Also, the way we learn has transformed due to shifting employee expectations around technology and new work conditions. Balancing compliance and regulatory requirements while enhancing internal mobility, career growth, and the employee experience is now a business essential. Learning must close skills gaps for personal development and align with strategic business needs in today’s marketplace.

The highlights upskilling and talent attraction as key. To predict business needs, organizations must plan and target skills gaps. They must also understand employees’ career goals and take their whole self into consideration for personalized development. This approach creates engaging experiences and aligns with what employees want.

Learning drives transformation but breaking traditional silos challenges skill growth alignment. Many organizations have invested in learning experience platform solutions to increase learner engagement, but this approach alone has not solved the challenge of increasing skills growth across the organization while aligning learning to strategic business goals.

Connected Learning as Strategic Part of Skills Growth

The 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Learning solution is a key part of our broader future-ready workforce strategy to help align the ambitions of people and organizations for shared achievement of accelerated skills growth. Later this year, customers can expect an enhanced integrated learning experience for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Learning.

While this will include a redesigned, revitalized homepage, it will also help identify the many learning options available to employees 鈥� the items that people 鈥渉ave to learn,鈥� such as mandatory learning for safety and compliance; those that they 鈥渘eed to learn鈥� to excel in their roles and achieve business objectives; and what they 鈥渨ant to learn鈥� based on their own interests, aspirations, and motivations.

Here, the integrated learning experience will leverage the framework within the 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors portfolio. The talent intelligence hub is a centralized framework that helps organizations understand the skills their employees have today, the gaps that exist, and the ways in which to close those gaps. With machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered intelligence, the talent intelligence hub can provide highly personalized learning and development recommendations to help ensure employees develop their skills sets while pursuing a career aligned to their ambitions. This accelerates upskilling and reskilling at scale while delivering unique talent experiences for every employee.

This fresh take on corporate learning fosters an intrinsic culture of upskilling within the corporate landscape. Considering employees as a whole 鈥� with a data-driven view of their skills, wants, and needs 鈥� can drive workforce progress in an organic manner. That鈥檚 because a motivated and talented workforce contributes to a future-ready business strategy that employers can sculpt to meet the ever-changing demands of a fluctuating market.

Four Ways to Address the Skills Gap with the New Integrated Learning Experience

1. Prioritize learning opportunities that encourage collaboration, growth, discovery, and curiosity while ensuring employees stay compliant with business and legal objectives.
2. Accelerate upskilling processes through greater visibility, access, and navigation through the integrated learning experience.
3. Improve engagement through experiences that prioritize and organize a learner鈥檚 individual needs, skills, interests, and aspirations.
4. Individualize opportunities and personalized recommendations for learning activities, mentors, temporary assignments, and more, fueling professional development through 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace.

All of this can allow organizations to curate the strategic attributes they expect in their people while also supporting their growth and development aspirations. Being on a skills transformation journey the integrated learning experience has already piqued the interest of organizations looking to support both their employees and their overall business strategies. Simon Wi脽mann, director of Corporate HR at Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, believes 鈥渢hat the new integrated learning experience with its modern look brings added value to our employees by restructuring how mandatory trainings and trainings for personal growth are presented and added to the personal learning journey.鈥� By integrating the new experience with its learning strategy, Wi脽mann is confident that 鈥渋t will help to develop critical skills in our organization by closely linking together talent and learning processes while enabling employees to grow to their full potential.鈥�

This essential focus on employee experience in a more unified way can promote a culture of learning and growth in an organization鈥檚 landscape, which is essential for succinctly meeting critical business objectives. It is increasingly clear that when a company invests in accelerated upskilling solutions to create agile workforces that understand their individualized contributions to the organization鈥檚 overall strategy, it can reap extraordinary benefits.

Want to know more about or the values of upskilling in the modern economy? Read .

Margit Bauer is director of Solution Marketing for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Learning.

As a customer of multiple , Wellstar is familiar with the power of 麻豆原创 and knew it could be getting more out of its 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Learning solution. Danielle Mecum, manager of Learning Technology at Wellstar, believed that improved governance of the system was part of the road to getting there. 鈥淲hen governance is lacking, the employee experience suffers,鈥� Mecum explained.

With a nursing background, she knew firsthand the need to get new hires trained properly and quickly, and that reducing the time from hire to actual work was key. She added, 鈥淚n addition to our non-clinical employees, our medical employees were taking longer to get to the patient floors to start providing care because of how the required onboarding training was organized and set up. There were inaccurate training assignments, courses not marked as required, and, in some cases, no required-by dates.鈥�

In addition, users said that their learning assignments were too cluttered and disorganized, Mecum explained. And there were instances where new employees would get to a patient floor and realize that they were not able to enter a patient鈥檚 chart, for example, because a course hadn鈥檛 been assigned to them in the correct sequence.

The need to get employees onboarded faster could have been enough to justify the governance project, but to add to the complex nature of the project 鈥� and completely out of Wellstar鈥檚 control 鈥� the organization faced the impending deprecation of Flash content and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. To help tackle this challenge, Wellstar decided to work with its customer engagement executive to start a solution adoption engagement. This type of engagement is intended to provide recommendations to a customer to help them create an action plan to optimize their use of their system 鈥� in this case . A recommendation came out of this engagement that confirmed the needed for the governance initiative.

Mecum鈥檚 nursing background helped her understand the urgency of the situation. She and her team looked at the issues already discussed and began to build a governance model. For example, they instituted a content life cycle management process that incorporated a formal method for requesting the creation of new items, curricula, and assignment profiles. In addition, they implemented an ongoing review procedure that included automated notifications to course owners to review material that had reached expiration. Additionally, Wellstar leveraged and configured custom fields within 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Learning to track key data and report on it from within the system to ensure compliance with the new governance process.

Other governance steps included reviewing and consolidating LMS admin roles to ensure the right administrators had the right permissions to perform administrative tasks as appropriate in the system 鈥� without giving them freedom to add to the problem at large. A formal process for vetting new LMS administrators was created to ensure they weren鈥檛 simply giving just anyone these permissions. 鈥淲e knew we needed to define what goes into the system, so we could control what comes out. This helps when we need to get rid of old, outdated courses,鈥� Mecum explained.

These changes, among others, were implemented as part of the governance initiative. The result is that Wellstar is now reaping greater benefits from 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors Learning and, most importantly, employees now have an improved experience with the system. Frustration levels are down and new hires are able to start their actual jobs much sooner than before 鈥� in three days rather than a week and a half!

Mark Tarallo is a solution marketing fellow for 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors.

Take automation, which has already brought changes to many jobs, as an example. The jobs that are currently available in today鈥檚 economy depend greatly on lifelong learning because they continue to change and evolve. This is nothing new, but the rapid pace at which technology and business models change is dramatic and with that comes the need to constantly keep skills up-to-date. According to a , adoption of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) will mark an acceleration over the shifts of even the recent past. And this change is impacting all jobs: even those with high incomes spend an average of 31% of their jobs doing things that could be automated, according to McKinsey. Stockbrokers, for instance, spend a good portion of their time gathering and processing data, which could be done automatically with even greater accuracy than the way it is now done.

So, lifelong learning will be relevant for everyone. The good thing is that people are naturally curious. We鈥檙e constantly asking ourselves questions and finding answers. In addition, employees are keen on upskilling to be prepared for the future. According to a recent , 77% of the workers surveyed are ready to learn new skills or completely retrain, with 74% seeing training as a matter of personal responsibility.

This is one of the reasons why employees expect a continuous learning culture. The risk of not building one is that employees may move to other organizations in order to remain relevant and add new skills. At a time when the Great Resignation shows no signs of slowing down 鈥� according to , one in five workers plan to quit their jobs in 2022 鈥� organizations unquestionably have to offer development opportunities. They need to upskill and reskill their employees not just to keep them excited and prepared for new job requirements, but also to fill positions they are not able to fill with external candidates.

Therefore, a key to organizations鈥� future success will be to provide continuous learning options and instill a culture of lifelong learning throughout the organization to develop the workforce of the future. For many years, learning and development organizations tried to find the optimal way to serve different learning needs to push learning like compliance trainings to their employees, to meet specific departmental training needs, or to empower their employees for further personal development, all while considering that the way of learning and employee expectations have changed tremendously. And this is change that is going to stay. According to a , only 5% of respondents think that their learning strategy, investment, and resourcing will go back to what it was before the pandemic began.

But exactly what do we mean by a learning culture? A learning culture refers to an organization鈥檚 values, beliefs, and norms that influence learning behavior and outcomes. Unfortunately, maintaining one is no easy task. A recent survey conducted through 麻豆原创鈥檚 program showed that only 30% of employees consider their organization to have an excellent learning culture. So how can an organization take steps towards creating a strong culture of lifelong learning? As part of the research program, we uncovered four evidence-based factors integral to a culture that encourages learning across an organization. Focusing on these can set you on the path towards an organization filled with lifelong learners.

• Reward and recognize learning: Integrate reward and recognition into your learning strategy. Not only does this demonstrate that learning is an organizational priority, but it also acknowledges the employees who proactively take advantage of learning opportunities.
• Leadership support and role modeling: Leaders should serve as learning role models to employees. They can do this by sharing their perspectives and experiences on their own learning and development. It鈥檚 important for leaders to 鈥渨alk the learning talk鈥� and not contradict what employees are being told about the importance of learning.
• Closing the awareness gap: It鈥檚 key for employees across the organization to be made aware of what learning is available to them. This will help to drive consistent perceptions of learning among all different employee subgroups resulting in a stronger learning culture.
• Technology enablement: Technology is a crucial factor in the learning culture of organizations. Technology can have an impact on an employee鈥檚 overall learning experience and should be leveraged to improve that experience and ensure smooth, easy access to learning opportunities.

Creating a learning strategy that addresses these four factors can have you on your way to building a culture of lifelong learning across your organization. In this rapidly changing business environment, this is more important now than ever.

Get more insight into the research and how a can concretely support you in fostering a continuous learning culture.

Margit Bauer is director of Solution Marketing at 麻豆原创 SE.
Mark Tarallo is a solution marketing fellow at 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors.

Today, employees at this leading Chilean telecommunications company enjoy an enhanced learning experience with 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions. Entel used 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions to help fully digitalize Entel University, the company鈥檚 training program, as the pandemic rocked the lives of workers worldwide. Rather than caving to this disruption, HR leaders at Entel transformed crisis into opportunity and adapted the company鈥檚 training formula to the new normal.

鈥淭he COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the process that we had been developing, causing us to completely digitalize our corporate learning plan,鈥� said Ang茅lica S谩nchez, organizational development and learning management analyst at Entel. 鈥淭oday, the focus is to maintain this trend and concentrate our digital offerings, further democratizing knowledge.鈥�

By providing fully digital learning experiences to a , Entel empowered employees to take control of their careers during an increasingly uncertain time. Not only that, but remote e-learning courses helped provide structure to employees鈥� workdays as they adjusted to working from home.

Entel adapted learning content to face the pandemic head-on, developing leadership workshops and trainings focused on supporting employees. These included sessions on increasing productivity at home and best practices for remote collaboration, as well as tips for self-care and overcoming anxiety in times of uncertainty.

鈥淲e know that in the current reality, one of the main interests of companies and organizations is to maintain productivity,鈥� said Crist贸bal Vergara, a general manager at 麻豆原创 Chile. 鈥淭o achieve this, it is relevant to reimagine the processes and invest in distance collaboration tools, technologies to facilitate work, and worker training programs because building a culture of continuous learning reflects that the company is investing in potential and growth.鈥�

Entel鈥檚 digital learning journey began in 2016 when the company implemented a from 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions to help enhance Entel University, a largely in-person education center. The company founded Entel University in 2010 with a face-to-face classroom format that proved to be a constant challenge for learners spread across locations. Not only that, but in-person learning also required a large investment in time and money. The digital LMS helped reduce these costs by initiating self-learning processes and bringing content online, and it offered specialized training tailored to the needs of each employee鈥檚 role and specialization.

Then, in the midst of the pandemic, Entel decided to take the plunge and completely digitalize Entel University. It consolidated its entire learning infrastructure on a single platform on 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions. The solutions helped create a foundation for permanent corporate learning through diverse and dynamic courses that align with the company鈥檚 strategy. Employees can easily access topics of interest intuitively organized on one digital experience through their desktop or mobile devices. They can take advantage of a new professional skills program that includes performance management workshops and more. In addition, specialized courses help employees gain new skills in sales, e-commerce, cybersecurity, and customer experience.

At its core, Entel University promotes a new digital culture that emphasizes self-management and continuous learning. In 2020, 3,098 employees took one or more e-learning courses at Entel University for a total of 6,003 completed remote courses 鈥� three times more than all of the courses completed in 2019. Entel University will make it easy for employees to continue learning, even after the pandemic subsides.

鈥淔or Entel, learning management is in constant evolution, mobilizing the capacities that our company requires in its permanent transformation,鈥� said Sanchez. 鈥淭hat is why, within the next 12 years, the main challenge will be to train talent with an emphasis on the development of digital capabilities and a mentality willing to change.鈥�

To achieve this, the company continues the successful journey it started with 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions. Entel hopes that its digital training, in addition to future developments in human experience management (HXM), will help reduce employee turnover by improving the overall Entel employee experience.

To learn more about how 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions can help your business provide effective digital enablement for employees, .

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