Learning and Development That Moves as Fast as Your Business

Progressive organizations are narrowing their focus for skills data collection, or “skills intelligence.” Moving beyond exhaustive skills inventories, they’re honing in on collecting quality data about skills needed for the organization’s core workflows and accepting directional information about less critical skills areas. Collecting, organizing and analyzing skills data is a significant effort, and fully comprehensive skills data is both costly and often unnecessary. A narrow focus on understanding the skills that underpin core workflows allows organizations to invest that effort sustainably and target information needed for critical talent strategy decisions.

To establish sustainable skills intelligence:

1. First, align on a clear vision for core skills.

2. Prioritize roles based on their stability or dynamism.

3. Build partnerships to create a robust data infrastructure. 

Even with a narrowed focus on core skills, HR teams often face more learning priorities than resources can support. Make trade-offs transparent and fund what moves the needle:

1. Continuously communicate alignment between organizational priorities and learning budgets. Alignment with business priorities often fades as urgent requests arise. Regularly reinforce the connection between core organizational priorities and learning spending to determine appropriate trade-offs and keep resources focused on initiatives with the greatest impact:

2. Support self-directed learning to help employees address fast-moving, hyperpersonalized needs on their own. You’ll never meet everyone’s exact learning needs, so it’s important that organizations build employees’ capability to find the learning resources they need, when they need them.  

Traditional learning delivery models cannot keep pace with today’s skills demands. To adapt learning delivery for speed, scale and agility, adjust your approach to:

1. Managing learning delivery partners. Design tiers of engagement to clearly define and narrow the scope of partners who need to be engaged on changes to learning delivery strategy and execution.

2. Connecting employees with expertise. Maximize the impact of subject matter experts with collective learning opportunities, like skill-based peer learning networks, digital twin repositories of organizational knowledge, and AI-enabled coaching.

3. Implementing learning technology rollouts. Time technology rollouts to coincide with peak motivation. Demonstrate how new technology helps employees and leaders reach their performance goals, thus improving adoption levels.

4. Promoting learning to employees. Communicate the skills employees need to drive growth in their role, rather than specific resources or programs to drive motivation, and help employees effectively direct their development.

Business priorities will continue to shift, technologies will evolve and skills requirements will change. It’s critical to build responsive feedback loops that track organizational learning in real time and support pivots. Here’s how:

1. Map learning activities to business outcomes. Map how learning activities connect to business results to spot early signs that the strategy needs to change.

2. Use a select set of leading and lagging indicators to inform design decisions. Choose the right metrics to track progress. Focus on a few key indicators to guide learning design and demonstrate real business impact.

3. Tier data collection to track the most critical skills. Focus on measuring only the most important skills that drive business performance.