At a time when organizations are shifting the conversation from the great resignation to the forced resignation, learning and development (L&D) can take an active role in helping organizations future-proof their workforces and identify the talent they need to nurture from within. In this new labor market, keeping and upskilling your best talent is more critical than ever. Fortunately, a new breed of sophisticated tools can use data science and validated, unbiased assessments to take inventory of an entire organization’s workforce. These new tools can quickly evaluate the capabilities of an entire workforce and map them to the critical capabilities needed for future success. And all of this can be done in an hour or less.
L&D must be reinvigorated to compete in today’s labor market
As W. Warner Burke predicted in his 2018 paper, The rise and fall of the growth of organization development, Organizational Development (OD) has become stagnant. He identifies four trends to reinvigorate OD and talent management, bringing both to the C-Suite table with actionable, critical insights that drive the organization into a more successful future.
- Shift to platforms
- Go digital
- Focus on insights you can glean from data
- Integrate talent management with OD
The Josh Bersin Company’s 2022 predictions for HR identifies15 trends for the future of HR, and many of them involve L&D. Bersin emphasizes the need to keep a capability inventory, merge talent acquisition with employee development, design targeted strategies to develop talent and create mobility and drive business decisions with human-centered insight and solutions. Fortunately, new workforce tools provide an effective way to do just that.
Capabilities are now more important than job history and resume
Focusing on workforce capabilities will help L&D shape the company culture, moving away from what a person did in the past to what someone can do in the future. That means deemphasizing previous job history and focusing on hidden capabilities revealed with these new data science-driven tools. You can now easily identify who is underemployed, misaligned to their role, who should upskill, and who has the potential in areas you (and they) never imagined possible. Creating opportunities and mobility for people like Domani and Chitra, people who didn’t know what their capabilities were and didn’t have the confidence to see what was possible or how to communicate their potential to an employer who was only looking at a resume.
Many employees in your organization are in the wrong roles. And you don’t know it.
Many organizations still employ 19th-century hiring practices, relying on golden pedigrees and previous job history to determine organizational fit. But what a person does is not as important as what they can do. We all know friends and co-workers who hate their jobs but are seemingly good at them. One in five people in the workforce are in the wrong role, jobs they are not motivated by, engaged with, or productive in, according to recent research. By understanding deeply what motivates your employees and uncovering their “inner geniuses,” you can identify better roles where they can find meaning and purpose. Many employees are underemployed, and this is where L&D can provide C-level data to inform future workforce strategies.
Four steps to keep your best talent and hire from within
- Map the skills you need. Work with the organization’s leaders to identify the skills needed to future-proof the organization. According to a new study from 1EdTech Foundation, 69 percent of employers support industry-led competency frameworks. There are a number of good frameworks in the industry, including the Human Capabilities Framework from The Institute for Working Futures and the Foundational Skills for Citizens Framework from McKenzie.
- Employ a data science-driven tool, like MyInnerGenius, to help develop a complete skills registry for your entire workforce. These tools will allow an organization to create a complete database of human capabilities and skills in less than an hour. These tools can automatically create personalized skills development pathways to ensure an organization has the necessary skills, without wasting resources and incurring extra costs. These tools identify employees under-employed in the organization (and potential flight risks) and where they can have better opportunities, have more meaning in their work, and offer more value to the organization.
- Analyze your data and create a heatmap to gain a deep understanding of the talent in the organization and create macro and micro L&D strategies. 73 percent of employers are using talent analytics in some way to improve hiring. Again, there are many tools, from basic data analysis to AI tools which can offer deeper insights. Organizations can develop a capability heatmap of their entire workforce from a macro-level. Data can be analyzed from an aggregate level to identify current organizational issues, predict future issues and inform workforce strategies. From a micro-level, you can identify people’s strengths, capabilities, and gaps, then create personalized, targeted development plans. This ensures your training dollars are spent where they are needed and where they will have the greatest organizational impact.
- Measure your success. Many L&D organizations struggle to find metrics to show the value of what they do. This makes it easy. You can measure the results by benchmarking your organization (or individuals) before you initiate your program. Using simple tools like NPS ratings, you can determine increases in engagement, retention, and job satisfaction. By placing the right people in the right roles, organizations have been able to correlate revenue and customer satisfaction increases. Matching employees to the right roles can save organizations millions of dollars in training and recruiting costs alone.
Becoming a data science-driven organization = a new way to think about employees
The convergence of Big Data, data analytics, and a new way to think about employees (focusing on capabilities instead of job and school history) are the best ways to reduce attrition and prepare your organization for the future. But the benefits extend beyond talent retention; they improve employee satisfaction and increase diversity and inclusion by focusing on what matters: human capabilities. The rest can be trained. This is the future for learning and development groups.
