#TLB 23 🧠 'Skills Readiness' requires a culture of continuous learning
A by-weekly inside scoop on all the hottest events, juicy discussions, and oh-so-many other exciting things happening in our dynamic L&D community. 🧡
Hi dear Shaker,
Anamaria here! 🧚♂️
I’m taking over today’s newsletter, as Sejaal’s attention is needed towards a personal life event that happened unexpectedly.
Let’s send all our love and good energy to her, please. 💛
I’m not even trying to fill her shoes, that would be too big of a task, but I can promise I’ll give my very best to share bits and pieces that are inspiring and insightful. ✨
Let’s get to it, shall we? 💪
Learning Bites 💡
For this week’s Learning Bites, I am bringing you a podcast conversation with Gina Jeneroux, about upskilling, from RedThread Research.
Gina argues that a company culture sets the foundation for skills readiness. If a company culture isn’t supportive of innovation and creativity, is it ready to support an initiative to focus on skills?
Here are my top takeaways:
Skills are leveling the playing field: Skills enable a more precise match between an individual’s capabilities and the tasks at hand.
Culture and partnerships are crucial: A strong organizational culture that values skills development, along with strategic partnerships (both internal and external), is crucial for the success of skills strategies. This involves collaboration across various departments and with external entities like educational institutions and technology providers.
Skills beyond technical proficiency: While technical skills are essential, the conversation emphasizes the critical importance of human and cognitive skills, such as empathy, resilience, and creativity, in distinguishing human capabilities from technology.
Strategic integration within the organisation: Successful skills strategies require clear leadership, a strategic approach that aligns with the organization's broader goals, and the integration of skills development into all aspects of the business.
What does this mean for us in practice?
It was fun to think of potential ways in which L&D can contribute to the integration of such complex strategy. Here’s what I’ve come up with, based on this conversation.
1. Run a skills inventory and gap analysis. Implement a comprehensive skills inventory for all employees to identify existing skills and highlight gaps in relation to future needs. The outcome should be a detailed roadmap for targeted training programs, personalized learning paths, and hiring strategies to bridge identified skills gaps. This is easier said than done. 😅
2. Cross-functional project assignments: Create opportunities for employees to work on cross-functional projects outside of their usual domain. This could be facilitated through short-term assignments or project-based learning experiences. This fosters cross-pollination of skills and ideas across departments. I loved the way Schneider Electric implemented such stretch assignments as part of their internal talent marketplace.
3. Skills-based mentoring programs: Pair employees with mentors based on specific skills development goals. The program can be structured to provide both one-on-one mentoring and group mentoring sessions focusing on various skill sets.
4. Micro-credentials. Introduce a system of digital badges and micro-credentials that employees can earn upon completing project-based projects, or courses and achieving certain skill levels. They are a tangible, motivational tool for employees to showcase their learning achievements. Even better if you find creative ways to celebrate these achievements, and offer recognition internally.
5. Innovation Labs and Hackathons: Organize regular innovation labs or hackathons that challenge employees to come up with solutions to real-world business problems. These events can be themed around emerging technologies, process improvements, or customer experience. They stimulate creativity, problem-solving skills, and teamwork, and promote learning by doing.
6. Partnership with educational institutions. What are ways in which you can open up collaboration paths with universities, vocational schools, bootcamps and so on, to offer access to cutting-edge knowledge and academic expertise, ensuring your colleagues remains ahead of industry trends. Other projects here can take the form of internship and apprenticeship programs that provide real-world experience.
7. Employee-led learning sessions and internal communities. You knew this was coming, didn’t you? 😁 Encourage employees to host sharing sessions on topics where they possess expertise, facilitating peer-to-peer learning within the organization. If you’re serious about it, you move past just scattered events, into fostering internal communities of practice for specific roles or skills, and building a varied employee-driven learning ecosystem.
If you were to walk away just one thing, then I’d say this: Fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptability is key to evolving skills development. To go there, organisations need a strategic, systemic, holistic, and innovative approach, and move away from the outdated “training only” model.
Coming Up Next
Community Calendar 🗓️
The upcoming events are 🔥🔥🔥
From “ChatGPT for L&D”, and a creativity Playground session, to an event on confident communication, and our upcoming Book Club Meetup!
Offline events are taking place in LA, Birmingham, Amsterdam, and London. 😍
Community Creations 🖌️
Eveli and Stacie are hard at work to refresh our Mentor pool for 2024, and they are opening up 10 new spots for Mentors! 😍
If you’re an experienced L&D professional who has a strong willingness to help and wants to make a difference in someone else’s professional journey, we’d love to have you on board!
To join, you must be willing to start in March 2024, for at least 3 months and be available to meet a mentee at least once per month (for 1 hour).
Please fill out this FORM by tomorrow, the 16th of February to apply, and you’ll hear back from them shortly after.
🇧🇷 We’re thrilled to welcome Diego Coletti Oliva, Ph.D. as the new Local Hub Lead for São Paulo, Brazil!! 🥳
Diego is a Senior Consultant, Content and Project Management at the Wadhwani Foundation, and shares a passion for learning and community, not only through his work but through all the little project’s he’s been involved with around work.
Diego—Congratulations and enjoy the ride to continue nurturing our community in São Paulo! 💛
I also want to take the time and thank Alejandro Ramírez Mayorga for launching the hub, and hosting the first sessions! Ale, you’re awesome, I hope you know that, and it was a pleasure to see you getting the hub off the ground! 🔥
And if you are in São Paulo, join the local hub in the Slack channel called "2-local-hub-são-paulo" and stay tuned for the upcoming gatherings!
🇷🇴 We have a brand new Local Hub launching today, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania!
Leading the charge is this fantastic trio:
Izabella Geapana is the Training Program Manager at UIPath
Andreea Nate is an HR Business Partner at Bosh and a Certified Leadership Coach
Cristian Popa is the Future Skills Development Manager at Microsoft
I can’t wait to see you three step into this new role, with creativity, enthusiasm and energy—Enjoy the ride!!!!
If you're in or around Cluj, join the conversation in #2-local-hub-cluj Slack channel, and gear up for the inaugural gathering happening soon!
Cool Stuff You Don’t Wanna Miss Out
Resource Reel 🔖
This week’s hottest resources are:
What the Fluff Bootcamp—A free self-paced training from HowNow. Six modules to help you build your L&D strategy.
Psychology of Human Emotion: An Open Access Textbook—It centers on four main emotion perspectives: basic emotion, social constructivism, cognitive appraisal, and dimensional models.
The Capability Comb Team Workshop—A model by Emily Webber, for people to think about and share how they describe their unique capability profile. It starts to break out of the box that a job description puts them in and allows people to talk about what they excel in how they want to portray themselves and what they can bring to the team.
How to structure modern L&D teams—A podcast conversation with Ross Stevenson, where he argues why our work should be less about learning & development, and more about performance improvement.
The Safe Zone Project—This is a free online resource database for effective LGBTQ awareness and ally training workshops.
The Ultimate Guide: Implementing An Individual Development Plan—A complete guide by Lavinia Mehedintu from Offbeat, taking you through the implementation steps of individual development plans to ensure engagement and usefulness for employees.
Facilitation for All—A goldmine of resources plus expert tips for each stage of the facilitation process, aimed at unlocking transformative conversations and the collective potential of any group.
That’s all I’ve got. 🫣
Have a wonderful rest of the week, everyone!
Anamaria