How To Manage Career Development With A Learning Experience Platform

The Covid-19 pandemic has cast a spotlight on the growing skills crisis

As the dust settles in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many organizations are moving their attention back to their business-as-usual processes. For many, that means assessing their approach to career development.
 

The pandemic has cast a spotlight on the growing skills crisis, whereby 54% of all employees will require reskilling within the next three years. On top of this, 62% of executives say that they expect to retrain or replace up to a quarter of their workforce between now and 2023, making it critically important that employees, managers and senior management teams consider career development within their organizations immediately.

When it comes to managing career development, one of the key tools in any HR team’s arsenal should be a learning experience platform (LXP). An LXP facilitates informal learning across the organization, including sharing resources, collaboration, content curation and the discovery of relevant learning activities, which supports and drives employee engagement. Below, we will explore how an LXP can be used to fuel career development at every level of employment.

New Employees

In their first few days, weeks and months, your new employees will have several objectives:
 

• To learn the skills and knowledge required for their new role
• To make connections and build relationships with their peers
• To impress their new manager and teammates

To do this, they need access to a safe space to ask questions and a way to find the information they need quickly and easily. This will help new employees feel less overwhelmed, and connect the dots between the gaps in their knowledge and skills and what they need to know to succeed in their role.

Creating a collaborative workspace in your LXP for your new employees is a great way for them to introduce themselves and start making connections with their new colleagues. Additionally, depending on their role, you can recommend other relevant workspaces for them to join so they can start to receive updates on topics useful to their jobs. Your LXP can also help surface relevant courses and resources that will help them both with their orientation and skills development as and when they have downtime in their first few weeks.

Mid-Level Employees

Established, mid-level employees will usually have the skills and knowledge they need to perform their current roles, but they may be thinking about the next step in their careers. Perhaps this means specializing in a particular area or expanding their skill set, or potentially developing their leadership skills to move into a management role.

Your mid-level employees will benefit from joining workspaces related to their areas of interest, where they can communicate directly with senior members of the organization and subject matter experts. A great search algorithm will help surface the right content for your mid-level employees without having to trawl through all the basics, and they can benefit from content curated by others to better understand a topic with “pre-vetted” resources.

It’s common for mid-level employees to fall into a bit of a slump, so it can help to motivate this group within your LXP. You can reward employees for sharing content and commenting on others’ posts, which in turn motivates them to continue posting and fuels engagement. Leaderboards, points and badges can be used as motivators for some employees, but it pays to know your audience to ensure that you’re implementing the right initiatives.

Subject Matter Experts

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are looking for recognition in their areas of expertise. An LXP makes it easy to recognize individuals for their knowledge and contributions by giving them a special “title” or badge to display on their profiles, identifying them as a reliable source of knowledge.

To help leverage the knowledge of your SMEs, you could encourage them to set up their own workspaces. Here, they can post interesting articles they have found, tips from their own roles and relevant e-learning courses from your LMS. They can also create customized content playlists to direct interested colleagues to a set of high-quality courses and resources.

Other employees can then ask questions, share their own resources and improve their own knowledge of a topic, without overwhelming the SME. This also creates a permanent source of knowledge that grows over time, which helps protect your SME’s busy schedule without having to answer the same questions time and time again.

Senior Managers

A common misconception about LXPs is that they primarily benefit more junior employees as they build new skills and learn from their peers. However, senior managers have just as much to gain from collaborative learning, content curation and the easy communication of an LXP.

Senior managers, for instance, can use an LXP to identify emerging or hidden talent within the organization. They may spot that an individual is constantly sharing insightful posts that garner large amounts of engagement, which could lead to further career development opportunities for that employee. Engagement can feed into performance management discussions, and managers should take advantage of their LXP’s reporting to keep a close eye on engagement levels and rising stars within the organization.

LXPs can also be used to create more engaged workforces, with senior managers leading by example. They can highlight high-quality, engaging content by “pinning” posts to the top of workspaces, and communicate quickly and efficiently to entire teams within workspaces or across the LXP. As well as using engagement data for performance management conversations, senior managers can also use this information to influence future engagement initiatives, learning content and behavior change programs.

Integrating an LXP into Your Learning Technology Ecosystem for Capability Building

As LXPs grow in popularity, organizations will naturally seek ways to get the most bang for their buck - and that means tight integrations with the rest of your learning technology ecosystem. Your LMS will take care of employees’ learning and development plans in line with job roles, capabilities and skills requirements of your organization, while the LXP helps surface relevant learning content and supports “little and often” learning.

On top of this, your LXP should also integrate seamlessly with your performance management system. This will help capture feedback and progress towards new internal roles, which promotes internal mobility and acts as a motivator for your people.

Bringing together learning, engagement and performance will enable you to support capability building for your employees, tying together the more formal competency-based progression in defined job roles and the fluid recognition of skills valued across your organization. This recognizes that capability building is a holistic process requiring formal and informal learning, and ultimately benefits your people by equipping them with the skills, knowledge and behaviors needed to progress within your organization, meaning you retain your top talent and benefit from increased motivation and productivity. 

Lars Hyland is a respected thought leader in the fields of HR and learning technology and the Chief Learning Officer of Totara. Lars has over 30 years of experience working with a wide range of organizations to build workplace learning experiences that raise people’s performance, productivity, and engagement. Connect Lars Hyland