Adaptive Learning for Today’s Evolving Workforce

The primary challenge facing today’s C-suite is themanagement, growth, and development of the organization’s most important asset,its people. Failure or success in these areas directly correlates with how welland to what extent they provide employees with proper training, skills, andleadership development.

What’s different about today’s workforce?

To answer this question, we need to examine howorganizations develop and train their workforces today—and we can start with “one-sizefits all” learning programs. They may have worked years ago when employees oftenheld static positions, but in today’s knowledge-based economy that is no longerthe case. The workplace and workforce are rapidly-evolving dynamic entities. Thespeed of change, and the failure of organizations to evolve their trainingprograms to be more agile and adaptive, has created an ever-widening gapbetween employee learning needs and the organization’s ability to meet them. Considersome of the factors in the workplace ecosystem that are contributing to thissituation:

• The workforce is highly diversified and presentsa new set of challenges brought about by outsourcing, global expansion, and thediverse work styles, behaviors, and expectations of a multi-generationalworkforce.
• An increasing number of people entering theworkforce are seeking on-the-job training and lack the experiences and skillsnecessary to work with today’s technologies.
• To manage a workforce with rapidly evolvingdemographics, managers’ leadership skills need to be highly effective, but alltoo often it is an endeavor based around trial and error and learning from pastmistakes.

The challenge then becomes not just, “How do I offer myemployees more learning programs?” but rather, “How do I offer an employee the right learning programs in the right context?” or “How do I identifyand provide the needed tools in time to support an employee’s growth?” For starters,this requires more individualized learning programs that tailor training to eachemployee, spanning positions, career paths, and levels of experience.

Align individual development with organizational goals

Organizational success is no accident. It is achieved throughintentional leadership, making the right tools and resources available toemployees, and implementing defined processes around real-time personalizeddevelopment so employees are prepared to solve business problems. Organizationscan  realize significant breakthroughs inperformance when they graduate from a “usage equals value” mindset (offeringmore programs and measuring headcount) to an operating model that perpetuallypromotes continuous learning through engagement and tight alignment.

There are four primary factors that enable organizationsto achieve these goals:

• Engagement—successfulengagement in learning programs starts with committed leaders setting thedirection and tone. This means objectives are defined up front and continuousimprovement on those benchmarks is top of mind.
• Alignment—theinitial step in ensuring proper alignment is involving leadership to determinelearning priorities that focus on end results. Similarly, it is essential that youintegrate HR with the talent strategy to ensure staff members understandprogram objectives and are committed to achieving them.
• Adoption—thistranslates into many individuals consuming learning resources over time andthen actively integrating those skills into their daily activities to improvetheir personal performance as well as that of the teams they’re involved with.Adaptable, data-driven eLearning programs allow individuals to apply theirtraining on the fly and can scale to meet the needs of every individual across theentire organization.
• Value—theultimate test for any learning metric is whether it improves businessperformance. For learning programs, this means giving individuals a betterunderstanding of their strengths and their opportunities for improvement. Upon seeingmeasureable improvements in their performance, these individuals can become stronglearning advocates and more valuable contributors to the organization as awhole.

Put people at the center of your learning programs

Employees have come to demand a workplace culture thatborrows from consumer experience, offering seamless, engaging, and highlypersonalized opportunities for training and career advancement. When people areable to access the type of learning that suits them best, in the moment ofneed, they are much more likely to adopt the learning program.

By encouraging this mass adoption, organizations willcultivate a learning-centric company culture from the ground up. The mostsuccessful businesses will be “self-developing” organizations, which buildlearning interactions and activities into the fabric of the organization todrive an end-to-end culture of development. A self-developing organization willexperience better individual employee performance, engagement, andsatisfaction, and will also yield continuous growth and innovation on anorganizational level, ultimately securing their top talent and a competitive advantage.

Reinforce the value of adaptive learning programs for eachindividual

Achieving success in these areas requires effort. In manyways, it ultimately comes down to how engaging and beneficial each employeefinds their learning process to be. This is where contextual learning is socritical. Knowing what content and resources to provide an individual atprecisely the right time is what adaptive learning is all about—helping thatindividual get better at his or her job while they’re doing it. By automatingthe delivery of the right tools in the moment of need, an individual’sdevelopment is not only more relevant, but enables professional development tooccur on a larger scale.

Today’s adaptive learning technology brings value toorganizations by enabling them to approach learning differently—not counting onits people to be, act, and learn the same. Organizations that want to create acompetitive advantage must, by definition, deliver differentiated solutions totheir people. As jobs become more and more specialized and the workforce continuesto diversify, it is time to leverage advances being made in big-data science tore-invent individualized learning at scale. To increase the productivity of anorganization’s talent, that organization must embrace increasinglysophisticated and fully integrated talent expansion suites that put people at thecenter of learning.

By leveraging a broad range of information aboutindividual employees so as to hyper-personalize the user experience,organizations can drive greater adoption and increase end-user value.

In adaptive learning, context is key

Context-aware software combines situational andenvironmental information to proactively offer enriched, usable content, functions,and experiences. For learning and development to be relevant, both for theindividual learner as well as for the team as a whole, the user’s learningexperience should involve personalized recommendations based on past behaviorand in the context of their broader roles and functions.

Think about Amazon.com and other consumer websites that driveso many of their sales from suggestions presented after users have made a purchase.Or consider Yelp.com, which curates your information and that of similar usersto offer personalized and localized recommendations. Similarly, usingcontextual learning solutions, you can integrate cross-functional data in humanresources systems to recommend appropriate content that will best contribute topeople’s professional growth and organizational goals.

We’re on the cusp of a renaissance in training anddevelopment—from “one-size fits all” activities to individualized learningprograms driven by contextual computing. Context-aware software can provideusers with specific actions to improve performance before a skill gap affects hisor her work down the road. It can connect that person with others in theorganization who have the tribal knowledge needed to become better at a giventask. It can tell that person what development activities he or she shouldexplore to prepare for a future job they see themselves in, instead ofeventually finding themselves pigeon-holed in one area. It can help managersbetter schedule their people based on which person might be most effectivegiven their learning history and current skill level. This contextualization notonly provides relevant solutions to organizational challenges, but also helpsleaders anticipate and prepare for future business challenges as well.

What’s at stake

Ultimately,by leveraging HR and learning analytics, the goal learning and HR leaders have isto understand what training has been most effective. Using that information,they then can implement the programs that drive better personal andorganizational performance. In the current competitive landscape, adaptiveindividualized learning will be the biggest differentiator for companies. Theworkforce will continue to evolve, which is why the future of learning will notonly require that organizations be nimble in their learning and developmenttechnology investments, but also invest in the talent that will be the mostimportant asset they have as they continue to grow.