Enabling effective reskilling, efficient reskilling and employee engagement

As LearnerShape engages with our early customers and prepares to release the first commercial version of our platform later this year, we are frequently asked—by prospective customers, investors and others—what are the key benefits of the LearnerShape solution? A reasonable question to ask about any service!

We believe the benefits are clear, and becoming clearer, falling into three broad categories: (1) effective reskilling, (2) efficient reskilling and (3) employee engagement. Some of the benefits are ones that are also offered by other solutions in the very diverse learning and development (L&D) market, and some are ones that make LearnerShape unique.

Effective Reskilling. The massive market need for reskilling is the central reason that companies need solutions like LearnerShape. McKinsey reported last year that 87% of executives face skill gaps now or expect gaps within 3-5 years, and 70% of executives expect disruption of more than 10% of their companies’ roles within 5 years (and 30% expect more than a quarter of roles to be disrupted). Amazon and AT&T are retraining even larger proportions of the workforces—more than 100,000 employees each. In short, the majority of companies are realizing that, in these times of rapid change, reskilling is essential to maintain a fit-for-purpose organization.

Getting a reskilling program right is essential, and that can be a very complex challenge. That’s where LearnerShape comes in. We help companies determine what skills gaps they need to fill, and deliver the learning content and collaborative study required to acquire them. Of course, this is a big market and there are many other companies offering reskilling solutions. LearnerShape delivers flexibility in reskilling solutions where our competitors cannot (see our last blog Any Content, Any Skills Framework, Any Platform for more on this).

Efficient Reskilling. In addition to making reskilling effective, it is also critical that it be efficient. Where reskilling is done properly, the economic rationale is clear: in a UK-focused study McKinsey recently found that reskilling of current employees should pay off in about 75 percent of cases. But this economic calculus depends on deploying learning resources efficiently. LearnerShape’s platform is designed to maximize efficiency of reskilling, including by providing a dynamic view of requirements and actions as changes occur in a company’s workforce or strategy, in the market, or in available learning content. The complexity of such choices is massive, and the LearnerShape platform is designed to manage it, allowing L&D personnel to focus on the strategic and human dimensions of reskilling.

Employee Engagement. Last but not least, the right reskilling approach can have a major positive effect on employee engagement. L&D has a bad reputation in many companies—typically because employees just don’t like taking away time from busy jobs for training. This is a hard problem to solve but it is not insurmountable. We believe that a flexible reskilling approach tailored to specific organization needs can improve engagement by (1) making L&D consequential by linking it to real job opportunities and goals and (2) delivering the right content in the right content (including through collaboration among learners and mentors). See our ebook Flexible AI-Based Learning Infrastructure for more about how LearnerShape makes this work.

Maury Shenk
Co-Founder & CEO, LearnerShape