Employees are calling for an education revolution in business, driven by digital transformation – according to a report launched at the beginning of this month.
A report by business consultancy and personalised learning providers The Ludic Group gives us a glimpse into the future that employees want; one in which they play a more active role in crafting their own learning and development, and can work in ways that are more in sync with their everyday lives. This follows hot on the heels of a poll by Gallup which found that only 8% of employees felt engaged at work.
On the job training can be challenging: hiring managers, under the pressure to optimise skills across teams can discover that the costly training programmes they have implemented have not delivered a return on investment. The employees that receive these “one size fits all” training sessions can also become disengaged as they are not personalised to their needs.
The report found that 26% of employees surveyed thought that training was not personalised enough; they saw many face-to-face training sessions as expensive and inefficient and they were very open to the learning options offered through digital platforms. Furthermore, many didn’t receive training at all – 1 in 10 individuals missed out in large companies, rising to 1 in 4 at small businesses.
Despite the fact that as businesses become more established and they are able to amass budgets to deliver training, they are also faced by a new problem – as they grow they also become more disparate, and as a result traditional training become more difficult to deliver effectively. As a result accessing bespoke learning is fast becoming a key priority for employees – moving away from ‘one size fits all’ sessions delivered for groups of mixed ability and towards harnessing the potential of digital platforms to help people learn what they want, when they want and in the way they want it.
This move towards “mass personalisation” in learning delivers benefits for organisations too – instead of losing vital team resource delivering information that a) may already be known by some individuals or b) not immediately usable by employees, internal teams in charge of training programmes can build capability by identifying skill gaps, oncoming projects and delivering immediately usable training as needed, making the process all the more cost effective – and importantly directly linked to supporting live projects that are vital to business growth in the moment.
Re-igniting engagement is also a vital piece of the puzzle as it links directly to productivity; according to the Gallup poll, currently around one in 12 employees in the UK classify themselves as being engaged at work. They feel a sense of ownership, connectedness to their business’s strategic goals, and have a sense of satisfaction in what they do – driving performance and innovation as a result. The majority of the UK’s employees – 73% to be precise are classified as “not engaged”, with the remaining 19% classified as “actively disengaged,”which leads to resentfulness and ultimately higher churn rates.
The change in learning and use of digital tools comes with other recommendations, including the wider deployment of flexible working, as part of a drive to make career paths more tailored to the increasingly demanding lives faced by UK employees – tackling these issues may not just avert a ‘crisis in culture’, but also help create the work we want.