As organizations navigate this ever-evolving, uncharted world of work, one thing is certain. Skills development is a vital tool to traverse our complex and uncertain future. Now, because work requires talent leaders to simultaneously boost revenue, energize employee engagement and reduce turnover, the best way they can accomplish those goals is by prioritizing career development. And talent mobility is a best-for-everyone solution for thriving in our changing work landscape.
According to the Cornerstone 2022 Global Skills Report, 79% of employees say they want more skill development content and opportunities from their employer, while 48% of employers placed skills and talent shortage within their top three concerns.
By connecting employees’ skill-building to internal growth opportunities, you and your people can work toward the same goals and share in the same successes.
Creating a connected learning experience
Using as little as a job title or job description, AI-powered software can create self-directed learning opportunities, helping you place your employees in the driver’s seat of their careers. And when people and organizations share a sense of ownership over their career development, your people are more satisfied, more likely to feel valued and more likely to stay with your organization.
With the right skills strategy, you can:
- Benchmark and assess – Build personalized skills profiles from self-assessments and generate reports to understand where to invest
- Close skills gaps – Digitally identify and address the mismatches that can keep you from forging ahead and outperforming your competition
- Enable growth and development –Connect your people with curated career and learning options designed to help them pave their own path to success
- Target learning opportunities – With over 53,000 skills in 15 different languages, you can filter for exactly what you need when you need it
“Good enough” isn’t good enough for the future of work
Humans aren’t necessarily afraid of change. They’re fearful of the unknown. Rather than pushing tedious training, employers can encourage employees to pursue their career growth through transparent, continuous learning opportunities and hands-on experiences. Help your people take on new opportunities, stretch assignments and gigs by leveraging consistent check-ins throughout the employee development lifecycle.
To become a high-performing organization with demonstrated business results, you must align with your employees’ perceptions, needs and desires for professional development. Investing in key programs to drive employee satisfaction while providing ongoing, people-centric, development-oriented feedback is essential to improving long-term talent retention. Managers must unlock potential on a personal level through continuous conversations and reframe the language around performance from “good enough” to “business critical.”
Outcomes of linking performance and learning
Performance dialogue should generate tangible goals that can be measured by sharpening skills and mastering new ones. What about scenarios where employees don’t have visibility into learning and career opportunities? In these cases, they’re nearly three times more likely to say they wouldn’t be interested in other jobs at the same company. Technology that unlocks self-service development opportunities allows employees to explore, compare and select other roles thereby impacting internal mobility and tangible recruiting cost savings.
When engineering an organization’s future, linking performance and learning can help you:
- Align ever-evolving business priorities and goals
- Provide targeted guidance to track learning and development progress
- Increase the velocity of skill attainment and skill deployment
- Discover and understand skills and performance gaps
- Improve internal career mobility and lessen the cost of new hires
- Reduce unconscious bias and make space for equity and inclusion
According to McKinsey’s 2023 Performance Through People Report, organizations prioritizing human capital through learning and development have doubled the pace of their revenue growth since 2020. When an organization takes ownership in creating a culture of skill-building, uses career development tools to target the most impactful skills and adopts an internal-first hiring mindset, they develop a stable environment to build products, serve customers and deliver value to their stakeholders.
To learn more, watch the full webinar where three Cornerstone experts Anna Goldberg, manager, product management, Dan Lemieux, lead, product manager, and I discuss how to leverage learning and performance to take your skills strategy to the next level.
For a deeper dive into how Cornerstone (CSX) Performance supports your skills strategy, don’t miss Part 2 of the webinar, which includes a product demo.
For information about the Cornerstone AI-powered Opportunity Marketplace, click here. To find out more about Cornerstone’s Talent Mobility study, click here.
To learn how to creatively conquer the business challenges of tomorrow and ensure your people feel passionate about work, download this eBook
co-authored by Dr. Edie Goldberg, an expert in the future of work and talent management.
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