Digital is reshaping customer experience.
Digital competitors are entering markets with radically new offers, disrupting
the ways that companies and customers interact and setting a high bar of
simplicity, personalisation, and flexibility.
Sometimes we don’t even know who these
competitors are until it’s too late.
The
shift to pull
To capture new sources of value, companies
will need to reinvent their customer experience – how?
Learning and development is key in the
workplace, but it too must adapt to these changes, taking advantage of
innovative technologies.
With every major economic shift a new asset
class becomes the foundation of productivity and profitability: in the past the
asset was land, more recently it was machinery. In today’s knowledge- human
economy it becomes human capital- talent, skills, business acumen, empathy and
creativity.
In the same way our customers are seeking
products and services which are tailored to their needs, so our skills
development must match the requirements of each individual in the organisation,
their job requirements, their previous experience and training history.
How can we achieve this in our
organisation?
In today’s work environment, school/
university education only equips the individual for their first job - lifelong
learning is essential for every job thereafter. The pace of change demands a dynamic stability between the
individual and the job.
This creates a demand for online and mobile
platforms that empower both the individual to adapt their skills to the
changing requirements of their respective jobs, whilst at the same time
enabling the company to record, recognise and reward the individual for the
attainment of new, relevant skills.
It starts with strategy: because customer
demands are moving so fast, strategy needs to focus on innovation and
adaptation.
For such a strategy to be translated into
human development, it needs to be communicated to those who will carry it out
in a way that that everybody is able to see how its demands will impact on the
skills they have today in terms of the skills they will need to be a part of
the strategy.
Some may react by not wanting to be a part
of the new initiative, thus causing their experience and skills to be relocated
elsewhere. For those wanting to be a part of it, the company needs everything
in place to make learning accessible, engaging and relevant.
There are a number of pillars on which successful human resource
development in such a dynamic environment are built:
1.
The ability of the organisation
and its employees to objectively assess what the skills gaps are in each individual’s
case;
2.
A close working relationship
with selected education and training providers of high quality who are prepared
to adapt their courses to those of the organisation. In the case of smaller
organisations, they may consider joint approaches to training providers;
3.
The ability to deliver the
training required when the individual wants to engage, not when the provider’s
schedule says so;
4.
A close alignment between
training delivery and learning in the workplace which is facilitated by a
mentoring culture in the organisation;
5.
The ability to assess the
impact of courses in terms of improved organisational efficiency and to effect
changes to courses based on such feedback;
6.
The ability to record and
recognise learning achievement and to mine such information in order to fill
vacancies.
Sound idealistic? Then consider the
following:
·
HR Magazine reported that
organisations investing USD1,500 or more per employee per year on training
average 24 percent higher profit margins than those with lower training budgets.
The American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) gathered training
information from more than 2,500 organisations and found that those that offer
comprehensive training have 218 percent higher income per employee than those
with less comprehensive training 1
·
In a study of more than 3100 US
workplaces, a 10% increase in educational development produced an 8.6% gain in
productivity. 2
Feel like adding to the discussion?
To what extent is your organisation geared
to meet the technology disruptions sweeping the world?
Would you like assistance in gearing your
organisation’s human development infrastructure to take full advantage of these
developments?
Sources:
1 https://elearningindustry.com/gain-competitive-advantage-employee-development.
Accessed 30 March 2017
2 http://info.shiftelearning.com/blog/the-true-cost-of-not-providing-employee-training.
Accessed 30 March 2017
