Article: Stay competitive by reinventing the learning strategy

Learning & Development

Stay competitive by reinventing the learning strategy

Arun Rajamani, Consultant and Country Manager, Pluralsight gives insights on the complex situation that L&D professionals in Indian tech sector find themselves facing
Stay competitive by reinventing the learning strategy
 

Most of the training time and effort today is going into training for legacy technologies when it should really be put into the technologies that are shaping up the future

 

In order to stay competitive, the Indian tech sector today needs to adopt quality and innovation, focused business models, along with building enhanced capability. Technology skills, as entrepreneur Eric Bloom has expressed, have a two year half-life. This means that “that the exact set of skills you have today will only be half as marketable two years from now.” And so, they must constantly keep upgrading their skills while servicing the legacy technologies. 

Everybody in the industry understands that the technologies that will shape the future such as SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytic, Cloud), artificial intelligence, augmented reality and methodologies such as agile learning are here already. Most of the training time and effort today is going into training for legacy technologies where the organization’s maturity already exists, when it should really be put into the technologies that are shaping up the future. When majority of the revenue today is coming from legacy technologies, there is a classic dichotomy of short-term versus long-term investment that learning professionals need to balance.

As per a Bersin study, an average of $1,1847 are being spent on training an individual. This amount is actually spent on just 20 percent of learning, as 80 percent of the whole learning takes place on the job, according to an HBR study. But when 70 percent of companies still report “capability gaps” in their employees, one can gauge the limited effectiveness of the learning programs, many of which still rely on old school methods such as textbooks and instructors. L&D professionals are aware that they need to shift to digital, modern age learning which is a better-suited medium for different types of learners, unlike classrooms.

E-learning or on-demand learning has statistically showed itself to be quite effective. Business leaders in an IBM study reported a 26 percent direct increase in business revenue from employees who underwent self-paced learning. Additionally, 50 percent of employees in a Bersin study conveyed that their productivity increased from adopting e-learning, as opposed to from textbook-oriented learning. Still, the bulk of the Indian training style is instructor-dominated. The demand for e-learning in India is low – 10 percent as opposed to a 36 percent globally. There is certainly room for intervention and scaling up this learning, because even out of these, only 46 percent of these learners are skilling for future technologies and the rest 54 percent are still just training for its legacy counterpart. 

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Topics: Learning & Development, Learning Technology

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