"Most employees, irrespective of industry or organization, spend, on average, only 24 minutes per week on learning. This is not enough to remain up to date with the changing skills needs, let alone prepare for the future. What is needed is consistent learning — through offering relevant learning opportunities, in manageable time chunks, with permission for people to learn during their workday and reinforcement/accountability from their line managers," said Janice Burns, Chief People Officer, Degreed. Janice brings over three decades of professional experience as an educator, human capital strategist, diversity and inclusion advocate, HR business partner, learning innovator, and entrepreneur. In an exclusive interview with HR.com, she shares insights on how the company engages and retains talent through a range of personalized learning opportunities, autonomy, and wellness benefits. She also touches upon the company's approach to workforce management and how it allows for global talent recruitment and flexible work arrangements, among others.

 

Excerpts from the interview:

Q:  In terms of workforce management and talent development, what are you doing to engage and retain talent in your company?

Janice: Offering learning opportunities that align with what people want to learn will enable them to develop skills they need to do their roles effectively. This is a powerful way to retain employees. It shows a level of commitment to their career progression and career goals, and our research has shown that 46% of employees will consider leaving an employer, who is not invested in their personal development.
 
The company offers various learning opportunities to employees to help them upskill for the future and remain with us for a long term. These include the Degreed learning platform, with pathways in everything from public speaking and leadership skills to product marketing and agile development.

We also offer a personal learning budget of $100 (or local equivalent) that employees can spend on any learning that interests them. Employees have spent this budget on a range of learning, including languages, guitar lessons, coaching, mental resilience training, and coding boot camps.

It is the flexibility and choice of this approach that stands out for our people. It gives them the power to shape their skills and the future stemming from this. We encourage and support our employees’ essential learning for their jobs, everyday learning for their careers, and deep skill learning that will help them transform and pursue other career possibilities.
 
Autonomy is incredibly important at Degreed. We are not prescriptive on how people should work, where, or when. As long as they are doing their work, we give them the freedom to fit it around their needs and other commitments. This also broadens our potential talent pool as we can hire the best talent globally, and also those who might otherwise not be able to work for us (like working parents, caretakers, and neurodiverse individuals) can adapt their schedules and work environments.
 
Finally, we recognize the importance of our people being mentally and physically healthy. We offer several wellness benefits to employees, ranging from a monthly wellness benefit ($75 or local equivalent) that people can spend on anything health and fitness related to a ‘Calm’ subscription. We also have ‘BrightBreaks’ to encourage employees to go for a break during the workday, and ‘Carrot’ that rewards employees for walking.

Q: What are the learning and development opportunities you offer to employees at your company?

Janice: The learning opportunities you get at Degreed are personalized and varied. It helps employees shape their learning to their needs, style, and goals. We offer a ‘personal learning budget’ that provides employees the freedom to choose what they want to learn.
 
The Degreed platform offers learning pathways and recommendations based on someone’s focus skills (a handful of skills that they choose to focus on for 3-6 months). They can also share content with others or create their own resources and pathways — managers and senior leaders often use this to upskill their teams in strategic skills important to their department’s goals.

Because of the partnerships we have with the likes of Ted@Work, Harvard Business Publishing, The Ken Blanchard Company, and Anders Pink, there is a wide variety of resources available to employees in various formats. Everyone learns differently, so having the option of reading about leadership, watching a video on public speaking, or completing a module on agile development helps to cater to individual preferences.
 
Plus, employees can stretch their skills through experiential learning opportunities recommended in the Degreed platform. These currently include ‘Client Education’, a 5-month stretch assignment, contributing thought leadership for our blog, and working with the professional services team on a temporary basis. This enables employees to learn more about other functions in the business and create new connections, as well as explore alternative career paths.
 
Employees can also match with mentors within Degreed based on their focus skills. Expert mentors are recommended when their skills align with a focus skill that a learner wants to develop. Additionally, employees, who participate in our diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) business resource groups (BRGs), learn through casual company-wide events that focus on different topics, for e.g., “Leveraging Diversity in Product Design”. The BRGs also serve as a great mechanism for highlighting and showcasing hidden talent, while also providing leadership development opportunities for employees in individual contributor roles.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face when it comes to learner engagement?

Janice: Like any organization, making time for learning is a constant challenge. Communicating regularly with the team and getting managers on board with learning can help with this. Our research found that most employees across different industries and organizations spend, on average, only 24 minutes per week on learning.

That is not enough to remain up to date with the changing skills needs, let alone prepare for the future. What is needed is consistent learning — through offering relevant learning opportunities, in manageable time chunks, with permission for people to learn during their workday and reinforcement/accountability from their line managers.

Q: How do you engage learners in your development programs?

Janice: We engage our employees with learning and development by modeling it at a senior level and reinforcing how critical it is to our company mission. Our internal communications and learning and development (L&D) teams work closely on initiatives to launch new learning programs and to highlight focus areas for the business. We build campaigns around new learning initiatives that are business-critical, so employees find out about them via Slack and email, and at our company-all-hands meeting if needed.

The Degreed platform also shows relevant and interesting opportunities to people as soon as they log in. Additionally, we host a weekly “all-hands meeting” where leaders share information related to our business, product innovation, and client challenges.  This meeting serves as a great opportunity to increase the knowledge and skill of our entire organization as it relates to their business acumen, innovation, and customer-centricity skills.
 
Managers are also essential to encouraging continuous learning in their teams, so we target them with new initiatives that they can push to their team members, and we encourage them to keep an eye on ‘Skills Coach’ who tells them the skills mix in their teams and how well team members are progressing in increasing their skill proficiency.

Q: How do you measure the ROI of your development programs?

Janice: Ultimately we measure the return on investment (ROI) utilizing a 4E Learning Value Model.  This model looks at:
●    Effectiveness of our learning initiatives to generate the desired business outcomes
●    Efficiency of learning solutions to reduce cost and optimize the time for learning
●    Engagement of our employees in leveraging our learning tools
●    Experience of our employees as they utilize our learning offerings
 
We also look at areas like how many active users we have, how many ‘skill ratings’ are being completed, and the kind of learning resources that are being engaged with. We have ‘Focus Skills’ on a company level too, such as transformational leadership, coaching, and data literacy, with which we can track the ratings and skill signals to understand if our workforce skills are heading in the right direction.

Q: What is the best practice when it comes to developing learning programs for employees?

Janice: Relevance and usefulness are key. You will not spend time and effort learning if you cannot see the impact that it will have on your role now and your career prospects in future. In a way, we need to borrow some thinking and best practices from our marketing colleagues, who have been personalizing their communications and outreach for decades.

Targeting people with the right learning opportunities at the right time (which could be at critical junctures in their lives, such as onboarding, a promotion, or a lateral job move) will go a long way in engaging learners.
 
The format is important too. An email or Slack message might not be the right way to get attention. Instead, experiment with other ways of sharing information about a learning program through the company all-hands, a launch event, or a friendly internal competition.
 
You also want people to feel rewarded for learning. We all love being celebrated and recognized for our efforts. Highlighting “learners of the month” is a simple way to recognize learning and motivate others to take part. Offering career opportunities like stretch assignments and temporary deployments can also help you to reinforce how learning is positively impacting their work. Even gamification elements like points and learner levels can encourage people to keep learning.

Error: No such template "/CustomCode/topleader/category"!