The digital disruption and rising customer expectations have made capability building extremely important for the long-term growth of a business. Companies that recognize the value of capability building have been able to map impactful learning journeys for addressing capability gaps. This allows their frontline and knowledge workforce to invest time in learning and development for building new capabilities.
Demand for new skills led to a 70% increase in average learning hours for frontline workers. While knowledge workers have invested more time consistently in upskilling since March 2020.
Currently, the market is filled with uncertainty and competition. Capability building is a great strategy to prepare your employee for the unforeseen future
Competence vs Capability
While competency mapping is important, capability goes one step further. When you focus on capability building, your employees can effectively perform their work today while preparing for challenges they’ll face in the future.
Competence refers to a person’s current state, and talks about the knowledge and necessary skills they possess to perform a job. Whereas capability is about integrating knowledge and skills, and adapting and flexing to meet future needs.
Shifting from a competency model to a capability building model calls for a change in mindset. Your upskilling programs must make employees more learning agile and more committed to continuous learning & development to successfully create, innovate, lead, and manage change as a future leader.
Developing a Continuous Capability Building Model
Employee engagement is undergoing a metamorphosis. Over the last five years, disruption based on digital technologies has been phenomenal and unprecedented. It is time to review and reboot your employee experience strategy.
Several stakeholders play an important role here in delivering a great employee experience:
- The recruiter
- The manager
- The business leader
- The intangible stakeholders in processes, policies and technology
It’s time to align these stakeholders and develop an employee development strategy to meet the needs of the changing workplace. Start with pre-joining rituals: give your would-be employees interactive self-learning modules to understand the history & vision of the company to ensure they culturally fit into the new family!
Give them virtual onboarding, where engaging & interactive audio-video training sessions and initial employee orientations are conducted virtually from the far-off geographically dispersed locations.
The first 90 days should actually be quite an adventure! These are the experiences we are talking about.
We are talking about effective onboarding to offset the volatile marketplace and daily upskilling for skyrocketing employee performance by setting new milestones in the process.
Constantly assess employee performance and based on identified skill gaps, create personalized learning journeys. The learning content can come through both in-house knowledge repositories as well as MOOCs.
This is the way to transform your capability building model to turn your average employee into a seasoned performer. The bottom line is to develop an end-to-end learning culture that cuts across all the departments and functionalities, keeping capability building top-of-mind.
To achieve this, you’ll need an integrated capability-building platform to bring out the leader in your employees, polishing their functional, technical, and behavioral skills.
Blending Capability Building Models with Employee Experience
The very concept of the Learning Management System was giving learning a digital makeover — learning that was more engaging, more pull-based, more retention-focused, and convenient in the form of self-paced content. Until late, the LMS was a cornerstone in corporate training & employee learning. These platforms were hugely successful, but soon reached a point of saturation.
Organizations felt a need to go beyond the LMS, and in came Learning Experience Platforms — with new features such as MOOC integrations, Open content from the web, On-demand learning, and AI Content recommendations.
At this stage, the employee development & corporate learning market is big. But the most successful companies in this segment are those that have taken a leap one notch higher — towards the Learning Experience platform.
The future of corporate workplaces is one such integrated capability-building platform that delivers constant employee experiences from hire to retire.
