Operations Insights
October 1, 2024

How to close the skills gap with your enterprise learning management system

Employers need employees with the right skills, and they need them now. Find out how a technology-first approach can help you close your skills gaps with targeted upskilling and reskilling at scale. 

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Learn how your enterprise learning management system can help you close critical skills gaps through upskilling and reskilling at scale.
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Employers around the globe are watching their productivity fall because of persistent skills shortages. In fact, nine in 10 organizations say they’ll encounter a meaningful skills gap in the coming years. But conquering this challenge has been extremely difficult. Companies often don’t know which skills their employees lack, and even when they do know, they can’t solve the problem with recruitment alone. In many countries, the lingering impact of inflation on the cost of living continues to make new hires more expensive. Employers are thus caught in a balancing act where they need to increase productivity while keeping costs under control.  

In this environment, it makes sense that organizations are trying to boost productivity through upskilling, reskilling, and increasing internal mobility. These efforts also help retain existing employees to prevent regrettable attrition, since nearly half of US workers say they would consider switching jobs for better learning opportunities. But this approach has met with headwinds, too. The Harvard Business Review reports that “among [companies] that have embraced the reskilling challenge, only a handful have done so effectively, and even their efforts have been subscale and of limited impact.” This often happens because these efforts lack the infrastructure to offer personalized learning at scale and support it across the employee lifecycle.  

Nearly half of US workers say they would consider switching jobs for better learning opportunities.

Increasingly, organizations are turning to enterprise learning technology to support skills training in every aspect of the employee experience, connecting it to key development milestones and providing leaders with the visibility they need to ensure goals are met. This guide is a roadmap for organizations looking to close their skills gaps by leveraging the full capabilities of a best-in-class enterprise learning management system.  

Start with “Why?” 

The first step in closing your skills gaps is getting buy-in from key stakeholders for new investments in enterprise learning technology, especially a learning management system (LMS). An LMS is a software platform that allows you to administer, document, track, report, and deliver educational courses and training programs to your people. It’s also an essential tool for upskilling and reskilling your workforce.  

Without the right technology, companies need to record skills manually department by department, establish agreed-upon naming and definitions for different skills, and develop an overview of the business titles across their organization and how those titles connect to specific skills. Creating and maintaining this approach without the help of an LMS simply doesn’t work at scale and likely isn’t worth the investment of time and money. But best-in-class enterprise learning technology can provide time-saving automations that help companies automatically identify key skills, map them across diverse jobs, understand gaps, and assign learning plans and activities to help close these gaps as quickly as possible.   

To support the case for investing in a leading enterprise LMS, you’ll need to come prepared with a list of the positive business outcomes that better technology will help you achieve. Here’s a quick look at some of those outcomes, along with handy sources for backing them up: 
 

If you’re building a case for new learning investments at your company, be sure to mention these benefits to get everyone on the same page about why you want to move forward. Once you have buy-in on the most important benefits, you’re ready to explore available solutions. 


What does your enterprise learning management system need to do? 

Organizations need to instill an end-to-end cultural focus on learning if they want to close their skills gaps quickly. But to do this, they need to invest in the tools that sustain workers’ engagement with learning day-to-day. An occasional workshop or one-off training module won’t move the needle on your company’s top KPIs. Learning needs to be incorporated into an employee’s daily routine and key development stages, empowering them to access training and upskill within the flow of work, and this can only be achieved by embedding learning into the tools and processes they use every day.  

As more millennials and Gen Z workers enter the workforce, they also expect a learning experience that boasts the convenience and user-friendliness of an on-demand video streaming platform like YouTube and Netflix. For that reason, your learning technology needs to offer the robust compliance support of an LMS alongside a highly engaging user experience. 

On the operational side, managers need visibility into their employees’ learning activities and progress toward their goals. They need this to maintain ongoing compliance, but more often, to ensure their company is staying on top of emerging skills gaps and helping their employees envision a future at the company to increase engagement, productivity, and retention.  

Finally, it’s important that your LMS can map and target training towards specific skills. For this, you need an overview of the skills available in your organization, as well as the skills that might be needed in future, whether that’s high-risk areas for skill gaps, or high demand from employees for training on key topics. Luckily, best-in-class technology can offer these benefits on day one.  

 

Lay the foundation for continuous learning 

Nearly any organization will say it wants to foster a culture of continuous learning, but few organizations offer concrete ways of doing so. That’s because companies often look at culture from a top-down perspective, stressing the importance of continuous learning to managers and workers, then offering few opportunities or tools to engage in it. If learning is left entirely to the initiative of managers and employees, it won’t flourish. To help understand this gap, consider that 60% of leaders say their organization offers training to help employees transition to new roles, but only 26% of employees say they are offered such training. To overcome this gap, organizations need to make their learning opportunities more engaging and ensure employees are aware of them. To do this, they need to take a technology-first approach to embedding learning into every part of the employee lifecycle and making it much easier for users to engage regularly with compelling, relevant content.  

First impressions are key 

Learning begins at the earliest stage of the employee lifecycle – onboarding. With a strong onboarding platform, you can provide the new employee with a branded, engaging experience that sets the tone for their entire time at your company. It also provides clarity of expectations that helps mitigate the stress and uncertainty employees often feel during onboarding. This first impression also sets their expectations to receive regular nudges and learning assignments in the future. These convenient nudges and assignments significantly reduce the workload of your administrators while ensuring the new employee stays on top of all their learning requirements. 

Ensure compliance from day one  

As important as it is to make a positive first impression with new employees, it’s also essential to help managers see when workers have completed their required learning and when they’re at risk of missing important deadlines. This is especially important in an employee’s first few weeks, when the completion of mandatory training not only speeds time to productivity, but also keeps your organization in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and ethical standards. Having your learning live on the same platform and data model as your recruitment software also allows you to seamlessly pass relevant new hire data from the recruiting stage to the onboarding stage, saving the many hours of administrative work spent creating new employee profiles. 

Create personalized learning plans at scale 

To ensure employee engagement with learning, curricula and materials need to be relevant – not only to the employee’s current job, but to their future career aspirations. Dayforce Pulse of Talent research has found that 84% of workers feel that having a clear career path would make them more loyal to their employer. On the other hand, employers know they need to curate clear learning plans for employees and not just offer one-off, ad hoc courses. The challenge is doing so at scale, since asking your team to curate personalized curricula for hundreds or even thousands of employees is too cumbersome for most employers. Instead, they need the help of technology to fill this capacity gap.  

If your enterprise learning management system is embedded within your overall human capital management (HCM) platform, you can create personalized development plans for employees that include targeted skills and training content pulled from a learning library. Reporting also allows companies to track organization-wide progress towards development plans, while managers have a dashboard view of their own teams' progress. With these tools in hand, learning assignments and achievements can be reflected in development plans, and those plans can flow into performance and succession planning efforts, all on a single HCM platform. This seamless connection between learning, development, and performance provides your managers more insight than ever before into the relationships between different parts of your employee's experience, leading to better decisions and increased engagement.   

 

Source Expertly Crafted Learning Content 

If your enterprise learning management systems is hard to use, people won’t use it. That’s why it’s critical to have an intuitive content authoring experience, along with a robust library of pre-built courses and curricula to satisfy all your general and niche learning needs.  

Authoring your own content 

Using content authoring tools, administrators or content creators should be able to easily create courses from scratch using a platform's built-in capabilities. This includes the ability to upload various types of content such as videos, text, images, and podcasts. The content can be organized into individual courses and pages, or as learning plans that facilitate structured learning paths for users. 

Leveraging third-party content 

In addition to in-house learning content, companies often see value in leveraging pre-built third-party content to help fill out their library and curricula, especially for subjects that might be common across different organizations or beyond their in-house expertise. Therefore, when looking at your current or future learning platform, make sure to ask how well it’s able to discover and pull in pre-built content collections and curricula from a content store that can be accessed directly within the learning platform. This option offers you professionally verified, data-backed collections that can help eliminate guesswork from content curation and provide relevance and reliability more quickly and with greater confidence than developing all learning material in-house.  

 

Lean into analytics 

To provide real value to learning administrators and managers, the enterprise learning management system needs to provide insights that lead to better organizational outcomes. When you use the right metrics, you can connect your learning data directly to productivity and performance. This provides key insights for managers about the state of their team and how things can be improved moving forward from an engagement and productivity perspective. You can also provide valuable insights for instructors on the impact of their teaching, effectiveness of learning materials, learner success, and the impact it’s all having on your organization. 

Powerful nudges to keep you on top of what matters  

In addition to regular reports, a strong learning system can provide you with timely nudges to help you proactively address any coming problems. Automated nudges can alert you when: 
 

  • An employee certification is going to expire 
  • A course enrollment deadline is approaching  
  • An employee completes a course 

With these nudges in hand, you can use the same learning system to proactively address these issues by sending reminders to affected employees or enrolling them in new courses to keep them compliant and sufficiently trained. 

Connect learning to performance management and succession planning 

To build a culture of continuous learning, you need to connect learning to the parts of work that matter most to employees. One key area for this is performance. By linking your employees’ development plans to their learning activities, you can incorporate insights about their learning into your performance review cycle. Your learning platform needs to integrate seamlessly with your performance management solution so managers can create a set of tasks or training needs that align with a particular goal or competency.  

This same approach and single data model allows managers to generate solid succession plans by identifying key employees with required skills and identifying potential successors and the learning activities/timelines that would put them in a position to step into the vacated role. Again, this is only possible when your learning solution is part of an end-to-end HCM platform operating on a single data model.  

This holistic approach to learning across the employee lifecycle sets you up for success not only today, but also tomorrow. Managers can see the progress employees are making toward their own personal career goals as well, which can provide important insights into worker engagement and even burnout.  

 

Conclusion 

Skills gaps are top of mind for nearly every HR professional in the world, but closing these gaps is easier said than done. Traditional recruitment-oriented approaches are important, but not enough to solve this challenge on a long-term basis. For that kind of solution, a company needs to invest in an enterprise learning management platform that's seamlessly embedded into a single data model spanning the entire HCM ecosystem. Without this foundation in technology, organizations will struggle to provide the development opportunities across the employee lifecycle needed to drive their business forward. But with this foundation in place, organizations will have what they need to meet the ever-evolving needs of both employers and employees, conquer their skills gaps, and propel their business forward. 

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