________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Five ways to power upskilling
In these conditions, manufacturers will need a balance of five approaches to design learning strategies for such a unique task and ensure employees’ engagement with them.
■ First, L & D teams have to collaborate closely with company leaders to agree clear strategies for their workforces to acquire both human and digital skills. Learning professionals and company executives need plans that identify workforces’ skills needs, communicate priorities and determine whether new human and digital skills programs can be operated simultaneously – or as related programs if budget or bandwidth is challenging.
■ Second, L & D teams need dynamic and exciting learning strategies; approaches that harness the best of intelligent technologies like AI to customize learning in the flow of work and at scale. These approaches enable individual employees to‘ pull’ personal learning and performance support assets‘ just in time’ while benefitting from broader‘ push’ learning
Many employees are disengaged from content library learning platforms or weary of repeated workplace reorganizations and IT upgrades. As a result, skills strategies need to reignite people’ s enjoyment of learning or convince the cynical that their employer is right behind them in upskilling endeavors and help build critical mass for new learning and training.
■ Third, L & D teams should persuade company leaders to become learning role models. Actions speak louder than words and leaders that demonstrably bring learning into their working hours will create‘ permission’ for managers and employees to adopt new learning techniques and ring-fence diary time for skills sessions.
30