“A company’s competitive advantage is its employees because they are the ones making the magic happen.”

Skill development of employees in an organization has always been more of a reactive process because the organization wants to understand what employees need to achieve something that leads to achievement of business strategies. There has been an increasing usage of various types of analytics by many organizations to evaluate various business opportunities and strategies. One such analytics initiative that organizations can take is ‘Learning Analytics” to reshape their reskilling initiatives, and its impact on various business strategies with regards to an organization’s employees. It can be considered as a method that can be utilized to quickly build and gauge reskilling methods for employees.

With organizations increasingly growing in terms of their technology and other business strategies, it falls to the HR and Training and Development Teams to ensure that the employees in the organization are continuously learning and reskilling themselves to meet the improving standards of the organization. This might also include having to relook at every stage, what are considered as key skills in the organization, and build or come up with learning solutions that can meet the needs of the business leaders and their time frames. A huge challenge that the HR Leader might meet in this process is that sometimes leaders themselves do not know what skills they want employees to build upon and to what extent.

Changing employee skills and giving them opportunities to constantly grow and improve can be considered as one of the biggest drivers for organizational growth, apart from technology. There exists a gap of information because leaders might not be very aware of what skills are needed and to what extent, to bring about wider organizational transformations. To overcome this gap, we can use information that can be pulled from job boards, customer websites and demands, publications from industry, competitor surveys, etc., apart from discussions that are conducted with leaders so that changes in skill needs can be identified to work in tandem with transformations in the organization.

The HR Leader’s role in this upgradation of employees is quintessential because he/she will have to lead changes in workforce strategy by making sure that any changes required get articulated as business-unit requirements and not just individual requirements. It also helps to create a better relationship between the HR Leader and Functional Leaders in the organization, because of the HR’s role in leading communication about any upskilling or re-skilling that is needed, decisions and strategies made by the organization, and agility in producing learning solutions that are required.

Any learning solution that is provided is approved by Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in the organization or industry, with high-quality content that allows for employees to quickly learn the required skills, embodying the principle of agile development. The HR can also share information on emerging skills and quickly work on developing content that has been approved by SMEs and get it approved by the executive leaders of the organization so that it can be shared with their employees. This improves the reputation of the HR as well and shows them as an essential part of the organization that people can reach out to for any update needed about solutions to new skill development. The HR can help out with employees improve skills for the betterment of their careers using a similar method, and make it better, if it is available for employees to access in from anywhere they are so that there is no stopping their re & upskilling.

Organizations place a lot of importance on the HR’s ability to anticipate activities that will help drive business strategies. This anticipation is a challenging service. Concrete information about what an organization’s workforce will require in the future is always elusive because the future cannot be predicted to a full hundred percent. It is subjective to change.

In this ever-changing and updating world of knowledge, there is a special importance that is placed on the development and reskilling of an organization’s work-force.

Prof.Radha Pavitra
Assistant Professor
DSCE-MBA