The competition for talent has shifted to the competition for skills. At a time where rapid change is the new normal, organizations are faced with skill shortages that hiring won’t solve. Understanding the skills you have and the skills you need is key to staying competitive in the future.
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 HR meta-trends 2023 report 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 SAP 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 SAP SuccessFactors Learning.
While this integrated learning experience will include a redesigned, revitalized homepage, it will also help identify the many learning options available to employees – the items that people “have to learn,” such as mandatory learning for safety and compliance; those that they “need to learn” to excel in their roles and achieve business objectives; and what they “want to learn” based on their own interests, aspirations, and motivations.
Here, the integrated learning experience will leverage the talent intelligence hub framework within the SAP 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 – with a data-driven view of their skills, wants, and needs – can drive workforce progress in an organic manner. That’s 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
- Prioritize learning opportunities that encourage collaboration, growth, discovery, and curiosity while ensuring employees stay compliant with business and legal objectives.
- Accelerate upskilling processes through greater visibility, access, and navigation through the integrated learning experience.
- Improve engagement through experiences that prioritize and organize a learner’s individual needs, skills, interests, and aspirations.
- Individualize opportunities and personalized recommendations for learning activities, mentors, temporary assignments, and more, fueling professional development through SAP 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 Wißmann, director of Corporate HR at Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, believes “that 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.” By integrating the new experience with its learning strategy, Wißmann is confident that “it 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.”
This essential focus on employee experience in a more unified way can promote a culture of learning and growth in an organization’s 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’s overall strategy, it can reap extraordinary benefits.
Want to know more about SAP SuccessFactors Learning or the values of upskilling in the modern economy? Read Corporate Learning Is Evolving: 6 Things to Know.
Margit Bauer is director of Solution Marketing for SAP SuccessFactors Learning.