David Blake is the Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Degreed and managing partner of The Future of Work Studios.
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With the decreasing skills half-life, the challenges and opportunities facing front-line workers and the economics of upskilling, it's no surprise that companies are aiming to optimize their upskilling to support employees and improve their overall businesses. While I'm proud to lead an organization that is able to help companies navigate their options for upskilling, I am concerned about the impact of time and upskilling on diversity, equity and inclusion.
It's true that corporate boardrooms are right to ask how they can be part of meaningful community reform, but those same leading companies must tread carefully so as not to drive a further wedge in access to opportunity in our workplaces. If we don't do corporate L&D right, bigger disparities than those already seen will develop.
Who Upskilling Benefits Most
While some companies provide time for employees to engage in upskilling, the reality is that many people are asked to upskill on their own time. When companies do roll out upskilling platforms and opportunities, those options — again, for most employees to engage with on their own time — tend to cater to a certain kind of employee.
Who does upskilling benefit most? A worker who:
• Already has the skills to be a self-directed learner on their own time.
• Isn't a caretaker, or who has child-care support.
• Has a strong, reliable internet connection.
• Doesn't work a front-line role with a long commute.
These attributes and conditions give an employee a tremendous advantage when their company offers upskilling opportunities. If not, upskilling may be less effective, or worse, create divides in access to skills growth and promotions in the company.
In scenarios where the majority of upskilling will take place in a person's residence, people who are able to work from home have an advantage. Affluent workers with stay-at-home spouses who take care of their kids have an even larger leg up.
Which demographic does that map to most? White males, and particularly married white males.
Who gets left behind? Minority populations, single parents and anyone who is under-resourced or under-networked.
What To Do About It
As the person in charge of corporate L&D initiatives, you may be excited to begin more aggressively upskilling your employees. That's great. It's progressive since not all companies are doing this. But if you aren't giving time, what you're actually doing is creating a big wedge that lets white males up and through and keeps everyone else behind.
To address these issues, upskilling might be optimized to give time and support employees through the following:
• Flexible scheduling: Provide workers the ability to swap shifts so as to care for children or the elderly. Gap's pilot saw managers save time while increasing sales by 7%.
• Mentoring and workplace culture: Introduce targeted mentorship to ensure critical on-the-job feedback between midlevel managers and employees to support training, development and higher rates of promotion.
• Tying incentives to diversity and upskilling: Create a long-term pipeline beginning with junior and midlevel roles to rise up the ranks to middle management and senior roles, rather than addressing these goals through hiring alone.
The Distant Future: Corporate L&D Is Where The Majority Of Learning Will Happen
We've already talked ad nauseam about these same themes in higher education. As we look at our recent past, higher education is where the majority of the learning happened, so it mattered the most.
As we look to our not-too-distant future, I believe that corporate L&D is actually where a majority of learning is going to happen in America. We're only in universities for two, four, six, perhaps nine years. But we are in our careers for 30 or 40 years. Companies, instead of universities, will be the primary place to learn if they give their employees access to on-demand learning.
Not only that, as the half-life of skills goes down and the need for lifelong learning goes up, we will need to learn more in our lifetimes. That learning will increasingly be in the hands of corporate learning programs, taking that responsibility out of the hands of our universities and our professors.
The risks are huge if we don't get this right. But we don't have to make that monumental mistake.
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