Learning for the Modern Workforce - Everwise

Learning for the Modern Workforce

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E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

Learning and development is ready for disruption. Employees are demanding more than ever, looking for the same kind of experience they’re used to as consumers.

L E A R N I N G F O R T H E M O D E R N WO R K F O R C E

It’s time to reconsider our approach to learning and development. Spend on corporate learning continues to rise - in fact it’s at an all time high. Despite the investments we’re making, though, leaders’ and employees’ satisfaction with the results isn’t measurably improving.

Helping employees reach their full potential is as important as it's ever been. Products and entire business models are being disrupted by new innovation. Globalization, an instant-on contingent workforce and demographic shifts present new faces to the team.

Employees are demanding more than ever, looking for the same level of experience they’re used to as consumers. Moreover, learners themselves have changed: they’re more distracted and overwhelmed than ever, increasingly mobile and expect learning to be always available. They increasingly take learning into their own hands if their needs are not being met by the organization.1

1 Meet the Modern Learner (2014) Josh Bersin

2 Becoming irresistible: A new model for employee engagement (2015) Josh Bersin


Continuous and effective learning is a critical factor for organizations that want to attract, engage and retain top talent in today’s talent market.2

Despite the change around us and the increasing need for continually up- and re-skilling our teams, our approach to learning and development hasn’t kept pace. Most organizations struggle to roll out learning solutions that are both scalable and effective.

In this eBook - we review the importance of talent development, the state of learning today and the critical success factors for learning for the modern workforce.


Why talent development matters

On the eve of the 21st century, Peter Drucker - one of the leading architects of the modern corporation and arguably the most important business author and management consultant of the last century - predicted that the ‘most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution (whether business or nonbusiness) will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.’ 3

Drucker observed that management’s top focus should be on ensuring the continued increase in the productivity of an organization’s knowledge workers.

Most organizations today face one or more severe talent-related challenges.

Ineffective managersOrganizations with strong management practices are five times more likely to be healthy and deliver strong, sustained performance,4 but frontline leaders in most organizations lack basic management skills.

Non-diverse leadership teams Organizations with gender diversity in senior ranks achieve 41% higher return on equity and 56% better operating results.5 However, most organizations fail to recruit, promote and retain senior women leaders.

High potential talent retentionHigh potentials are 91% more valuable to their organizations and produce up to 3.5 times their total compensation - but one in four high potentials plan to leave within a year due to a lack of appropriate career development.6

Effective change managementThe rate of transformational change is ever increasing, making continued productivity in times of change more important than ever - but 75% of employees do not handle significant organizational change effectively.7

3 Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge (1999) Peter Drucker

4 The hidden value of organizational health - and how to capture it (2014) McKinsey

5 Women matter (2013) McKinsey

6 Companies That Fail to Retain High-Potential Employees Groom Top Leaders For The Competition (2014) CEB

7 Making change management work (2016) CEB

High leader quality makes organizations

6xmore likely to be among the top 20 financial performers


The three pillars of L&D

Traditionally, learning and development teams have thought about three distinct learning requirements: compliance training, technical skill-building and soft-skill development.

ComplianceIn the modern workplace, some categories of knowledge are simply table-stakes. In many cases, organizations are obligated to show that training has been completed by each employee to mitigate risk or meet regulatory or insurance requirements. Examples include sexual harassment awareness and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance training.

Online training governed by a learning management system, sometimes including quizzes, often checks the box. Many organizations feel that there are diminishing returns on investments beyond “good enough.”

Hard skill buildingWith technology advancing at breakneck pace, workers need to continually hone new technical and functions skills to do their jobs effectively. Today’s employees require a dizzying array of industry- and job-specific skills such as software development, sales methodologies and financial modeling.

In recent years, the cost of hard skill development has plummeted. MOOCs and other eLearning solutions and low-cost bootcamps put world-class instruction within reach of employees everywhere.

Soft skill developmentA third group of skills helps employees perform more effectively and allows them to guide the work of others. Examples include clear, authentic communication; providing coaching and feedback; general leadership skills.

Historically, these have been the most difficult to ‘train’ on, but are by far the most valuable as employees grow into roles of higher influence. Given the value of getting this right (and, conversely the cost of getting it wrong), soft skill development should be the primary focus of strategic learning and development teams.

Spending on corporate training is at over

$150b with $15b for compliance, $50b for soft skills and $85b for technical skills


Current approaches to soft skill development

Fully 84% of corporate leaders view learning as a critical issue and investment in corporate training is at an all time high.8 However, nearly every CEO and CHRO reports that their companies aren’t developing skills fast enough or leaders deeply enough.9 Why is soft skill development not working?

Historically, learning and development teams have had to choose between the scalability and effectiveness of the solutions they deployed.

HR leaders designed comprehensive soft skill learning experiences for senior leaders, teaching key concepts and theories, enabling skill practice and providing feedback loops. Executive coaching, residency-based training at elite institutions, purposeful job rotations, business simulations prove highly effective. Alas, they’re also cost prohibitive for all but the most senior executives and a select group identified as “top talent.”

Solutions available to the “other 99%” of the organization sacrifice effectiveness in favor of scalability. eLearning courses provided through a learning management system, content aggregated from around the web and periodic classroom training don’t break the bank but also prove minimally effective and suffer from sporadic and spotty engagement.

A number of extrinsic, organizational and individual factors compound the complexity of the challenge facing L&D teams.

80% of managers stated companies are failing to use digital learning well for leadership topics, 37% believe content is not aligned with their company's strategy

8 Global Human Capital Trends (2016) Deloitte

9 Ibid


Change Driver 1: Extrinsic factors

Changes in the business landscape drive significant demands for learning outcomes. The world is changing, becoming smaller, flatter and more connected and talent development needs to keep pace to prepare organizations and individuals for success.

A global, instant-on workforceAdvances in technology - low-cost, high-fidelity video collaboration tools; task molecularization - have given workers access to roles across geographic boundaries. Global work markets allow ‘on demand’ (consultants, contractors or freelancers) workers to join and leave teams with shocking efficiency.

Increased competition for jobs drives a requirement for self-learning and learning to learn, building right-brain and people skills (those that cannot be easily automated).

Diverse buyersWomen drive an increasingly large portion of household spending in many developed nations and organizations are selling their products in a global marketplace to buyers who bear little resemblance to domestic buyers.

Building leadership teams that appreciate diverse perspectives has become a critical success factor for continued growth.

Technology disruptionTechnology is disrupting entire industries and changing the way we think and act. To simply keep up, let alone lead, in an environment marked by such significant change, organizations need to harness the full creative and collaborative energies of their teams.

"Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software."Marc Andreessen, Cofounder & General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz


Change Driver 2: Organizational factors

There are also a number of factors at the organizational level - increased challenges attracting and retaining top talent, an increased pace of advancement for younger workers and a limitless list of new skills - that drive demand for improved learning outcomes.

Talent development as a competitive advantageAttracting and retaining top-skilled workers is, to say the least, a highly competitive activity. Employees today have increased bargaining power, the job market is highly transparent and we’re competing for talent on a global scale.10

For many workers, truly effective growth and development opportunities are the top factors in choosing an employer.

Different requirements at distinct leadership levelsIt’s much less expensive to build talent rather than buy, to develop leaders at all levels, rather than hire them from the outside. There is evidence that younger workers, for their part, hope to move up faster in their careers.

The traditional corporate ladder has, as we know, morphed into a jungle gym and the best knowledge workers take unpredictable paths to the top. Helping them build the skills they need to succeed at each stage is harder than ever.

Changing skill requirementsOrganizations need to develop employee capabilities faster and more flexibly. With the ever faster changes in technology and disruption of virtually every industry, planning for future skills seems like a futile effort.

Two-thirds of today’s top performers lack critical attributes essential to their success in future roles.11 Learning to learn is the most practical skill for today’s rapidly accelerating employee.

10 Meet the Modern Learner (2014) Bersin by Deloitte

11 How to Keep Your Top Talent (2010) Harvard Business Review

65% of today's students will be employed in jobs that don't exist yet


Change driver 3: Individual factors

As power shifts to employees in an increasingly competitive talent landscape, meeting expectations for overall employment experience becomes critical as well.

The learning curve is the earning curveToday’s learners recognize the significant upside of advanced skills and capabilities, and place increased value on education. For millennials, who are now becoming the core part of the workforce, learning opportunities are the top factor in selecting a job.12

The quality, experience and timeliness of talent development is more important than ever.

Consumerization of the workplaceEmployees are demanding more than ever. They expect the same highly intuitive, personalized and integrated experiences at work as they’ve come to expect as consumers. This includes seamless collaboration, easy knowledge sharing and a beautiful experience across every device.13

The modern learnerThe influence of technology significantly changes the way people learn. Today’s learner is increasingly distracted, inpatient and overwhelmed.14 Throughout the workday, interruptions disturb employees as frequently as every five minutes and two thirds of knowledge workers complain they don’t have time to do their jobs. Learning is relegated to just 1% of time.15

“Career opportunities” are twice as important as compensation in whether or not an employee would recommend a company as a great place to work

12 The learning curve is the earning curve (2016) Bersin by Deloitte

13 4 Consumerization Trends That Are Changing Enterprise Software As We Know It (2015) Entrepreneur


15 Ibid


Effective, scalable learning

As changes in the environment, organizational requirements and individual needs pose ever increasing demands on learning, delivering effective and scalable learning becomes more difficult - and more important than ever.

A number of key success factors can contribute to an agile learning environment that can meet the needs of today’s workforce, at scale.

Analytical and data drivenEffective programs measure what works at all levels of the Kirkpatrick Model - reactions, learning, behavior change and business results. They allow the approach to be tailored at the learner level based on key insights.

The new 70/20/10Learning is balanced between different learning modes. The 10 include content from inside and outside the enterprise; the 20 includes internal and external networks; and the 70 includes corporate, community, and social experiences.16

Continuous improvementLearning is not an event but a constant in everyday work life. The workload flexes according to the employee’s motivation and capacity at that moment to engage in learning activities.

PersonalizedLearning is personalized to the needs and preferences of each learner, making it highly relevant and engaging.

ScalableLearning experiences can reach deeply into the organization, providing effective skills building accessible to the entire workforce. Additionally, measuring learning engagement across the organization can give senior leaders a continuous method for identifying high-potential talent at all levels of the organization.


73% of managers want their digital experiences to be more adaptive

60% want the experience to be more social and collaborative

55% want more experiential learning included


Reinventing talent development

Current approaches to talent development fail to balance effectiveness and scalability, not meeting the needs of organizations - or learners. The world is increasingly complex, posing additional challenges and demands on L&D.

How can progressive learning and development teams capitalize on the changes impacting modern learning to prove that the question of effectiveness versus scalability is a false choice?

Reach out to us and we'll share how we can help address the demands of business leaders for faster and deeper skill development and to fulfill the needs of today’s learners for personalized, flexible skill development.


About EverwiseThe Everwise Leadership Development Platform is a completely new approach to effective and scalable talent development. We help companies solve for the historical enterprise learning challenge "invest a lot in fewer people or accept lower impact but reach more?" Our simple but powerful SaaS platform is grounded by the concept that people learn best from people and that technology allows companies to scale impactful and personalized learning across the organization.

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Learning for the Modern Workforce - Everwise