Enterprise Upskilling in the Second Wave - The Need to Invest in L&D

From mid-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced both the employees and companies to change the way they were working, communicating and collaborating. This included employee learning & development programs which saw an acceleration in eLearning adoption and move towards virtual instructor-led training and upskilling. As the world was trying its best to get back to a degree of normalcy, striking a balance between remote and office working, the second wave of Covid has underscored the fact that strategies devised to handle the Covid disruption to work from last year are here to stay.

Organisations across the world have leaned on technology to help them cope with the challenge of continuing business in this remote working reality. This, in turn, has translated into the need for adoption of new tools, technologies, applications, platforms, methodologies etc, as well as a new mindset, throughout the organisations, imposing the Learning & Development Managers within the organisations with the responsibility of upskilling at scale and a fast pace! The impact of this change on talent strategy and upskilling is huge.

How the Pandemic Reinforced the Need for Upskilling Initiatives?

Need for the adoption of new Tools and Technologies

An example of this is the realisation of the true potential of remote collaboration tools, such as Slack, Teams, Trello etc. Similarly, on-premise infrastructure has taken a nose dive - there has been a major move towards Cloud-based applications, platforms etc. that support remote working. To make the move to these new toolstechnologies smoother and successful, focussed training programs for employee upskilling are imperative.

New Team and Functional structures

Employees are now working on complex projects and problem-solving with an expanded pool of people. It goes way beyond their work location, functions and sometimes opens up cross-hierarchy collaborations. Organisations are embracing these new work and project methodologies – there’s a big focus on upskilling teams to effectively work together using these methodologies which lend themselves easily to the new post-pandemic work realities.

Data-Driven Decision-Making

With digital transformation, gut-feel decisions will now have to go down in the absence of a traditional relationship-driven collaboration as they are no longer possible or needed. Data-driven insights are needed by all involved to make smart and better decisions.

Topics like Big Data Processing, Data Analytics and Machine Learning etc. now are not just relevant to a select few within the organisations, but by the vast majority – fuelling the need for tailored, graduated training programs for different teams and employees.

The Physical Work-Place

WFH indeed comes with a lot of perks and benefits but it also brings some serious domestic challenges, such as the upper-middle-class concerns about “living at work” to the existential dilemmas of competing for “zoom space”.

L&D Managers are putting in place various behavioural, cultural and soft-skills learning programs for their employees to understand and assimilate these shifts in nature of working and style of collaboration with their colleagues and managers.

Why Do Organizations Need to Increasingly Invest in L&D?

The need for upskilling and reskilling employees was there before the pandemic as well, but in the post-pandemic world, especially after the second wave, it has become clear that L&D managers have to make a sea-shift in their strategies to ensure employees across the organisation are equipped for adoptingmanagingdriving organisation-wide transition from the traditional way of working to the new modes of collaboration. This requires an increased investment in the L&D budgets for carrying out the required upskilling initiatives at a scale and rapid pace.

Endnote

Data, new-age skills and methodologies will get more important and prominent as we move forward. Enterprises are acknowledging the importance of upskilling programs but they need to do it at a faster speed and across the board to keep up with the current trends. The half-life of learning is shortening and as time passes by, it will vanish: just like a regular vaccine, regular upskilling is becoming a norm.