Steven Dineen is the Founder & President of enterprise learning platform, Fuse.
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The ongoing debate around skills gaps — or rather, how to close them — has been the evergreen topic on learning leaders’ agendas for well over a decade. The L&D industry has now long been conditioned to plug these gaps with training courses — a valuable approach when it comes to reskilling and talent development, but one that is too narrow in its thinking when applied to upskilling.
With the speed of knowledge change ever-increasing and the new world of hybrid work here to stay, the need for rapid upskilling at scale has risen exponentially and now far eclipses its reskilling cousin. The problem is, many organizations are still defaulting to the course, irrespective of whether the goal is one of upskilling for performance now or reskilling for the future workplace.
Upskilling To Power Performance On The Job
The learning industry needs to shake off the long-standing notion that skills — and in particular, skills mapped to courses — are the utopian answer. There’s no denying that foundational skills are important, but in a rapidly changing and digitally disrupted world, they’re not enough to drive high performance. To do that, we need to embed positive learning behaviors and enable people to easily access the exact knowledge they need to solve problems and instantly upskill in the flow of work.
Taking a holistic view, it becomes evident that the industry as a whole knows how to put foundational skills and knowledge into place through a structured learning approach. But what use is that when the majority of workplace learning is now happening on the job? The untapped opportunity is huge, but to seize it, we need to move beyond course-based competency learning to a model that enables people to realize their true performance potential.
Unlocking Knowledge In The Flow
If it wasn’t glaringly obvious in the past, it is now: Upskilling calls for a performance-first learning design, underpinned by instant access to knowledge in the flow of work. This approach is entirely more fitting than attempting to apply the square peg of a training course to real-time learning.
The solution is simple. If the L&D industry is to achieve high performance through upskilling at scale, it must divorce the course and bust the locks on both explicit and experience-based tacit knowledge. Here's the best part: Organizations that succeed in doing this will find themselves able to take as much as 80% of learning content out of the course and make it available in-flow, drastically reducing costs and improving business performance in the process.
Knowledge Access And The Adoption Curve
There are encouraging signs that the learning industry is entering a steep adoption curve in this regard, and that’s really exciting. Yes, most organizations are yet to implement the infrastructure to support knowledge access and upskilling in the flow of work, but, crucially, the futility of courses that cram learners with knowledge they cannot apply is at least recognized, if not yet remedied. Learning leaders know that to keep pace and to nurture high-performing teams, they must innovate — and so the question is no longer why, but how.
So what do organizations need to do to ensure their people can access the exact knowledge they need, right when they need it? In fact, how do companies go about capturing subject matter expert (SME) knowledge in the first place?
Making Knowledge Smarter
Modern learning technology certainly has a major role to play here — both in terms of enabling SMEs to share their knowledge and empowering learners to instantly access that knowledge, in context, and at the moment of need. But when you consider that the speed of knowledge change has accelerated from decades to days, even that’s not enough.
Of course, technology is not a magic solution in and of itself. Central to success is building a culture of actively engaged learning in which L&D is given the recognition — and investment — it deserves. It is this winning combination of culture, technology and performance-first design that is essential to optimizing outcomes — both for L&D and the wider business.
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