SKILLS EQUITY

cases of the organisation, is critical to charting a viable course. But when that vision evolves, when the next ‘Big Idea’ comes along, L&D must be prepared to evolve along with it.

How can data and analytics help?

Data plays a crucial role in understanding where your organisational strengths lie. By understanding the skills of your people and mapping them back against the organisation’s strategy, you can create a powerful skills gap analysis that can guide the executive team in their decision-making processes.

An AI-infused analytics platform like Sisense helps businesses understand the value that learning/training is providing in the workplace. Analytics models, supercharged with AI, are being leveraged to recommend content to users based on who they are and where they work. The captured data determines how engaged a learner is in a specific topic or how well they understand that topic.

If your organisation is woefully short in a skill area that the go-to-market plan called for, that’s a good reason to rethink the strategy. Equally, a deeper dive into the analytics of learning can uncover which tactics help improve time to competency in a given area the fastest. It’s not enough to just know where you are strong or weak as a company; you need to know the levers you can pull to quickly upskill and retrain the workforce without wasting time and energy on initiatives that don’t close the gaps.

The role of AI and machine learning in unlocking skills ‘equity’

Traditionally, understanding which skills are actually useful ‘on-the-job’ has always been a bit of a dark art. Twenty years ago, organisations spent fortunes on a constant cycle of competency mapping and job descriptions, trying to explicitly capture what made each role tick. But this was always doomed to a never-ending cycle of documentation trying to keep pace with reality; things moved too fast then and they move faster now.

AI, and specifically machine learning, can help us to map and understand the jobs people really do and the underlying skills ontologies that underpin the work. By analysing large data sets, companies are becoming increasingly capable of determining the common skills and themes that underpin certain job roles and functions. These sets of skills can adapt and change in real-time; they aren’t a written document like they used to be, but a model that learns and changes as the work evolves.

ABOUT LEARNING POOL

Learning Pool empowers workplaces to deliver extraordinary learning outcomes with its comprehensive suite of innovative technologies. Supporting the evolving ambition of more than 1,200 businesses investing in learning experiences for over 5 million global learners, Learning Pool’s suite provides everything needed to build, manage, and deliver workplace learning.

The company offers an unparalleled customer experience, delivered by more than 300 expert colleagues based in the UK and USA, working to bring each customer’s unique vision for learning and development to life.

In the last year, it has featured on 17 eLearning Industry lists for excellence in its field, received Gold at the 2021 Brandon Hall Excellence Awards, for Best Advance in Learning Technology Implementation and double Gold in the Stevie Awards for Outstanding Customer Service.

Recognised as a Strategic Leader in the Fosway 9-Grid for Digital Learning, wherever you find ambitious workplaces investing in their people, you’ll find Learning Pool.

Infusing analytics in learning platforms

When it comes to infusing analytics in learning platforms, simplicity is key. Collating and analysing complex data is challenging for nontechnical users. Organisations shouldn’t need to have a team of data specialists simply to make good use of learning data.

They have the skills and knowledge to use the insights from their data — they just need to have the data available in a more accessible, simpler-to-use, and easier-tounderstand way.

This is where leveraging tools like Sisense helps remove any barriers to understanding data.

Learning Pool recently announced it is embedding Sisense to combine the power of its leading AI-driven analytics platform with the LRS Learning Locker. This partnership has culminated in a valuable new addition to the Learning Pool suite, “Insights,” which serves up granular learning data combined with Sisense’s AI capabilities to bring personalised and automatic intelligence to every user.

Optimising your ‘competitive edge’

The future is complex and uncertain. But it also presents fresh and exciting opportunities. What we do know is that organisations and individuals alike must remain agile and adaptable if they are to meet tomorrow’s challenges successfully. The best way to do that is through the development of skills that optimise your ‘competitive edge.’

This is because a highly skilled workforce is more resilient in the face of change and most equipped to seize the moment when an opportunity presents itself. In turn, learning and development that fosters skills acquisition can no longer be limited to job titles. After all, investing in your skill equity is about what you need to do next, not what you’ve already done.◆