“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” -Henry Ford
The modern-day workplace is a school. Learning today bridges the gap between employee skillset and organizational expectations. This is the new age learning process that drives business value. Conventional thought is that the current workplace learning is supposed to be online and automated.
However, much of today’s learning comes from building innovation through new opportunities created by technology. Modern-day learning is not only about enabling competence, compliance, and conformance, but also about offering paths to employees to choose from. Employees can address several issues through learning including the following.
Performance problems
Building knowledge bases
Awareness of skills for the future
Motivation at work
Organizations must encourage and employees’ self-awareness, learning, and growth. An important aspect of today’s learning is to build resilient organizations that evolve continuously.
Corporate learning in today’s day and age is driven by the following factors.
Millennials:
The millennial learner demands and directs his learning journey. Hence, the learning and development strategy should be redesigned and improved to give tools and freedom to learn what they deem to be most important.
Transformation:
Today’s organizational strength is gauged through the employee network. Any organization that identifies the importance of building resilient teams along their digital transformation journey is heading towards a successful business transformation. These organizations have served as catalysts to shift priorities from just developing learning strategies to empowering employee learning that drives enhanced business value.
The Growth Driver :
Organizations must strengthen their employee network as meticulously as their customer networks. The growth of employees in organizations today is aligned to the overall organizational development. Hence, today’s learning function must become a strategic business development area that facilitates leadership development and innovation. Organizational learning builds a culture of collaboration and constancy among internal teams, driving business growth.
The Paradigm Shift :
Changing the thinking curve of employees and leaders is a paradigm shift. This is enabled by establishing a strong learning function in the organization, that the employees can bank on. This strategic placement of learning strengthens employees’ trust in the organization in times of crisis. This paradigm shift has also enabled the C-suite members to step up and learn new skills.
Organizational Learning Strategy
It takes time and effort to establish an organization-wide learning strategy. Yet, it is crucial. In these testing times, it is highly important to instil the habit of learning and constant upskilling in the employees. Ideally, the senior leadership team should step up and identify several learning gaps in the organization and establish learning engines accordingly.
Feuji’s recent partnerships and business expansion taught me and my team to focus on specific learning goals, derive a learning schedule, and identify people who are enthusiastic to learn and grow. In this process, our sales and technology teams were actively involved in the partner enablement calls, which emphasize building skilled teams.
Leadership Learning
Leadership learning plays an integral part in business growth. Today’s leadership is termed successful, only if the leaders can stay equipped and current. Leadership learning should be focused on:
Building diverse teams
Reducing attrition
Increasing employee retention
Making and implementing inclusive policies
Achieving a gender balance
Engaging employees
Reducing communication and resource gaps between global teams
Instilling a growth mindset in the employees and leadership teams
A strong leadership network adds to and builds on individual visions. My association with TiE helped me discover leaders who share common interests and enabled a platform to discuss ideas, brainstorm and innovate together. This also helped me nurture a strong relationship between my organization and the TiE network.
Employee Retention
The world is changing in the blink of an eye. Employees expect protection and personal value from the organization. Hence, leaders must invest their time and effort in creating and implementing personalized employee experiences. Employee-specific learning programs help greatly in this aspect. Understanding the learning needs of an employee and offering all necessary tools become vital in employee engagement and retention.
Establishing learning engines, workshops, boot camps, and certification programs that bring technology and business experts in the organization together builds freedom and inclusiveness. These events serve as platforms where employees can learn, share ideas, and grow together. Recognizing employees who constantly learn and achieve their goals also builds employee satisfaction.
Organization-wide learning builds brick-by-brick. We leaders must identify knowledge gaps in our organizations and utilize them as opportunities for learning. We grow when we learn together and evolve when we can derive innovation from learning.
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