Skills for the Future: Transforming Today and Preparing for Tomorrow

Skills shortages have been making the headlines for decades. And they’re not letting up. So it’s not surprising that 48% of employers cite their most urgent concern over the next three years as a skills and talent shortage, according to the Cornerstone Global Skills Report.

But maybe not as surprising is how high-performing organisations deal with this skills shortage compared to the laggards. Simply put, high-performing organisations focus on developing talent as the number one way to fill skills gaps, while laggards were 3x more likely to stall skills development investments.

Luckily, that’s Cornerstone’s specialty: helping organisations stay ahead of talent challenges by creating a personalised and connected learning experience for their employees.

Learn what Cornerstone customers have to say about how they’re powering the future-ready workforce and putting employees in the driver’s seat of their own growth.

One of our customers told us, “We don’t even know sometimes what the skills we will need tomorrow are and when we find out, everyone else needs the same skills, so it’s super competitive.” This is an issue cited by an increasing number of organisations since skills shortages have become so widespread.

But Cornerstone has given them an edge up. Skills are recommended by AI and help the customer determine if these capabilities are really something they need. They continued, “We can see it really clearly and in advance of it becoming a problem, and then do things to develop our own people with those capabilities.”

It can be challenging for organisations to do all the legwork required to gain this knowledge on their own. That’s where Cornerstone and our technology play their part.

Thames Water said, “We needed a partner who can help us go on that skills awareness journey and bring that data into us successfully in real-time. That’s where working with a partner like Cornerstone is really critical.”

Teleperformance acknowledges that access to all this skills data powers the future-ready workforce and retains them. “Having a central platform where we can have skills, skill path and more gives us the opportunity to do great things and retain the people by offering them the opportunity to really take, take a step forward,” they said.

More on that next.

Only 55% of employees are confident in their organisation’s prioritisation of developing new skilling opportunities for them. Whether related to time, focus, adequate resources or other reasons, employees are not confident that their organisations are prioritising new skilling.

But the following organisations are showing employees they are listening by offering Cornerstone’s skills transformation technology.

At Deutsche Post DHL, “This idea of having a marketplace where you enable learning recommendations which are rather personalised, direct to the employee is a very powerful way of not only developing them but also engaging them, making them feel that they matter.”

Because people these days want — rather, expect — to engage with their organisations. They just won’t settle for less. And they also want to be in control of their growth path.

“One of the main games is really putting the employee at the center, letting them have the information to drive their career internally,” a leader at Alstom commented.

The skills graph is one of the tools that helps customers do that. It can develop a rich skill profile for everyone in the organisation with only a job title and a resume. And it will learn based on the courses an employee takes and mutes to continue developing a relevant path.

Deutsche Post DHL added, “It recommends them to close gaps and suggests to them what might be a next role that suits their capabilities. But it also allows them to say, ‘Well, I’d actually like to make a career shift and what development what I need to put in place to take that route in my career?’”

That is powerful.