Narrowing the Skills-Job Gap: A Sustainable Approach for Businesses
Embracing Loyal Learner Pipeline and Data-Driven Approach
Are you a leader or a manager, often grappling with talent acquisition, striving to find the right skills at the right time for your start-up, business, or your team?
Are you a training or a learning and development (L&D) professional who feels like you’re always playing catch-up to fulfil the ever-changing training demands?
You are not alone.
As per data on the EU year of skills website, 77% of EU companies report difficulties in finding workers with the necessary skills. There are several global bodies, such as the World Economic Forum, the European Commission, and the Singapore government’s SkillsFuture program, all aiming to address skill gaps at the national level.
At the organizational level, this puts the onus on the Learning and Development (L&D) function to ensure talent readiness, making our role crucial in bridging these skill gaps.
As L&D professionals, aware of the immense pressure that comes with our roles. Rapid changes in training requirements, disengaged learners, and demands for quick impactful trainings, all adds to the pressure on often thinly resourced L&D teams.
In my career, having designed 9,000 hours of learning experiences and successfully built strategies yielding high engagement rates, such as 90%, I’ve faced these relentless challenges of skill set evolution.
What if we as L&D could change our lens? What if we could anticipate skill gaps with a salesperson’s rigor and persuasion?
Today, I want to share a fresh perspective on how L&D can respond with speed to business needs. We’ll explore two key strategies for doing that — building a loyal learner pipeline and adopting a data-driven approach.
Let’s dive right in!
How I Adopted Pipeline and Data Innovation:
Yesterday, it was all about coding, today it’s data analytics, tomorrow, who knows?
In my career as an L&D professional, I noticed a compartmentalized way to address training needs. If a business wanted to change training strategies, or shift from capability to competency, we would rush to adopt off-the-shelf content or switch learning designs.
Our selection was often based on intuition and past experiences, not always achieving completion rate goals.
Realizing the need for a change, I studied strategies of other functions.
Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.” — W. Edwards Deming
This led to the development of my strategies: a loyal learner pipeline and a data-driven approach.
Strategy 1: Building Success: The Key Role of a Strong Loyal Learner Pipeline
The answer lies in cultivating a strong pipeline of loyal learners.
· What is a loyal learner pipeline and why?
These are individuals who are convinced, aware, and eager to take advantage of your L&D offerings.
Much like nurturing prospects in a sales pipeline towards a purchase, an L&D professional must propel learners through various stages of engagement — from awareness and interest to conversion and loyalty. -Author
Here is a quick recap of pipeline stages: Awareness (becoming aware of the learning need), Interest (beginning to engage with learning content), Evaluation (considering the potential value of the learning), Engagement (actively participating in learning activities), and Completion (achieving the learning objectives and applying them in practice), and Advocacy/Loyalty (promoting the learning experience and returning for more).
· Why is the pipeline strategy important?
By shifting the focus to building a loyal learner pipeline, it prompts you to view the learners as customers.
For instance, when I began viewing learners as customers, I found myself asking,” Will our learners want to “buy” the learning products / programs we offer.?” And “Do they understand the value of our offering.”
This helped me to introduce activities to build our brand, promote our offerings, and most importantly to discover deeper insights about the learners’ behaviors. These questions allowed me to align our L&D initiatives with the needs and desires of our learners.
So, this approach led to higher adoption of our learning programs, leading to better utilization of our courses, and ultimately drove better business outcomes and ROI (as defined).
· Why convert them into loyal learners?
You may be asking yourself, “Why do I need to build a pipeline and convert them to be loyal learners?” One may argue, aren’t employees supposed to take ownership of their learning journey? Why, then, is there a need to foster a loyal learner pipeline?
The answer is simple. Even with the best resources, learners might resist. Many may ask, “Where is the time?”
In fact, they need to be convinced just as much as a customer. Learning happens to take a lower priority than their work, meetings, and emails.
Only if you have a loyal pipeline of learners, can you effectively assist their growth and progression. — Author
A strong pipeline is the cornerstone. But ensuring they engage and continue to benefit from our L&D offerings calls for a new, data-driven approach.
Data plays a crucial role in your transformation efforts. It will provide you with measurable insights into how your learners interact with L&D offerings. Also, it allows you to make necessary adjustments to improve these interactions.
Takeaway: In this way, a ‘loyal learner pipeline’ isn’t just a strategy for your success, it’s a path towards accomplishing better business outcomes.
Now that we understand the importance of loyal learner pipeline, let’s explore how we can measure and optimize its effectiveness. This is where data comes into play.
Strategy 2: Measuring Success: The Power of a Data-Driven Mindset
To build strong loyalty with learners, you need data to draw a real-time picture of how they interact with L&D and the L&D offerings. Adapt your learning design to improve learners’ interactions in real-time, rather than evaluating them after the program ends.
Here, learner interaction refers not to course completion but to their engagement behaviors with the offerings — like how long they watched the video or where they dropped off.
Typically, a learning function already has ample data to kickstart this process.
If you don’t have systems that provide, click-through rates or customer lifecycle value, LMS reports provide significant data about learners’ interactions with content.
For example, you could track how quickly learners enrol in a program after receiving an introductory email. Over time, this helps paint a picture of learners’ responsiveness and can inform strategies to encourage their progress.
L&D’s traditional measures such as completions, time to development hold little meaning for the business. However, additional data insights from the same LMS reports, provide more relatable information to business.
Using this, you can determine the rate at which content is consumed by the learner between the start and end of a program. Also, you can proactively inform business about upskilling needs.
“Data really powers everything that we do.” — Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO
But, leveraging data effectively is not without its complexities, and L&D professionals need to navigate these carefully.
Takeaway: Embracing a data-driven mindset is essential, but it’s also critical to recognize the diverse complex situations L&D professionals face every day.
An Anecdote to Relate to the Power of Data:
I recount an experience around data. We were under some pressure — low course completion rates and continuous requests for additional content from our business team. Despite our efforts to create fresh content, we were always playing catch-up.
A deep dive into the data provided an illuminating insight. Learners were not finishing the courses and yet wanted additional courses. This led us to shift our focus.
Instead of rushing to create new content, we began to delve into why current courses weren’t being completed. Was the content irrelevant? Boring? Why were some learners always on or ahead of schedule?
Highlighting this pattern to the business teams shifted their focus as well to complete the trainings at hand.
Taking a data-driven approach not only bought us time to prepare our next steps but also changed our perspective. By using data to understand our learners’ behaviors, we moved from a reactive approach to a proactive one.
From then on, data has been an invaluable ally. It had taught us that every report tells a story, and it’s our job to understand and act on it.
Conclusion:
In the face of widening skill gap and escalating timely talent availability issues, it is crucial for L&D to adopt long-term strategies that lend agility to respond to the unknown or unplanned situations. Let’s see learners as customers and create L&D offerings tailored to them. Also, let’s use data to guide our decisions. It’s all about being proactive and adaptable.
Therefore, you can adopt a two-fold strategy that comprises,
1. Building a Loyal Learners Pipeline enables L&D to partner with employees, supporting their growth, development, and productivity.
2. Using data to make design decisions, track, and measure impact in real-time that saves cost, wastage, and imparts agility to L&D to make real-time decisions resulting in speed.
Consider this approach for your next upskilling program and let us know if you have any questions along the way.
If you want more insights, you can check out my ‘L&D Playbook’. It is packed with practical and no-nonsense insights and practices.
