Vivek Ravi, head of talent development, North America, for technology, collaboration & strategic initiatives at Tata Consultancy Services, shares how TCS solidified its remote learning strategy and offers advice to organizations on engaging with and accelerating the career trajectories of their employees.
A robust learning and development (L&D) strategy has always been a point of differentiation for organizations looking to attract top talent and retain the best workforce possible. Today, this luxury has become an absolute necessity in the face of COVID-19. While prior investments were encouraging, this new climate – where global workforces have been forced into a widespread remote work infrastructure – a significant investment in constant employee learning and career enablement needs to be rapid and extensive.
Even with organizations acknowledging and investing in reskilling and training, only one out of every five employees haOpens a new window s the necessary skills for their current and future roles. Beyond that, nearly two-thirds (64%) of managers feel their employees won’t be able to keep up with future skills needs.
As we attempt to navigate forward amid COVID-19, talent development provides a pathway vital to organizational survival. The effort (or lack thereof) that organizations put into fostering an environment of remote learning and development will ultimately decide the long-term relationship that organizations have with their existing workforce when pandemic-related issues settle.
3 Essential Characteristics That Determine the Effectiveness of Remote Learning
The following tips highlight key characteristics that are integral to nurturing a skilled and happy workforce, which will drive long-term success.
1. Developing career paths
It’s common for employees to seek out opportunities to reskill or advance their contextual expertise during unprecedented times. To this end, organizations need to develop the programs and install guardrails to make it easier for their employees to grow their skill set in their existing roles or seek new areas of focus altogether.
Anyone can take a course in an area of interest to learn more about it, and there is value in that. But the real value is realized through the development of multiple competencies in coordination with industry certifications to truly make a life-long impact on employees’ careers. To this end, successful learning management system (LMS) programs map out the necessary steps employees need to achieve a tangible, impactful result.
Most companies will not be able to achieve this goal by investing in just one channel. Successful companies create a vibrant talent development ecosystem, made up of both internal and external learning platforms, deep-skilling certification programs, inhouse learning management systems, and L&D initiatives. This multifaceted approach will help companies foster a culture of investing in people and not positions.
At TCS, we have established a merit-based, democratized, transparent talent framework designed to create a tighter link between learning, career, and rewards. This framework provides Premium Learning Resources in a guided, role-based path to our associates based on their experience levels. This framework combines learning performance, work performance, and other dimensions of performance relevant for each experience bracket to help associates learn, demonstrate their talent, and get an opportunity to boost their career and compensation. All this to improve associate satisfaction/retention, accelerate the overall movement of associates to take on higher roles and responsibilities, reshape mid-level to fuel leadership in growth and transformation initiatives, and drive a culture of continuous learning and aspiration for accelerated career paths
Learn More: How Automation and Reskilling Can Boost Employees Careers
2. Open-source learning – built for all
Perhaps the most critical aspect of creating a culture of continuous learning is providing ungated access throughout the entire organization – something that is not as common as one would think, due to a wide variety of variables that must be considered with such an investment (cost per license, hesitancy to embrace change, etc.) Employees at any level should be allowed to access the platform, learn new skills, and work toward new goals – either in their existing career paths or in entirely new areas of interest.
Organizations need to provide their workers with the power to learn skills that are important to them as people, not just employees. They can adopt skills that can ultimately encourage them to pursue new career paths – where both the employee feels valued and content, and we as an organization get to retain their employment for the long-term. Giving employees control over their learning empowers them to pursue their career aspirations and leads to high employee retention.
Our “just in time, just enough and just for me†learning ecosystem called Fresco Play combines exploratory micro-learning with guided learning journeys. Our content is carefully curated from some of the best sources and our empaneled online learning partners to deliver digital, agile, DevOps and cloud, AI as combinatorial skills that our consultants must possess. Our “Anytime-Anywhere-AnyDevice†platforms make learning on train-rides or in coffee-shops as useful, and even more, as compared to classrooms. Our learning infrastructure scales to tens of thousands of associates learning concurrently any day. Our “one-click†immersive experience eliminates multiple hops and thereby dropouts. Numerous gamified learning rewards and recognitions keep learners addicted to this ecosystem.
This platform was envisaged and developed by TCS Talent Development with the one objective of giving the best experience to the learner. Experience where they will not need to look for content to learn new technologies on the internet, where they need not log in to our content partner portal since the content is curated from open source and partner portals. Experience where they know exactly what to learn with the guided learning journeys and role-based learning journeys. Experience where when they learn more, they earn more. More learning leads to the rewarding of virtual currency, which is redeemed as rewards or donations to charity.
The next level is cloud-based hands-on coding platforms integrated seamlessly into Fresco Play. You learn new technology, and you practice the technology in the same platform without having to log in anywhere else.
Learn More: A Career in Learning and Development: 10 Must-Have Skills to Make It Big in 2020
3. Gamification with a purpose
As employees settle into working from home, organizations need to find innovative ways to engage with their workforce and maintain that same sense of community that existed organically with in-person experiences. While it’s not a new concept, gamification can be used to spark employees’ competitive nature or provide a sense of being part of a team with a common goal.
LMS gamification and tokenization allow employees to receive that instant gratification that will help them be consistent with their learning journeys. Recent studies have shown that an overwhelming majority of employees say that gamification of LMS initiatives makes them feelOpens a new window more productive (89%) and happier (88%) at work. Furthermore, 83% of employees with gamified LMS feel motivated, while more than half (61%) without gamified training feel bored and unproductive.
At TCS, the entire learning ecosystem is guided by an algorithm-driven gamified engine that nudges learners to compete collaboratively to achieve higher scores of digital excellence. The engine also nudges relevant learning suggestions and awards learning points that can be converted to quantified rewards.
Adding a purpose-driven element to gamified learning is another way to keep employees motivated. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit and associates went into lockdown, TCS used gamification and purpose-driven learning to keep morale up. We converted learning hours accrued on our LMS into money that was then donated to pandemic fighting charitable organizations, so employees could “learn for a cause.†This not only provides employees with the sense of community and engagement that comes with gamification but also with an added sense of purpose. Because of this learn-in-lockdown initiative, employees spent 2.6 million hours learning in April 2020. That said, gamification, paired with purpose-driven community impact, helps provide a much deeper sense of gratification to employees.
Solidify Your Remote Learning Strategy Now
These are not just assumptions and estimations of what might work going forward. All these technologies, strategies, and tools have been proven successful through real-world applications at TCS itself.
Talent reskilling/upskilling strategy is a necessity. As organizations continue to attempt to navigate both shifts in customer demand and remote workforce needs, a learning and development strategy is an integral component to retaining and attracting top talent. It will provide employees with the necessary engagement and validation to help them continue to progress their individual careers. On the other hand, organizations are provided with an agile talent pool, a necessary sense of community, and an infrastructure to tackle any future shifts or roadblocks that are thrown their way.
Which new initiatives has your organization taken for talent development and digital learning amid COVID-19? Tell us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebOpens a new window Opens a new window pener” title=”Opens a new window” target=”_blank” target=”_blank” aria-label=”undefined (opens in a new tab)” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>ookOpens a new window .