Businesses across all industries are rapidly transforming. Starting next year, approximately 35% of skills needed for jobs across industries will change. It’s more important now than ever for companies to empower and enable employees to expand and transform their skills and capabilities.
There are hundreds of Learning Management System (LMS) options available to facilitate training for job-related and transferable skills. But as companies seek to remain competitive, attract top talent, and grow, they need their LMS to go beyond deploying courses that combat skill gaps – it should also contribute to the larger employee experience. Companies looking to support employee development, including workplace learning, should look for technology that checks these boxes:
Facilitates (a lot) more than learning
Thanks to the speed of technology and growing skills gaps, the need for workplace learning will never go away. But online courses alone aren’t enough. Formal and informal learning paths are an essential piece of creating engaging learning experiences. Frequent feedback, collaborative one-on-one conversations and mentorships (especially organic mentorship) can supplement traditional learning courses to better engage employees in their career development path.
Integrates seamlessly into the flow of work
According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, the need to improve learning and development was a top trend this year. Companies are faced with both a challenge and an opportunity to build learning programs that enable people to consume information and upgrade their skills seamlessly within their day-to-day job activities. Investing in technology that makes it easy for managers and employees to track goals, align priorities, and map out meaningful development opportunities in a single platform (on top of completing necessary online learning) has demonstrated the highest return for employees and businesses.
Ties employee goals and learning activities to business outcomes
Should employee development activities align with what employees want, or what the company needs? The answer is both. When done right, employee goals and development activities can be linked back to business outcomes that impact the company’s bottom line. Connecting employees to a company’s mission begins with a clearly communicated company strategy. When company goals are outlined from the get-go, the right employee development platform can help facilitate the rest.
Provides actionable data
Learning and development technology can be a hard sell or deemed an unworthy investment if there are no measurable outcomes or ways to track progress. It’s also important that the data produces actionable insights. Course completion rates are a great place to start, but an employee development platform can take a deeper dive on skills coverage, skills gaps, productivity and engagement, enabling HR to keep a finger on the pulse of metrics that really matter.
The needs and solutions at every company are going to be different, but one thing is clear: an effective LMS is necessary to ensure employees are gaining the skills they want and need to advance in their careers. With one-third of employees leaving jobs in part because they crave more career development opportunities, now is the time to make sure you’re investing in your people and prioritizing overall employee development.
