Five Imperatives For Leveraging Corporate Learning In Workforce Transformation

Workplace learning has become increasingly important as a lever for an organization’s ability to attract, engage, and retain employees. According to the OECD, more than 1 billion jobs, almost one-third of all jobs worldwide, are likely to be transformed by technology. As jobs evolve, so will the skills needed to perform them, as forty-two percent of the core skills of jobs performed today are expected to change by 2022.

This accelerated pace of change is driving learning & development professionals to be more strategic in leveraging the organization’s investment in learning to shape culture and transform the workforce. Future Workplace, in partnership with GP Strategies, conducted a survey of 549 global HR and Business leaders to uncover how a focus on learning is expanding across the enterprise and the implications for the new capabilities needed among members of learning & development teams.

As you prepare to flip the calendar to 2022, I want to share five imperatives that you should consider as you map your strategy for learning & development.

1. The need to up-skill learning team members and plan for innovation are the top two priorities for the learning function.

Before the coronavirus began its merciless march, the corporate game plan was to up-skill the workforce. However, learning & development team members were often the last to take advantage of this focus on up-skilling. Now, as the dust is settling, organizations are moving forward to drive innovation in learning and they are focusing on new capabilities needed for learning & development team members.

As Figure 1 shows, when we asked L&D leaders “aside from budget, what are the top challenges you will face in 2022,” they included up-skilling learning & development team members, having a strategic plan for innovation of corporate learning, and building a culture of lifelong learning as the top three priorities. Addressing these challenges starts from the top. The Chief Learning Officer must shift focus and resources from the development of courses to the development of mindsets and capabilities that will help workers perform well now and adapt smoothly in the future.

2. Consider the personalization of the learning experience as a mainstream expectation of employees rather than a bonus.

Employees are demanding a “high touch and high tech” learning experience, whether they work from home, in the office, or in a hybrid work environment. The end goal is to create learning experiences comparable to what employees already have on their smartphone. Figure 2 shows that 43% of our research sample are moving face to face learning to virtual online learning, and 39% are investing in using virtual reality to develop employee skills. As I wrote in my Harvard Business Review article, How Companies are Using VR to Develop Employee Soft Skills, companies are using immersive VR to create highly memorable and impactful learning experiences, allowing employees to practice skills without the potential risk of real-world consequences. Companies such as Mursion, Strivr, Immerse, BodySwaps, Realcast, and Talespin have applications for using VR for practicing skills such as emotional intelligence, empathy, interviewing, operational efficiency, and customer service.

As remote works becomes more common, it’s likely that VR will become the desired platform for many soft skills training programs. In fact, in my Harvard Business Review article, 21 HR Jobs of the Future, my coauthor and I proposed an entirely new HR role dedicated to VR: a VR Immersion Counselor, focused on creating, facilitating, personalizing, and scaling the rollout of Virtual Reality for professional development. 

3. The audience for corporate learning moves beyond traditional full-time employees to include gig workers, customers, and digital assistants or bots.

The learning department of the future will increasingly expand its audience to include customers, gig workers, and digital assistants or bots. The change in the audience for learning and development is shown in Figure 3. The focus here is expanding the audience for training as learning and business leaders use the company’s investment in learning to drive loyalty with customers, create a possible source of revenue with customer education, train gig workers and importantly, include bots as the newest audience for learning & development. Figure 3 shows the growth for these distinct audiences for learning & development. 

4. The golden age of corporate/higher education partnerships is here.

When it comes to corporate/higher education partnerships, half the organizations surveyed are currently offering college or university accreditation for their learning programs, and, among those not doing so yet, 53% expect to be offering this by 2025.

There are many reasons for this, including the increased need for individual employees to build the breadth and depth of their skills and capabilities to prepare them for the future of work. As outlined in the World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs Report, half of all employees around the world will need re-skilling by 2025 – and that number doesn’t include all the people who are currently not in employment.

While offering college credits for corporate training has been around for decades, there is now an urgency among organizations to find new ways to use their investment in learning to build the skills and capabilities of their workforce. The MOOC movement launched in 2012 has sky rocketed with MOOCs reaching over 180 million individuals worldwide, with the number of MOOCs surpassing 16,500.

Coursera, one of the first MOOCs, has partnered with Google to create the Google IT certificate led by Googlers who are expert in IT to provide qualified training in a field where there are over 340,000 job openings.

In addition to creating new certificates to train workers for in demand skills like IT, some organizations are using partnerships with institutions of higher education to create new offerings to close diversity gaps. This is the case for the partnership between PwC and Northeastern University, created to address the fact that of the 1.9 million accountants in the U.S., only less than 9% are Black.

As part of the firm’s commitment to DEI, PwC has built a partnership between PwC and Northeastern University, helping diverse students earn a free Master’s degree in accounting by combining online course work at Northeastern University with real world experience at PwC.

As Figure 4 shows, 53% of organizations are planning to partner in some way with higher education by 2025. We will see more use cases like Google and PwC using partnerships with higher education to both offer college credit for training programs and to create innovative offerings to find qualified job candidates.

5. Corporate learning professionals need to align their learning strategy and metrics to the transformation objectives of their organization.

Learning leaders need to develop business and commercial acumen to drive the transformation of their workforce. When we asked survey respondents to reflect on key impact measures for the learning function of the future, innovation is now the number one learning impact measure. More traditional metrics of measuring the effectiveness and efficiency of learning ranked as numbers two and three respectively in importance. Why is this the case? Organizations are moving beyond focusing just on instruction to creating immersive experiences and application challenges for learners to reflect on the implications on business priorities. The goal is to design learning experiences that integrate tightly with work so the learner can apply this immediately to their job role. Hence, the focus on tapping innovation as a mindset in this process.

In addition, companies are creating a new job role: the Future of Work Leader, as described in my Harvard Business Review article, 21 HR Jobs of the Future. The Future of Work Leader is responsible for analyzing what skills will be most essential as the workforce continues to evolve, and sets the strategy for proposing re-skilling and up-skilling efforts for current employees. As profiled in the online course, 21 HR Jobs of the Future, Prudential Financial has created the new job role Vice President of the Future of Work and Facebook has created the Director of Remote Work role, both examples of how organizations are envisioning the future and putting into place new roles and organizational design capabilities to build the skills needed for the future.

What does this mean for the role of the Chief Learning Officer?

Chief Learning Officers need to be transformative talent builders. Rather than just partnering with business leaders to understand the future direction of the organization, CLOs need to anticipate and lead innovation through the development of current and future skills needed to achieve the organization’s business strategy.

Figure 5 shows how the CLO Maturity Model is emerging, with forward looking CLOs becoming instrumental in defining why, how, where, and when people work and learn.

The transformation of the Chief Learning Officer role is making learning and development an integral part of the organization’s strategic agenda. This signals both a new mindset and capability shift for CLOs, one that will transform the learning function enabling learning to have a strategic role in workforce transformation.