The Imperative Of Continuous Skilling

The Skills They Are A-Changin’ – this is as universal as the song that it is modified from! 

We were just getting comfortable with cloud, metaverse, blockchain etc. and in came general purpose AI! Within a year, AI dominates all business conversations and was the star topic in the recently concluded WEF in Davos. 

Today’s employees must repeatedly acquire new skills during their career to stay relevant and for the enterprise to stay relevant for its clients. Hence the need to skill, upskill, and reskill talent at all levels, and then do it all over again. According to one research organisation, 37 per cent of the average job skills have been replaced in the last five years or so.

The demand for skill is also changing. There is a visible shift from single skill proficiency to multiple skillsets. Digital transformation is accelerating the need for full stack engineers. Hence employees need experience and exposure to variety of jobs and technology to become multifaceted. 

Along with technology and domain skills, focus is now shifting to foundational and human centric (social) skills. Foundational skills include skills like problem solving, analytical abilities, coding concepts, project management etc. Social skills include emotional quotient, communication, negotiation skills etc. While technology skills are becoming increasingly ephemeral, the foundation and social skills of employees are resistant to disruption and can become the core differentiator for an enterprise. The AI-led future requires employees to be more responsible, ethical, inquisitive, creative and be high on learnability. We always knew the importance of these skills, but we treated them as inherent in our employees. It is important that we make these skills explicit, accept these as learnable skills and train and assess employees on them. 

Technological advancement creates huge opportunities and advantages, but it also creates “skills inequality” wherein workers with higher skills or more in-demand skills benefit more than others. Upskilling and reskilling the other workers are thus necessary for inclusive progress. 

The process of learning

To sustain a virtuous learning cycle, enterprises need to build a foundation for continuous learning. Continuous or lifelong learning is the ongoing expansion of skills, knowledge, and information in response to organisational needs or changes in the business environment. As the name suggests, continuous learning (mostly) happens on the job, with employees building on existing skills without taking time off work. Alongside, knowledge delivery on latest areas can happen anytime, anywhere in micro-modules, in context or just-in-time.

For continuous learning to take root, enterprises must have a culture of learnability – of learning how to learn. Learnability calls for a personal attitude that maintains a conscious and active focus on developing one’s talent. Unlike the traditional approach, where learning is facilitated by an external teacher, learnability is all about self-managed learning. 

Organisations must therefore hone their employees’ ability to learn by training them in adaptability, critical thinking, creativity, empathy, problem solving, communication, and collaboration. Leaders must emphasise the need for learning in every interaction. Large scale learning programmes must be sponsored across the organisations, AI enablement is a wonderful opportunity for doing that now. 

Incentivising learning can be a great motivator. Awarding a tag on completing a learning journey and bagging a skill is a wonderful way to encourage employees to learn and creates a distinct identity for them in the organisation. The skill tag can eventually become the basis for project allocation, rewards, career growth, further encouraging employees in skilling.  

The technology of learning

An enterprise Learning Management System is a critical enabler of learnability and continuous learning. It frees learning-and-development programs from boundaries such as physical classrooms, in-person teaching, fixed timings, and inflexible curriculum. Learners can themselves manage the contours of their learning by deciding the number and the depth of skills to be learned, as also the pace, timings, channels, and outcomes of learning (learn something new, refresh existing knowledge, get certified, etc.). It becomes critical, especially, in the era of hybrid working. 

Flexible curriculum

Majority of learning management platforms had, until now, prioritised uniformity and scale by offering standardised content and a defined learning path to all learners, irrespective of their requirements, abilities, or motivations. With the advent of AI, it is possible to assess the skilling needs of every employee and customise content accordingly in real-time, at affordable cost. AI not only allows each learner to decide their path, method, and speed of learning, but even automatically adapts the programme to the individual’s progress. Moreover, it can scan, identify, and collate consumable content. Using generative AI, teaching materials can also be created or curated to suit individual contexts. 

Always-on-learning

We spoke earlier of how learnability and continuous learning are untethered from physical spaces, fixed timings, and training calendars. Knowledge should be delivered without interrupting work routine. AI-enabled learning systems facilitate this by integrating tiny learning modules into daily work processes, ready to be delivered exactly when needed. What’s more, AI tools can sense when an employee is stuck in a particular task and offer help without being asked. Some advanced learning platforms with conversational ability can even make changes to the content, or react, based on an ongoing chat, to remain in sync with the learner. 

Engaging learners

While older learning platforms provided rich content, they often failed to achieve the expected outcomes, mainly because of a lack of motivation among learners. AI-first systems, however, overcome this challenge by gamifying learning and transforming it into an exciting, engaging, enjoyable experience. Since employees can now imbibe learning more easily, they usually end up completing assignments on time. 

The ‘self-learning’ aspect of learnability is supported by multimodal AI-augmented tutoring. AI-based coaches mimic student-teacher interactions, answer queries, and offer help to learners. Going ahead, augmented reality, virtual reality, humanoid robots, holographic teachers, and multimodal pedagogy – text to text, text to video, and video to video – will make the learning experiences even more immersive and engaging. 

Skill to demand fulfilment

Another challenge of skilling is learning not aligned to demand. Hence employee's skill themselves but cannot be deployed in projects and managers end up hiring from outside. An integrated technology landscape matches demand to skills to learning paths and recommends the same to employee who have a skill gap. Once skilling is done, these employees are then automatically matched to the demands. 

Look ahead

Reskilling is the path to progress for every employee and every organisation. Enterprises must inculcate a culture of learning and the quality of learnability among employees to keep pace with rapidly changing skilling needs. Employers should also take a longer-range view and facilitate skilling among a larger community of people to promote truly inclusive development.