Why Employees Don't Learn—and How You Can Address That with Employee Upskilling

The need for employee upskilling is on the rise, thanks to the rising adoption of automation, AI, and other emerging technologies.

Employee jobs are transforming. For instance, cab drivers and food delivery employees are expected to follow GPS and reach customers. On the other side, customer demands are also changing: E-commerce has replaced frequent trips to the shopping mall. End-customers want everything on-demand and at the click of a button. 

The result? As jobs undergo a metamorphosis, skill sets are no longer under the radar. Employees with outdated skill sets will struggle to keep pace with their jobs.

The lesson: Employee upskilling has emerged as a strategic imperative, with research indicating that for 52% of countries, there's an increased need for matching skills and talent. Furthermore, for 80% of CEOs, the need for new skills has emerged as the biggest business challenge. The way employees work is demanding a new style of learning and development to emerge on the horizon.

While employee upskilling is clearly the immediate ask, there are roadblocks to driving an impactful employee upskilling training program. In this blog, we will explore what these are and how L&D leaders can address the same.

Top 4 Challenges that Hinder Employee Participation and Learning (And What Organizations Can Do to Help)

"The urgency of work invariably trumps the luxury of learning." - Harvard Business Review

1. Lack of time is a crucial employee pain-point:

According to a recent report by Salesforce, a staggering 59% of the US workforce is reporting fewer workplace learning opportunities since the onset of the pandemic. Another study finds that, on average, knowledge workers are able to carve out a mere 5 minutes a day for learning!

Needless to say, one of the biggest reasons why Learning and Development initiatives have gone downhill is lack of time. This is particularly interesting because despite being in an increasingly virtually-driven work environment, employees are still unable to carve out time for learning. The survey suggests that 60% of employees are struggling to fit learning into their already overburdened workday. There's no time to focus on skilling up. 

Proposed solutions:

Employees prefer to learn in the flow of the workday and on the job as opposed to dedicating a separate time for learning and development. Instead of asking them to set aside a dedicated time, L&D professionals should integrate learning into the normal workday:

Here are a few tried-and-tested tips to combine on-the-job learning and boost upskilling knowledge retention:

• Job rotation: A form of job redesigning, here you move employees between jobs, which leads to transfer of knowledge, skills, and capabilities.
• Job enlargement: This strategy is useful for employees who may need to upskill in additional areas in addition to their core responsibility. This type of upskilling initiative helps employees gather knowledge of a variety of skills while improving their learning curve and driving career growth.
• Job enrichment: Similar to job enlargement, this strategy involves adding extra dimensions to an employee's existing job. For example, you can expand the variety of the skills or help create more autonomy for the employee.
• Learning resources: To build a habit of upskilling/reskilling among employees, enterprises need to build a data-rich, up-to-date, accurate, and easy-to-use internal knowledge base - complete with bite-sized learning content comprising of informative and educative blogs, powerful videos, high-quality newsletters, and so on. These Learning Management portals should not only be used for compliance training but should also promote upskilling knowledge in an interesting way.
• Email: Another tactic that works wonders for boosting employee engagement and interests is sending personalized emails. L&D professionals can send customized emails to employees straight to the employee's inbox to promote learning at the employee's preferred time and convenience. Here's an excellent example of an upskilling email by Miro that promotes live learning sessions and encourages employees to kick-start 2022 with a (learning) high:

• Digital learning portal: PwC's online learning portal - PwC Academy - is an interesting case in point as it literally brings together business leaders and employees to drive a collaborative and meaningful partnership in learning and upskilling:

Pro tip: Effective upskilling typically comprises four stages: experience, observation, reflection, and transformation. When devising an employee upskilling/reskilling program comprising formal and informal learning formats, keep these four stages in mind.

In addition to the strategies mentioned above, here are a few best-practices organizations can adopt:

A. Encourage employees to share content internally and drive organic and scalable learning, which may be useful for others as well

B. Use platforms like Slack, Teams, etc. and leverage APIs to integrate relevant content into an employee's everyday work via integrated, learning-oriented apps, such as Zapier

C. Create a dedicated channel for learning and promote it on Slack. Alternatively, enterprises can add a chatbot feature to address employee queries and concerns at the push of a button

Pro tip: To build online assets such as websites and portals, the L&D team needs to engage in good design thinking and leverage cutting-edge technologies to make upskilling learning easily available and accessible.

2. Lack of employee understanding is another major roadblock:

For employees to be pumped about learning, they first need to be open to the idea of upskilling. However, often, a lack of reinforcing the importance of learning and development by key stakeholders from the top-down can lead to reduced employee engagement.

After all, leadership can have a positive (or negative) impact on all areas of business development, from organizational performance to employee well-being. In the same vein, if the importance of learning opportunities is not being trickled down by the organization leaders and C-suite executives to the employees, the latter will naturally be inclined to view learning and development programs as ad-hoc activities instead of embracing them as a core activity. 

Proposed solutions:

The job market is changing at a dynamic pace. On the one hand, job roles are becoming obsolete (read: travel agent, cashier, bank teller, etc.) at an accelerated pace. By contrast, the need for newer skills (read: data analysis, computer science, and information technology) is emerging at a faster pace.

According to a World Economic Forum report, "the window of opportunity to reskill and upskill workers has become shorter." In such a dynamic scenario, here's how leadership can influence the development of robust learning and training programs that employees may readily embrace:

• Strategy: Leaders need to focus on creating employee upskilling programs that align with the organizational strategy and value the needs of the employees at every stage of learning.
• Culture + Communication: Leaders should redirect their energies towards establishing a favourable environment of continuous learning. This can be done by creating a long-term L&D vision (idea), communicating the idea of training, and empowering the employees via action. Following this three-pronged process can help create a conducive environment of learning.
• Style: Leaders need to demonstrate a transformational, visionary, ethical, and supportive leadership style to get more employees on board.
• Collaboration + trust: Senior leadership should engage in creating shared goals and encourage experimentation of training solutions. This type of flexible and systemic approach can drive collective employee engagement and help employees gain trust in the leadership's actions.

Here's a useful table that demonstrates the key focus areas, leader actions, leadership style, and end results that can be expected from a 360-degree employee-centric approach to L&D programs:

As more and more employees start believing in their integral role towards organizational and personal development, the greater the success of the L&D program and the greater the individual commitment towards building a meaningful and two-way L&D initiative. 

Also Read: Why Organizational Learning and Competitive Advantage are Two Sides of the Same Coin

3. Lack of shared social support can turn a powerful L&D program into dust:

Employees are social beings, and the same is true for learning/upskilling as well. Everyone needs social support and added incentives to learn. In other words, fostering peer collaboration and driving employee-oriented incentives is key to upskilling. This can be done by embracing the following upskilling strategies:

• Mentoring programs: Culture Amp, an employee experience platform, has established a program called "Coaching for Everyone." With this program, employees get access to a professional coach who will be personally interested in their growth. The L&D sessions are planned every 6, 12, and 24 months where employees can refer to customized plans that are based on their current needs.
• Learning/upskilling budget: A great example of advocating employee upskilling is awarding them with a development budget, which employees can use throughout the calendar year. This strategy also encourages greater employee-manager collaboration as both can sit and decide which upskilling programs would be ideal for the employee.
• An online learning experience that is social, self-paced, and collaborative: According to data by Cornell University, collaborative learning experiences that are active, social, contextual, and engaging lead to the development of deeper learning, higher-level thinking, oral communication, self-management, and leadership skills. Additionally, learners can:

- Practice and apply the new skills learned in day-to-day work

- Engage with peers, create a two-way feedback mechanism, and brainstorm to understand how to proceed if the learner gets stuck

-Collaborate on ongoing projects as well as training programs and learn 'smarter'

-  Get assistance from mentors and coaches and put their best foot forward across learning initiatives

4. Lack of right programs that are not aligned to the employee's current needs, goals, and aspirations:

Upskilling programs that only serve the organization's purpose are half-baked in nature and will not drive employee participation. The programs need to be aligned with the employee's existing learning needs, or else you risk driving them away - and understandably so.

To create an employee-aligned program, follow these tips and hacks:

• Build the right upskilling program by factoring in the employee's current skill sets, domain knowledge, motivation, future needs, learning preferences, etc.
• Deliver a blended form of training (think: self-learning, classroom learning, mentor-based learning, eLearning, among others) that is catered to each and every employee's needs
• Leverage a variety of upskilling formats such as video tutorials, online classes, eBooks, etc.
• Encourage employees to provide feedback about the quality and efficacy of the upskilling program and pivot as needed

The Bottom Line

For employee upskilling to act as a catalyst for innovation and empowerment, the employees need to be engaged. No matter how good your training program structure (and content is), if you don't have employee buy-in, it is already a catastrophic failure.

To wrap up, follow these best practices and 'upgrade' your employee upskilling programs to forge a winning, employee-obsessed learning culture within your organization:

• Integrate upskilling initiatives within the employees' normal workday instead of expecting employees to carve out dedicated time for the same. Lack of time remains the number one challenge in driving effective employee-based upskilling.
• Make sure that your leadership is actively promoting the importance of upskilling initiatives to keep the workforce motivated and happy.
• Build interactive social communities of upskilling initiatives and take a collaborative approach to learn.
• Curate training programs, formats, and modules in accordance with the employee's needs, aspirations, learning preferences, and goals. Laser-focusing only on the organizational requirements will lead to a dip in employee engagement.