10 Things L&D Should Consider To Boost Employee Upskilling

10 Ways To Boost Employee Upskilling In 2021
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Summary: In this article, we explore how L&D can improve training programs through digital learning and content recommendations to help employees get access to the most relevant and impactful learning content.

Content Curation And Employee Upskilling

The pandemic has accelerated massive changes across all industries and sectors, putting the spotlight back on L&D to help businesses upskill their employees with the latest and in-demand skills to compete at the highest level. While continuous capability development has always been an integral part of L&D’s modus operandi, the pandemic has only augmented the need for it.

According to the 2021 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, upskilling and reskilling top the list for L&D professionals globally (59%) as their most important areas of focus. Deloitte’s Future of learning in the wake of COVID-19 report also mentions how at least 85% of organizations want their employees to develop some critical human skills like resilience, emotional intelligence, and empathy.

The need, as well as the expectation, is now clear that skills development has to be one of the top priorities on the corporate agenda [1].

Ways To Boost Employee Upskilling With Content Curation

One of the most effective and successful approaches to skills development is content curation and recommendation. At a time when there is an abundance of content and learners find it tough to choose what’s right for them, content curation helps them filter through the sea to find what fulfills their needs and is relevant to their wants [2].

Moreover, skills have a shelf life, which means training needs to be updated on a regular basis so that it remains at pace with emerging skills. Content curation helps address skills gaps because it satisfies the need for continuous learning and development and adds recent up-to-date, fresh content for learners. Learning curators can create microlearning experiences that are chunked into learning paths or categories that fit into learners’ schedules more easily than formal training. Learners can undergo skills training by accessing these bite-sized chunks of information as per their needs, time, and convenience.

Curating Skills-Based Content To Plug Skills Gaps

Curating content involves more than simply collecting content or resources and sending them out randomly to learners. Learning curators identify, collect, evaluate, categorize, and conceptualize content as per the learning needs of their learners before circulating it.

This is why curated content works as one of the best training aids for skills development. Based on whatever skills learners require as per their needs and role in an organization, curated content can be shared with them in the format best suited to them.

By offering the most relevant information, content curation can help learners avoid the burden of sifting through endless resources to pick the right content they need to develop the necessary skills. This helps reduce their cognitive load and ultimately achieve focused learning.

Here are 10 things to consider when using content curation and recommendation to drive skills development in 2021 and beyond:

  1. Align content strategy with learners’ needs by ensuring that they have the right platforms to express their feedback and give input on what they exactly need so that content relevancy is maintained.
  2. Choose those skills areas for training that can establish clear gains toward business goals. Newly emerging skills need focus because they can help learners better adapt to the changing world of work.
  3. Leverage skills-based content recommendations as learning resources to offer just-in-time performance support, supplement formal training, and encourage informal and social learning.
  4. Set up a dynamic team of curators who do not focus only on curating content but also on reinventing strategies based on feedback and usage patterns. This will help ensure that initiatives like these are successful, engaging, and motivating for learners.
  5. Give learners the flexibility to access the curated content at their convenience–at the time of their need, on the go, and on any device of their choice.
  6. Encourage learners to recommend and contribute by highlighting how they benefited from content recommendations.
  7. Offer customized learning paths to learners based on their areas of interest, their needs, and roles in the organization.
  8. Ensure continuous analysis and refinement of content in order to optimize the value of the skills-based content recommendations.
  9. Schedule regular updates and refinement using feedback and inputs from subject matter experts to ensure relevancy for learners in the curated content.
  10. Archive the resources so that they can be accessed even in the future.

Takeaway

As skills development is set to dominate the corporate learning landscape in 2021 and beyond, curating relevant content to align with emerging skills is the key. Skills-based content curation will continue to be a crucial element in the L&D toolkit to help employees upskill and reskill.

References:

[1] Top Employee Upskilling Trends to watch going into 2021

[2] 5 Ways Content Relevancy Can Get Faster Learning Adoption and Impact

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