We are seeing the world changing fast and so are the businesses. Organisations are struggling to meet the demand for new skills at scale. How can they do that?

In this TechHR session, Ashish Kumar Jha, Co-Founder & CEO at Vani by Vyakta and Dr. Rajiv Sinha, Head -Business Excellence, Corp HR, Learning & Dev at Larsen & Toubro discussed how L&T leveraged technology to solve the challenges of skilling@scale. 

L&T story

Larsen and Toubro is a known name in this country for its cutting edge of technology. In all the fields, it's but natural for them to use technology in all aspects of work. There are three critical learnings shared by Dr. Rajiv: 

• Technology has been the biggest differentiator, in not just work but also in their learning journey
• Communication became super important. The employees were meant to practice real-life work scenarios in order to deal better with the circumstances. The improvement in communications could be seen from very start and there is an enhancement in self esteem
• Discipline was the catalyst in the learning journey of the employees. It greatly helped in measuring the learning outcomes.

Further, the discussion shed light on more aspects of learning at scale-

• As per the theory of infinite game, learning is the most complex thing. It becomes even more difficult the moment we have to apply it practically. 
• Change is the only constant, so things will keep on changing in due course of time. Similarly, we need to keep on revising our learning strategies to suit the growing skill proficiency demands
• It's important that whatever the learning is happening doesn't only show on paper, it actually shows on the ground. And who better than the business stakeholders to report it. And when that happens, then we know the change is really taking place and if that's not happening, that's also feedback that we need to go back and start fixing things in the learning strategy in the learning process
• Integrating work life scenarios is also important because what happens is that when we are learning something theoretical, we are learning the concept, we are able to understand what we are able to absorb, but application is a completely different one. 

Citing the example of cricket, Ashish from Vyakta shared when you say a cricketer goes and practices in nets or when a tennis player goes and practices in nets, they try to simulate real life situations and that is what their inspiration was. So it also takes a whole village to help people. And that is the sort of value that Vyakta will want to provide to the organizations.

In conclusion, technology indeed has helped us manage several of the work-life aspects and needless to say, with learning going all mobile or on-the-go, many infrastructure needs which earlier were being serviced in-person are now being taken care of by the inclusion of technology platforms.