Learning Tech Meets the Internal Talent Marketplace

The pandemic and other crises of 2020 have made the need for modern, agile skill sets abundantly clear. What is not clear is how to get there. I believe next-generation learning technology is the pathway to skilling employees now, writes Ken Parker, co-founder and CEO of NextThought.

Several major reports have recently noted that talent development — specifically upskilling and reskilling employees — is the top priority for business leaders around the world. At the same time, the world of work has changed dramatically in the last year, causing heightened stress for employees and greater uncertainty for businesses.

A recent Axios storyOpens a new window highlighted the importance of upskilling workers to pivot to new careers, especially as the economy takes a turn: “Millions of jobs … will be gone forever, and workers are figuring out their next moves.” Here are just two examples:

• Former bartenders and restaurant workers have joined training programs and found new jobs at tech companies.
• One former cruise ship employee trained at a program funded by AWS, where she later got a job at one of its data centers.

Employees do not have to wait until a crushing economy or a layoff to transition to a new role. And they do not have to leave their organization to change jobs. Employees can creatively use existing learning technology and make the jump to new internal roles.

How can learning leaders help them get there? By facilitating nimble approaches in talent marketplaces and for employee skills developmentOpens a new window .

Learn More: Remote Learning During COVID-19: How HR Can Manage Remote Employees’ L&D

Talent and Learning Come Together

The future of talent development will look completely different than it has in the past. Traditionally, L&D teams have spent much of their time creating course content for internal compliance purposes, and content for new skills quickly grew stale. The future of L&DOpens a new window , however, will look like corporate learning teams using an LMS to help employees add skills to their resumes to tackle projects on an as-needed basis. Organizations will “hire” teams from within their own ranks to take on ad hoc projects, then quickly disband them and move on to the next.

For years, analysts at firms like Deloitte and McKinsey have argued for this talent-and-learning model in response to the increasing emphasis organizations have put on agility. The trend has even given rise to a category of tools to help with what is now called organizational network analysis (ONA). Analyses like these allow talent leaders to create succession plans and talent mobility, supporting the learning and development functions in many ways.

This trend is already picking up pace. Researchers at Deloitte now argue for an internal talent marketplaceOpens a new window . It would be a sort of one-stop shop that, according to Deloitte, would:

• Enable managers to promote varied roles
• Help organizations quickly deploy, motivate, develop, and retain employees

COVID-19 has only accelerated acceptance and implementation of this model.

But what does this have to do with learning technology?

The Solution? Create Content Quickly.

Adopting next-generation learning technology can help you be more agile. Though business is changing fast, the good news is that learning technology can change even faster. Think about how much content is freely available all over the internet. From experts on YouTube to major newspapers and podcasts, there is virtually no limit to how much great content you could bring into your learning platform, almost as quickly as it is created.

Suppose you found a podcast or a YouTube interview that will help your team better understand the dynamics of some market trend. Modern learning platforms allow you to grab the link and create a new piece of content for your employees to consume during their course.

The real advantage of modern platforms is that you do not even have to create the content yourself. Your employees know a lot more than you think. They keep up with trends that learning professionals miss. From their adult children or friends and peers, they glean insight they want to use in their jobs the very next day. All of this means that they are learning “on the street” — and so much of it can be used in the courses you offer through social learning, along with the follow-up comments and highlights from other employees.

This not only allows your employees to learn from the content you recommend but also from each other. It also creates a more engaged learning environment, knowing that your people can contribute to the organization in a collaborative and practical way.

Learn More: Bet on Blockchain to Revolutionize HR: 4 Ways It Will Improve the Value of L&D

Imagine you have gathered a few third-party resources from your newsletters or newspapers, or from videos you watched last week. Now imagine opening your learning platform to be able to immediately build a course on the latest trend, drawn from that real-time, street-savvy learning, where your people have contributed and grown their minds and their careers in a matter of minutes.

With that kind of speed, you can develop your people at the pace of business. You can quickly build their skills, enhance their industry expertise, and strengthen their peer relationships — to grow careers and businesses faster.