Both the workforce and workplace have changed drastically in the last few years. Organizations must explore new and sometimes untested ways to allow their employees to advance even in this new environment. Although the fundamental concepts of discovering and assessing skills across the enterprise are still at the core of creating a more capable and mobile workforce, new ways of accelerating skill and competency development are now being used.
Besides the most obvious challenge (a lack of budget/ resources), two major other complications plague organizations looking to increase the capabilities of their workforce: A lack of career paths and a lack of career coaches. These two obstacles, a lack of options and a lack of internal or external support, show that increasing employee capabilities is not a high priority in many organizations.
Organizations that are looking to have a more capable and mobile workforce must allocate budget for increasing the capabilities of their workforce but must do so in a focused and direct way — by auditing their career pathing opportunities and finding ways to increase employee mobility, and by investing in internal and external coaching resources.
While organizations understand the importance of teams and team development, there are many competing training priorities. Few organizations believe they are in the position to excel through the use of teams. With the amount of teamwork expected to increase significantly over the next few years, now is the time to identify better ways to prepare employees to participate and lead in high-performing teams.
Organizations that make use of these aspects of career development are more likely to see increases in several business metrics, not just career development-specific metrics. This shows the importance of these activities in helping the organization achieve its overall goals and helps justify an increase in budget allocation to these activities.
To improve your organization’s ability to increase the capabilities and mobility of your workforce, you need to determine what people, processes, and technology you have in place to help talent management professionals increase skill development. Organizations should ask themselves the following questions:
Who is accountable for maintaining and improving employee capabilities and internal movement?
Which metrics are most useful when determining the effectiveness of employee skill development practices?
What resources, in terms of time and budget, can be allocated to improving employee skill development and mobility?
What are the most important steps we can take to develop more people to participate in and lead high-performing teams?
- Create more opportunities for coaching, mentoring and peer-to-peer feedback
Coaching and mentoring have emerged as critical tools to improve individual and organizational performance. Organizations see better business results where coaching and mentoring are valued and encouraged and practiced from the top leadership on down, according to Brandon Hall Group research. Look for ways for employees to develop and learn new skills that may fall out of formal promotion or fast-track programs. - Use stretch assignments, job rotations and participating on teams from day one
Practice, either in-person or virtually, enables employees to refine skills in a safe environment before going “live” with them. Special project work or stretch assignments are economical ways to build skills while contributing to the business rather than taking employees away from their jobs to learn. Modern technology has evolved to the point where experiential learning is possible without actually being on-site, and these options should be explored for any organization struggling to create on-the-job training. - Think creative when it comes to career pathing.
Personal and career growth are top drivers of employee engagement, according to Brandon Hall Group research. During times of disruption, it’s easy to emphasize getting work done to the extent that employees are not provided needed opportunities to grow in their jobs and their careers. The fix for this problem is to give your employees opportunities to help self-select their career-pathing and to give employee-driven learning more importance in your organization. The last few years have taught us all to be more self-reliant and employee development is no exception. - Learning and development curriculum that is personalized for individual career plans.
The first step for a personalized curriculum development is a robust needs assessment (which can be automated for large-scale operations). A needs assessment will help determine what training needs might be, or it may turn out that training isn’t needed, but rather performance support to help reinforce what had already been trained on.
