As skill requirements change with unprecedented speed, companies are scrambling to ensure workers can not only learn the skills they need but actually practice them, a recent report by cloud learning platform TalentLMS revealed.
“Turning hidden skills into visible, measurable capability is critical. But skills visibility is only the first step. Knowing which skills matter doesn’t equal building or applying them fast enough,” the report’s executive summary said.
How fast a company can spot a needed skill, then build capability and put it to use, is what TalentLMS calls “speed-to-skill” — especially important, the report argues, because of how fast skills are becoming outdated.
Of the 1,500 U.S. managers and employees surveyed, 47% said some of their job skills have become outdated within the last five years. Twenty-one percent of managers said their skills became outdated within the last year alone. On top of that, 38% of managers surveyed said it’s hard to predict which skills their team will need in the next year — largely driven by the instability fomented by artificial intelligence tools, TalentLMS said.
Work itself often gets in the way of learning and practice, various sources have said. Forty-four percent of respondents told TalentLMS that work priorities put learning on the back burner, while 28% said training doesn’t match actual job needs. Notably, just over 1 in 4 said training isn’t integrated into daily work, which matters since “learning by doing is the new default” for workers, per the report.
In response, TalentLMS offered six strategies for companies to focus on:
- Make skill building part of work by turning daily tasks into opportunities for learning and building feedback into regular interactions.
- Build more responsive skill planning by collecting real-time input from managers.
- Shorten the path from learning to practice through simulations, scenarios and hands-on exercises.
- Make training more dynamic with modular content.
- Give clear ownership of speed-to-skill by enabling managers to define needs while L&D provides structure.
- Measure skill application not by courses completed but by how fast employees actually apply what they’ve learned and whether managers see performance changes.
“The opportunity for L&D is to make learning easier to access in the moments people need support, while also helping leaders see development as part of getting the work done, not a competing priority,” David Kelly, an L&D advisor as well as an executive at business consultancy Bluewater, said in a statement.