2022 was certainly a year to remember—or as some might argue—one to forget completely. Following two years in a global pandemic, people began to reunite with loved ones and companies began to open their doors (metaphorically and physically), welcoming employees back to a new “office.” However, as we all tried to settle into a new normal, we were met with a bewildering array of macroeconomic conditions and forced to continue grappling with an unrelenting amount of change.
As a result, in organizations of every kind, leaders are approaching the new year with a commitment to continue prioritizing the development of their workforce to ensure they can remain agile. This is critical to help companies keep pace with innovation among hiring freezes and layoffs—especially as 87 percent of executives say their organizations already face or expect to face skill gaps over the next five years. Prioritizing ongoing employee development not only helps to close those gaps, but studies have shown that it’s a powerful way to keep your workforce engaged, too.
3 Key Trends
This begs the question: If learning and development are still key to success in 2023, then what learning strategies should companies consider implementing as we continue to write the playbook for hybrid work? In Udemy’s newly released 2023 Workplace Learning Trends Report, we identified three key trends that will be essential for organizations as they continue to establish and build a framework for learning: culture, agility and delivery.
- Lead through a culture that reinforces learning. True learning organizations are clear on their purpose, strategy, and culture when it comes to doing business. They ensure there’s a connection between these tentpoles and the critical skills they are looking to build. Learning is an ongoing practice of building skills, experiences, and knowledge through our work, not around or on top of it. So when learning and culture are closely aligned, they mutually reinforce each other, creating a powerful flywheel for employee and company growth. Here are a few things to consider when building or reinforcing a learning culture:
- Assess whether your values and behaviors currently are showing up in your core people processes. Integrating those behavioral expectations within key processes such as hiring, onboarding, and talent management then will create opportunities for increased cultural reinforcement.
- Before sending your employees to a training program, take some time to map out the specific skills you’d like employees to learn during the experience and how those skills map to the strategy and culture. This ensures that both individual and employee development needs are met.
- Finally, it’s important to remember that learning is a team sport. As an employee begins a new learning experience, it’s critical that managers and employees take time to discuss the opportunity with each other. Ideally, the manager shares how they can support the employee and the employee shares how they need to be supported by their manager.
Today, 70 percent of employees worldwide admit they’ve recently contemplated a career change as they seek more opportunities to uplevel their work. Deploying some of the strategies discussed above could help these same employees contemplate new careers within their current organization as they learn new skills that can be practiced in their daily work.
- Upskill for workforce agility. Even before the pandemic, finding the right talent to help keep pace with the speed of innovation had become a challenge, and the last few years have only amplified that critical need. Further, experts claim that the pandemic has sped up digital adoption by as much as five years. As a result, many organizations are being faced with a major obstacle: How to remain focused and agile to deliver results despite working with fewer employees and smaller budgets.
The good news is, it can be done. If we look back at the 2009 financial crisis, organizations that continued to prioritize innovation outperformed the market by an average of 30 percent. The key here is to embrace disruption as an opportunity. Learning the skills to be adaptable during times of unprecedented change sets up employees and organizations to come out ahead of the competition. In fact, we saw a 49 percent annual increase in the amount of time Udemy Business customers spent learning technical skills in 2022, a number we only expect to increase this year. Here are a few tips to help make your organization more agile:
- To achieve increased agility, employees must be clear on their role and what they are driving across the organization. When organizations and leaders are clear about their role and responsibilities, work gets done faster and more effectively.
- Additionally, as the work that is being done within organizations has become increasingly focused on cross-functional global objectives, it’s also lengthened the decision-making process. To help expedite this process, it’s important to identify those stakeholders at the beginning of any major project and also as priorities shift.
- Finally, it’s crucial to regularly review team practices such as communication vehicles and meeting cadences. These simple but important practices make a considerable difference to help organizations increase their workforce agility.
- Rethink delivery to get the most out of learning. Over the years, it’s become clear that for learning to stick, people need multiple modalities to both learn new skills and reinforce existing skills in new contexts. Additionally, while 77 percent of the global workforce says they’re ready to learn new skills or completely retrain, designing the right modality for them to learn effectively is a critical component of the overall learning experience.
As organizations continue to embrace a blended learning approach—providing a mix of online and in-person trainings—it’s essential to ensure employees have the opportunity to learn from a variety of modalities. Here are some things to keep in mind when thinking about learning modalities:
- Managers need to guide employees toward the learning modalities best suited for their needs. To do this successfully, managers need to sit down with employees to map out a learning path that is aligned with their short- and long-term goals, enabling ample opportunities to practice new skills through daily work.
- When developing these learning paths, ensure employees are including a mix of learning modalities with an emphasis on applied learning. Bringing people together within real-world contexts can be a powerful way to achieve employee development goals. As an example, if your employee is learning how to be a better presenter, give them the opportunity to speak at a future company meeting and then tell them what they did well and what they can improve upon next time.
- Finally, while all learning modalities can play an important role, cohort learning is often the most critical for developing leadership skills. In a recent study done by The Conference Board and ROI Institute with 60 leaders across a variety of industries, they identified that an online, cohort leadership development program can deliver higher returns than those of traditional in-person leadership programs.
The global workforce is predicted to need not only new skills, but to acquire as much as 10 percent more skills with each passing year. If we continue to focus on building workplace cultures tied to learning experiences, developing agile skills, and learning within the right modality, we will not only get through challenging times today, we also will build a strong foundation for future success.
