every organisation across sectors is undergoing this digital revolution. As a result, Big Data is no longer a buzzword in the IT circles. IT leaders already realise the significant business value one can gain by tapping into large, complex data sets. Therefore, organisations will truly start to embrace big data and predictive analytics as the forefront of L&D. Through Big Data, organisations will be able to provide learners with personalised and prescriptive learning options based on their past behaviours and preferences.

Security is still a key concern
Just like every coin has two sides, this too has its pros and cons. The major challenge would be security. To tackle this issue, IT will need to quickly develop and execute a strategy, which will be able to take care of this issue. Security should never be reactive but proactive. If not done properly, organisations stand to lose a lot and saving face will be the least of their priorities.

L&D professionals key to organisational success

With Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), employees will be able to access information on the go. However, the need of the hour is to filter this information and ensure that the right content is processed. This is where L&D professionals come into play. They ensure that employees access content which aligns with the overall business goals.

While organisations might see many other trends in the coming days, only those organisations will thrive which will place learning at the centre of their existence.

(The author is Country Manager- India, Skillsoft)

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