If 2020 was the year of survival, then 2021 is the year of maximising your workforce’s potential. Navigating change has become the norm but we need to ensure we are giving employees the ability to develop their own journeys of development
The BTN recently partnered with Cornerstone, the premier people development company, for an exclusive roundtable on how can complex, large organisations ensure a personalised learning experience for their teams?
The session was attended by some of the leading people executives across the industry and the conversation brought about the following takeaways:
The curiosity to learn must be role modelled from the top
Learning must be aligned with the cultural transformation that you are trying to implement. The role of a talent leader is to liberate talent and we must facilitate this culture of learning and embed a curiosity to learn throughout our organisations.
Within most industries, the traditional career ladder is no longer the classic pathway, there is now more of a career lattice. Talent & learning professionals are there to embed learning agility and think laterally and disruptively.
Historically, to grow your career and be rewarded, you had to go up the ‘ladder’, you now can get recognition by becoming a specialist and honing your skills. If this message is communicated effectively, teams will be more productive and more willing to upskill as employees will see a shift from generalisation to specification as a role-based improvement.
People are losing the ability to read situations, both critically & analytically. Learning needs to help facilitate the skills that you can’t necessarily teach.
If you can get your culture right whereby you have an array of curious learners, then we can reframe the problem. We can then facilitate the problem and provide the solution by letting people curate their own meaningful learning journeys. This flexibility will give employees the ability to learn what they want to learn and if they’re looking for anything under the sun, we have it.
You can only personalise learning if you know enough about your people
As an organisation, we need to truly define what personalisation means. Do our employees have the same definition of what we as employers think it is? We must manage expectations across the business to ensure dissonance is not implied prior to any successful journey even starting. Personalised learning in itself is not new but organisations are still struggling to standardise learning. We need to truly understand why we even want to deliver personalised learning. Is it to become more agile? Is it to showcase career opportunities within the organisation based on skills-led analysis? We shouldn’t be treating people generally across our organisation, we have hired individuals and creating universal approaches is sub-optimal and inefficient.
The multi-generational workforce has created a new complex level due to the variety of learning styles that an employee now engages with. We should utilise regular career conversations and focus these conversations on each employee to understand what is important to them.
Even if the learning function is on their personalisation journey already or has not started, we need to have an open conversation about personal data with our employees. There is now an inherent fear of giving data out as individuals so we must communicate the reasons and benefits it will bring to the employee. Our responsibility as organisations is to be comfortable to maintain and keep it safe.
Let technology be the enabler, not the strategy
The curation of learning for our employees should allow them to make their own journey. That is where technology can play its most important role. Our organisational decisions must be based on what is happening societally. For example, our consumer experience is more tailored as sites & applications start to learn more about our preferences, so expectations have shifted generationally.
Early career development is an ongoing challenge for HR in the hybrid world as people learn so much from experience and we need to ensure the environment is built wherever that employee is working.
A question was asked of the group around whether our employees have become more demanding? Or is that a natural by-product of how we’ve evolved and how that has shaped our views/demands?
Social media gives a misrepresentation of what employees should expect from their roles, learning and the workplace in general. Learning then struggles to keep up and maintain traction with the employee experience as we oversell our organisations as ‘great places to work’ etc. We need the infrastructure to actually be what we sell to our employees and the ambition of what we want to be as well.Let’s stop telling people what they need, let them navigate their own way for their careers. Let people drive their own career bus with us as learning navigators helping them at whatever stage they need.
The role of purpose within organisations has been proven to have heightened as a result of the past 18 months as employees start to critically analyse what they actually want from their careers.
Learning should always be seen as a way of growing whereby you’re not necessarily going up the ladder but still growing.
As leaders, we need to pause without technology, then look at how technology can help to facilitate growth. Our focus should always be on the culture/mindset of our employees, the technology/platform that we use and the content we curate and share. If we get those three things right for our organisations, learning will always win.
About Cornerstone OnDemand
Cornerstone OnDemand is a premier people development company, pioneering solutions to help organizations and individuals around the globe navigate the new world of work and realize their potential at work. Featuring comprehensive recruiting, personalized learning, modern training content, development-driven performance management and holistic employee data management and insights, Cornerstone is there for you at every stage. Founded in 1999 with the goal of improving access to education around the globe through online learning, today Cornerstone’s solutions are used by approximately 6,300 global clients of all sizes, spanning more than 75 million users across over 180 countries and nearly 50 languages.
