Let’s power the future ready workforce
I know I’m not alone. We’ve all felt first-hand the personal and professional impact of the past 18 months. Navigating a global pandemic and the resulting “big reset” that turned our work and lives upside down, advocating for diversity, inclusion and equality for all people, and most recently, managing through the “Great Resignation.” All these things have fundamentally changed my own life and my work. I am still trying to balance the ever-evolving needs of my family and myself as we re-emerge from the effects of the pandemic. At the same time, I work to lead, motivate and engage a team of diverse, distributed people, ensuring that we stay connected and find common ground so we can execute huge, transformational work for our customers. As a team, we’ve found new and innovative ways to maximize our productivity while staying as agile as possible. And, we are all looking to the future with excitement, as we reflect on our personal and professional goals and seek new ways to grow — both individually and together. This is the picture of our work today The dramatic changes in our lives, the tectonic shifts in the way we work, and the new things we’ve learned about ourselves and each other shine a bright light on the opportunities we have in this moment. We are all searching for new ways to get inspired and to engage and grow at work and life — in a way that aligns with our ever-changing situations, which are all so uniquely personal. And whether change is required or chosen, it’s our human nature to try to “reweave” ourselves back into our new environments. To reconnect us back to purpose, to people, to the world around us. The experience of personal exploration, development and learning have been age-old ways to help us do that. But as important as this personal growth exploration is to us as humans, we can’t forget about the essential requirements of work. Enabling our people to grow and succeed in a way that works best for them AND enabling our business to grow and transform to meet the needs of our customers and markets is not an either/or conversation. Our ability to successfully navigate at this intersection is the lynchpin to the future of work. That’s the current gap we see in the market today Experience and intelligence must go hand in hand. To navigate the future of work successfully, we need to make a fundamental shift in the way we think about talent technology. To effectively adopt “back to human” strategies and elevate the people experience we need to harness — not ignore — the value of the essential talent tools, processes, workflows, and troves of people data and intelligence we’ve worked so hard to put in place. We’ve heard this from our vast and diverse customer base, and we believe Cornerstone is in a unique position to help solve this problem. It’s why we’re so excited that our latest innovation, Cornerstone Xplor, is launching today. It’s a new solution in our portfolio, but it represents more than that. Cornerstone Xplor works at the intersection of experience and intelligence Cornerstone Xplor is the manifestation of our company’s bold vision to revolutionize how people and teams will learn, grow, connect and thrive in this new world of work. It’s a holistic people growth experience that delivers a fully integrated and hyper-personalized journey of learning, skill development, growth and career mobility for every person. Cornerstone Xplor homepage See full image of Cornerstone Xplor homepage — The Cornerstone Xplor homepage is personalized to help employees see the content you’ve promoted, the training they need to take or the content that will help them meet their skill or learning needs. But unlike traditional Learning Experience Platforms (LXP) or other similar niche applications that create “experience silos,” Cornerstone Xplor brings every element of people growth into one single destination, so every person in your organization can: Design a personalized skill development and growth plan and a path to get there. Easily find the most engaging, relevant content that matches the skills they want to develop. Explore careers that are a fit for those skills. Connect with coaches and mentors who have mastered those skills. Join communities and explore gigs where they can practice those skills. Connect to an internal marketplace of job opportunities that align with those skills. Engage with others who share similar interests and ideas that have nothing to do with skills! Market response to Cornerstone Xplor is extremely positive. And here are two examples of how Cornerstone Xplor supports a better growth experience for people: Careers Explorer in Cornerstone Xplor See full image of Career Explorer — Career Explorer empowers employees to take career management into their own hands by providing a centralized location to explore career opportunities and to receive personalized development to support career advancement. Discover tab in Cornerstone Xplor See full image of Discover — Go beyond static content recommendations with Discover, a view into learning content recommendations inclusive of in-house and on-the-web content, all curated and filtered for quality, and searchable by skill and even by content vendor. And Cornerstone Xplor doesn’t detach this people experience from the systems and intelligence talent leaders need. Because the experience is only as powerful as the intelligence behind it. This is where the foundational strength of Cornerstone comes in. Cornerstone Xplor harnesses the power of our industry-leading learning, skills, content and talent capabilities, the broadest, deepest people data lake and purpose-built AI Engines to fuel continuous personalization and optimization of the people experience while delivering new levels of depth, flexibility, scale and insight for talent leaders. Supported by an AI-powered and skills-forward talent system As Cornerstone Xplor works on the experience layer, talent leaders have access to a whole new level of intelligence under the hood. They can easily identify their experts and offer them new opportunities to grow, visualize the skills they have across the organization, create new talent pools based on skills, and more precisely map and align the skills of their people to the evolving requirements of the business. They can auto-generate learning and skill development paths, create seamless skill and career journeys, deliver fresh, relevant, high-impact learning content — all surfaced by Cornerstone Xplor based on individual interests, goals and career aspirations — without all the heavy lifting. They can leverage Cornerstone Xplor to surface relevant learning and skills content, help people connect to mentors and experts, reveal options for both traditional and non-traditional career and skill paths, and connect people to an auto-matched “marketplace” of new jobs, gigs and projects. They can meet their people where they are with personalized learning, skill development and career growth opportunities – at scale and with more intelligence than ever — while keeping that experience tightly connected to their existing systems, workflows and essential learning and talent programs. Let’s meet this moment together How often do we REALLY get to shape the future of work? To inspire our people, help them achieve their goals and become their most extraordinary? To create a better world – the one we all aspire to live and work in? To empower our people to infuse their unique perspectives and personalities and strengths into work, and dazzle us with the results? It’s time to create this new world together. On behalf of everyone at Cornerstone, I’m excited to be on this journey with you, as we make our way together into the future of work. Today’s launch of Cornerstone Xplor is just the beginning of that journey, and we hope you like what you’re hearing. If you have questions, send me a message, I’d love to connect with you, even if we may not be able to do that in person, yet! To get a closer look at Cornerstone Xplor, check out this video
Career Growth is more than just “up”
People love to think of journeys as a straight line, as a neat path from point A to point B. It’s no different in the workplace. The ideal growth path is to climb steadily, one rung after other, up the career ladder. Start at the bottom, put in your time, and work your way up. That’s the way it works, right? Not so fast. Talk to the nearest leader – did they have a straight shot career path? Not likely. 93% of young professionals say they left their last employee to change job roles entirely. They didn’t leave to go up…they swerved. Not to mention, organizations today are experimenting with new structures - holacracy, flat, and flexible, including gig economy workers into the mix. Even if your employees would like to go up, there simply may not be enough layers to provide the perception of movement. Growth of the past centered on elevated titles, pay, and scope of responsibility. Career growth today is more about career mobility. What does this mean for your business? We need to start fostering career planning that includes skill variety and breadth, rather than just focused on tenure and depth in one area. Here are three ways you can get started. Have regular check-in conversations Managers will never know where their direct report’s interest lies without, you guessed it…communication! Usually, managers use 1:1 conversations to talk about the past and the present: what’s been done in the last few weeks and what’s needed now to move forward. It’s important to ingrain the future and timeless components as well: where do they want to head and what strengths are they exploring that could be brought to the table. Think of it as the 15X4 model. Divide an hour check-in to four parts: past, present, future, and strengths. Performance management tools can help you formalize and automate the process. If you have a learning tool in place, you can tie development conversations directly to courses that match employee career growth interests. Learning/Using unrelated skills in current role Speaking of strengths, consistently ask employees what strengths they want to use -- and be aware that these will change over time. From a neuroscience perspective, our brains are wired to thrive on variety and novelty. Historically, the preference was for employees to hone a set of skills or knowledge. Today, you can Google knowledge in seconds that took years and years to acquire! Employees are valued today for finding, sharing and receiving a wide range of knowledge. They are also valued for honing complex skills, but at the same time, being adaptable to changing technologies. Today, switching it up could have more advantages. What's something new someone is interested in learning? Do they have strength outside of work they want to bring inside? What concept or insight from another field could apply to the situation at hand? Even if there isn't an obvious application within their current role, find an opportunity and acknowledge their work in this new area. What starts as a side project may have great benefit for the company and for the employee. Cross-Function or Cross-Department Moves Lateral moves in the same organization can be exciting for the employee - a chance to get a bigger picture of the business, learn new skills, apply hidden strengths. It’s also insightful for the organization – a chance for a fresh pair of eyes and complementary talents to be applied in a new way. However, historically rotational assignments were primarily for new hires to get them engaged or high potentials who need a broader picture of the business to get leadership experience that leads to promotion. Now, we need to expand lateral moves to include everyone in between. This can impact engagement, retention, and even innovation in the organization. However, when you increase lateral moves across all levels, it's like having to constantly introduce new members to existing families and you might not know how long they'll be with you. Consider having "mini" onboarding processes to help make lateral moves successful – including essential work knowledge but also team relationships. Career Development is in All Directions Did you know that 94 percent of employees would stay at a company longer if that company invested in their career development? That should be reason enough for you to take development seriously, but the key to making development successful is to broaden your thinking. While it might seem more complex at first, shortcuts and scale are gained when each leader does their part to look for opportunities to develop their employees in all directions. Consider a career growth as an unmarked landscape, not a ladder. Start shaping yours today and create a culture of happy employees who are inclined to stick around.
There's No Such Thing as a Natural Born Leader
There’s a common misconception that being in a leadership role within an organization automatically makes someone an effective leader. Unfortunately, that’s just not true. That being said, there are some people in this world who, based on their natural charisma and infectious go-getter attitudes, can play the role of “leader” and exude influence in ways that many people could only dream of doing on their own. But there’s a good chance that those skills, even as effortless as they may seem on the surface, took a little time to master as well. That’s why I’m a firm believer that there’s no such thing as a natural born leader. Sure, leadership may come easier to some people than others, but even those people need to fine tune their skills every now and then. In this way, you could say that leadership is not a “one-and-done” acquired skill; it’s something that people need to learn and constantly work on. So, when you’re faced with the important decision of either hiring or promoting into leadership roles within your company, what criteria do you use to make the right choice? There’s always room for growth Let’s take a look at another common misconception worth busting: just because someone has held leadership positions in the past makes them the best candidate for future leadership positions. Again, this couldn’t be any further from the truth. There are actually a lot of people who have landed in leadership positions haphazardly and, without the proper training and coaching, have had to navigate those waters on their own. This leaves a lot up to chance; some are successful at embracing the new challenge with open arms while others crack under pressure and eventually crash and burn. Some people just aren’t cracked out to be leaders—and that’s ok. They can bring a tremendous amount of value in a lot of other ways, so instead of bogging them down with leadership responsibilities, give them a runway to do what they do best. Not only will they be happier doing that work, but giving those people the right focus will also benefit your organization in the long run. It’s a win-win. Similarly, there are a lot of people who have incredible potential to be amazing leaders but just haven’t yet had the opportunity to flex their leadership muscles. These are the people you really need to focus on. With the right training and support—along with a genuine desire to lead teams and companies to success—these people can be worth their weight in gold. Not to mention, these are also likely the people who won’t shy away from learning new skills and then actually apply those skills in their day-to-day. Spotting these diamonds in the rough isn’t always easy. However, once you’ve found them, here are a few things to keep in mind to ensure they succeed in their newfound leadership role: 1. Be open to unconventional career paths This may sound like heresy, but a job description is merely a job description. Very rarely will you find a candidate that ticks all the boxes—and even if you do, they may not be the right cultural fit for your team or organization. In a similar way, experience is just experience. When assessing candidates for leadership roles, spend less time focusing on what’s on paper and take the time to learn more about the “impact” that those candidates made in those roles. Because roles and responsibilities can vary significantly from one company to another, a big VP-level title in a resume may be nothing more than the result of a long-tenured employee receiving a series of promotions, without ever getting a change in responsibilities or even a team to oversee. That’s why, when pinpointing future leaders within your organization, it’s important to consider new hires—or even current employees—who may not necessarily fit the bill on paper but, rather, bring broad experience, unique insights, and an eagerness to grow to the table. 2. Leadership skills and role-based skills are two entirely different things It’s important to remember that leadership skills are learned just like any other skills. Just because someone has been a top performer in their current role doesn’t necessarily mean they are ready for the challenges of being a leader. Succeeding at the role-based level is just that: mastering the skills to do a specific job well. Although they are certainly role-based skills involved with leadership positions, there’s an entire layer of human-, interpersonal-, and communication-based skills that rarely see the light of day in a job description. In other words, just because your top salesperson keeps beating goals every quarter doesn’t mean that the same person is ready to lead a team. How this person succeeds at the individual contributor level is vastly different from the challenges they will face as a leader. Try not to confuse the two. 3. Leadership is a continuous learning process Even if someone has a tremendous amount of potential, just throwing them into a leadership role without any guidance is a recipe for disaster. You can’t expect anyone, even those people who have held leadership positions in the past, to rise to the occasion when faced with new teams, new responsibilities, and new challenges. That’s why it’s important to build learning and development into every leader’s growth plan, especially knowing that leadership is more nurture and less nature. So, if you’re in charge of developing the leaders within your organization, as an HR professional, take the time to create a leadership development skills “playlist” and make continuous learning mandatory for anyone hired or promoted into your company’s leadership ranks. 4. Don’t forget about soft skills Because leadership is interpersonal in nature, it’s important to help your leaders develop skills beyond their day-to-day roles and responsibilities alone. Qualities like empathy, adaptability, communication, crisis management, ability to inspire, and more are skills that can set apart a successful leader from one who makes little impact. Although many people at this level may feel that learning soft skills may be “overkill” or unnecessary at this stage in their career, it’s important to reinforce that these skills, like leadership in general, are not “one and done.” They must be practiced, refined, and perfected over time. And when they take the time to do this, they’ll see that their more “human” side of leadership will start to shine through. Remember, leadership is learned Unless you missed the point along the way, let’s reiterate here again out of good measure: leadership is not something you’re born with, it’s something you learn. A big part of this requires companies to proactively implement learning and development programs to ensure that leaders not only succeed in the role-based tasks but also continue to build the necessary skills to ensure that they constantly motivate, inspire, and encourage their teams to be as successful as they can be. And since being a dynamic leader isn’t a skill most of us are naturally born with, it’s important for HR teams to implement comprehensive learning and development programs to ensure that any people hired or promoted into leadership roles can thrive at all times. Platforms like Cornerstone Learning can help you take the guesswork out of developing your company’s next generation of leaders. And as always, if you don’t know where to start, the team at Cornerstone is ready to help you take your learning and development program to the next level.
Let’s power the future ready workforce
I know I’m not alone. We’ve all felt first-hand the personal and professional impact of the past 18 months. Navigating a global pandemic and the resulting “big reset” that turned our work and lives upside down, advocating for diversity, inclusion and equality for all people, and most recently, managing through the “Great Resignation.” All these things have fundamentally changed my own life and my work. I am still trying to balance the ever-evolving needs of my family and myself as we re-emerge from the effects of the pandemic. At the same time, I work to lead, motivate and engage a team of diverse, distributed people, ensuring that we stay connected and find common ground so we can execute huge, transformational work for our customers. As a team, we’ve found new and innovative ways to maximize our productivity while staying as agile as possible. And, we are all looking to the future with excitement, as we reflect on our personal and professional goals and seek new ways to grow — both individually and together. This is the picture of our work today The dramatic changes in our lives, the tectonic shifts in the way we work, and the new things we’ve learned about ourselves and each other shine a bright light on the opportunities we have in this moment. We are all searching for new ways to get inspired and to engage and grow at work and life — in a way that aligns with our ever-changing situations, which are all so uniquely personal. And whether change is required or chosen, it’s our human nature to try to “reweave” ourselves back into our new environments. To reconnect us back to purpose, to people, to the world around us. The experience of personal exploration, development and learning have been age-old ways to help us do that. But as important as this personal growth exploration is to us as humans, we can’t forget about the essential requirements of work. Enabling our people to grow and succeed in a way that works best for them AND enabling our business to grow and transform to meet the needs of our customers and markets is not an either/or conversation. Our ability to successfully navigate at this intersection is the lynchpin to the future of work. That’s the current gap we see in the market today Experience and intelligence must go hand in hand. To navigate the future of work successfully, we need to make a fundamental shift in the way we think about talent technology. To effectively adopt “back to human” strategies and elevate the people experience we need to harness — not ignore — the value of the essential talent tools, processes, workflows, and troves of people data and intelligence we’ve worked so hard to put in place. We’ve heard this from our vast and diverse customer base, and we believe Cornerstone is in a unique position to help solve this problem. It’s why we’re so excited that our latest innovation, Cornerstone Xplor, is launching today. It’s a new solution in our portfolio, but it represents more than that. Cornerstone Xplor works at the intersection of experience and intelligence Cornerstone Xplor is the manifestation of our company’s bold vision to revolutionize how people and teams will learn, grow, connect and thrive in this new world of work. It’s a holistic people growth experience that delivers a fully integrated and hyper-personalized journey of learning, skill development, growth and career mobility for every person. Cornerstone Xplor homepage See full image of Cornerstone Xplor homepage — The Cornerstone Xplor homepage is personalized to help employees see the content you’ve promoted, the training they need to take or the content that will help them meet their skill or learning needs. But unlike traditional Learning Experience Platforms (LXP) or other similar niche applications that create “experience silos,” Cornerstone Xplor brings every element of people growth into one single destination, so every person in your organization can: Design a personalized skill development and growth plan and a path to get there. Easily find the most engaging, relevant content that matches the skills they want to develop. Explore careers that are a fit for those skills. Connect with coaches and mentors who have mastered those skills. Join communities and explore gigs where they can practice those skills. Connect to an internal marketplace of job opportunities that align with those skills. Engage with others who share similar interests and ideas that have nothing to do with skills! Market response to Cornerstone Xplor is extremely positive. And here are two examples of how Cornerstone Xplor supports a better growth experience for people: Careers Explorer in Cornerstone Xplor See full image of Career Explorer — Career Explorer empowers employees to take career management into their own hands by providing a centralized location to explore career opportunities and to receive personalized development to support career advancement. Discover tab in Cornerstone Xplor See full image of Discover — Go beyond static content recommendations with Discover, a view into learning content recommendations inclusive of in-house and on-the-web content, all curated and filtered for quality, and searchable by skill and even by content vendor. And Cornerstone Xplor doesn’t detach this people experience from the systems and intelligence talent leaders need. Because the experience is only as powerful as the intelligence behind it. This is where the foundational strength of Cornerstone comes in. Cornerstone Xplor harnesses the power of our industry-leading learning, skills, content and talent capabilities, the broadest, deepest people data lake and purpose-built AI Engines to fuel continuous personalization and optimization of the people experience while delivering new levels of depth, flexibility, scale and insight for talent leaders. Supported by an AI-powered and skills-forward talent system As Cornerstone Xplor works on the experience layer, talent leaders have access to a whole new level of intelligence under the hood. They can easily identify their experts and offer them new opportunities to grow, visualize the skills they have across the organization, create new talent pools based on skills, and more precisely map and align the skills of their people to the evolving requirements of the business. They can auto-generate learning and skill development paths, create seamless skill and career journeys, deliver fresh, relevant, high-impact learning content — all surfaced by Cornerstone Xplor based on individual interests, goals and career aspirations — without all the heavy lifting. They can leverage Cornerstone Xplor to surface relevant learning and skills content, help people connect to mentors and experts, reveal options for both traditional and non-traditional career and skill paths, and connect people to an auto-matched “marketplace” of new jobs, gigs and projects. They can meet their people where they are with personalized learning, skill development and career growth opportunities – at scale and with more intelligence than ever — while keeping that experience tightly connected to their existing systems, workflows and essential learning and talent programs. Let’s meet this moment together How often do we REALLY get to shape the future of work? To inspire our people, help them achieve their goals and become their most extraordinary? To create a better world – the one we all aspire to live and work in? To empower our people to infuse their unique perspectives and personalities and strengths into work, and dazzle us with the results? It’s time to create this new world together. On behalf of everyone at Cornerstone, I’m excited to be on this journey with you, as we make our way together into the future of work. Today’s launch of Cornerstone Xplor is just the beginning of that journey, and we hope you like what you’re hearing. If you have questions, send me a message, I’d love to connect with you, even if we may not be able to do that in person, yet! To get a closer look at Cornerstone Xplor, check out this video
Theres No Single Path to Career Advancement
For years, we’ve been trained (dare I say, brainwashed) to believe and embrace the idea of “climbing the career ladder.” This is especially the case for working professionals in the U.S. The idea is simple: you start your career by getting your foot in the door, you work hard for years, and over time, after acquiring new skills, overcoming myriad challenges and hurdles, and being rewarded with a slew of well-deserved promotions, you eventually make it to the top of the corporate food chain. And while it may sound suspiciously like a “dog eat dog” mentality to career advancement and professional growth, it’s what many of us have been promised since we were young. In other words, hard work pays off. But this makes a big and oftentimes incorrect assumption that everyone in the workplace wants to climb said ladder. True, there are many people in this world who have dreamt of leading teams and organizations to success ever since childhood. There are others, however, who simply don’t want that added stress of managing employee or being directly on the hook for driving business goals; they just want to play their unique—and important— role in achieving that success. And the truth this, both approaches to career development are perfectly fine. So, at a time when many companies are faced with the troubling reality that 70% of high-retention-risk employees say they’ll leave their organization to advance their career—in one way or another—HR professionals need to get creative about how they approach career advancement and, conversely, mitigate unnecessary employee turnover. Why? Because three-quarters of employees who fall into this category say they simply have nowhere else to go in a company’s career ladder-driven environment. Therefore, if you haven’t caught on by now, the traditional “upward mobility” approach to career advancement just won’t cut it anymore. That’s where this beautiful thing called the “career lattice” comes into play: it has a lot less do with climbing up, per se, and a lot more to do with climbing around in all directions—all while still making important, growth-oriented career progressions at every step along the way. Similarly, it’s another tool that HR professionals and managers can use to build a growth plan that invests directly back into an employee’s overall happiness and success. If you haven’t yet embraced this new way of thinking, it’s not too late. Here’s what you need to know. Why the career lattice approach matters At the risk of being redundant, it’s important to state the (what-should-be) obvious again: not all employees want to be managers, nor do they see people management as a meaningful part of their career growth. And it’s these people who shouldn’t be put into management positions in the first place because people who have no goal or desire to manage teams can easily get overwhelmed by it or stressed to the point of burnout, creating an unfortunate trickle-down effect that will almost certainly impact their teams in a negative way down the road. (And don’t forget, the number one reason why employees quit their jobs is because they’ve got a troublesome relationship with their manager!) For these employees, you’ve got to scrap the career ladder and usher in the career lattice; it’s a way to give non-management-minded employees a way to stay motivated, challenged, and excited about their careers by giving them more mobility internally to learn new skills and tackle new challenges. Additionally, the career lattice approach is a really good strategy for improving communication company-wide. Take a step back for a moment. Visualize a ladder. What comes to mind? Something linear with only one way up and down? That sounds about right. Now, visualize a lattice. I bet you’re imagining something much more interlaced and interconnected. Here’s the funny thing: if you take these visuals and think of them through the lens of communication styles, you might see how these two approaches perpetuate, even if unintentionally, siloed vs. cross-functional communications. Therefore, if you want to break up communications “clicks” or boost cross-team collaboration, move people around between teams. You’ll quickly see how this kind of cross-pollination really starts to break down silos. Lastly, a whopping 93% of young professionals say they left their last employee to change job roles entirely. First off, it’s no secret that millennials have a reputation for job hopping. Secondly, it’s been shown that they’ll hold around 10 jobs before the age of 32 (gasp!) and likely have about six different careers throughout their lifetime (double gasp!). This is the antithesis to anything reminiscent of a career ladder—and any businesses who believe that today’s generation of employees are happy and willing to start their career and slowly work up their respective chain of command are, forgive the bluntness, simply not up with the times. To keep young talent engaged in your business—and equally in their work—you’ve got to give them the flexibility and, more importantly, the opportunity to move around the business and grow their careers in a more-than-likely non-linear way. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when your employee turnover numbers continue to climb. (You can’t say we didn’t warn you…) How to build a career lattice in your company By now, you’re probably thinking this entire career lattice concept can make a world of difference for your business, especially if your primary approach to career advancement still plays in more siloed sandboxes. However, for many of you, this might feel like a big—or even massive—departure from your current comfort zone. Totally fine if it is. So, to help you get moving in the right direction and improve your efforts around employee retention, here are a few tips for implementing a career lattice approach in your organization. Communicate opportunities: When new roles open up within your company, make sure your current employees are the first people to know—and, if you want to add the cherry on top, give them advanced opportunities to apply before opening up those roles to the general public. A great way to do this is by creating a central location via your talent management solution (if you don’t have one, Cornerstone can help with that!) where employees can easily search and apply for current openings. While you’re at it, regularly send out emails or other notifications whenever new roles open up. The big idea here is to remove all barriers that make mobility within your company feasible. Learning and development: We’ve talked a lot about the importance of learning and development—and we’ll say it here again: by giving employees opportunities to build and grow their careers laterally within your company, you’re also giving them a priceless opportunity to learn new skills and grow personally. This also means supporting them with learning and development programs to succeed in their new role. Sure, they may not fit the tried-and-true profile of a specific role when they move into a new position; however, if you support them in their development, they can quickly gain the necessary skills and eventually exceed even your wildest expectations. Remember, today’s employees are interested in charting their own growth plan; if they are motivated to take on a new challenge, there’s a good chance they’ll be motivated to break through any pre-existing learning curves a lot faster than you might expect. Employee-driven growth: At a time when many businesses are taking drastic measures to streamline and automate the performance review process—in our opinion, making it cold, impersonal, and wildly unproductive—the career lattice approach encourages you, almost by default, to engage employees in charting out their own growth plan. Sure, the challenge here is that this is not a one-size-fits-all process, which means that HR teams and managers may have to do a little more heavy lifting. However, the extra work will pay off in the long-run. By regularly setting goals, providing feedback, and working one-on-one with employees to realize their career objectives or carve out new entirely new opportunities of their own, you not only put them in the driver’s seat of their own career path but also show that you’re there to support them every step of the way. This will work wonders for employee retention, especially for younger talent. So, if we haven’t convinced you by now as to why the career lattice approach to career advancement is so important, let me leave you with this: 94% of employees say they would stay with their current employer or in their current job if the company invested in their careers. The writing is on the wall—creating more opportunities for your employees to succeed in all directions within your company will make a world of difference in terms of employee retention. We’ve given you the basics here to succeed, but this is just the beginning. Be sure to talk to one of our experts to learn how Cornerstone can help you build a high-performing, career lattice-minded organization today.
Future of Work Requires a Connected Experience
Work is changing. Rapidly. Dramatic shifts in human skill sets are already underway, and the need for organizations to reset for growth is critical. At the same time people are seeking a career path and an opportunity to actually change their lives – to develop new skills, new careers, and to find acceptance, purpose and belonging. The ability for your organization and people to respond quickly to changing and uncertain conditions is essential. And yet, traditional people management strategies aren’t keeping up. Nor are these strategies providing people the personalized work experience they crave. Making matters worse, the sheer volume of competing HR systems and tools are creating more silos and more complexity. There is literally a tool for every problem you could ever imagine. Yet organizations are still struggling — to get scale in their employee value propositions, and to align their people to growth and transformation. In this webinar, guest speaker David Johnson, principal analyst with Forrester Research, will discuss how to create a work experience that makes your people want to stay and grow with your organization. He’ll share how to identify systemic factors in current employee journeys that may be inhibiting the performance and growth of your people, and how to deliver individualized and self-driven experiences at scale. You’ll learn how to: Design a meaningful work experience aligned to organizational priorities Enable and empower managers to coach for growth Be intentional with reskilling Use technology to deliver rather than shape your people management strategy
A partner on your journey
Implementing Cornerstone Xplor is simple. Once you’ve configured your LMS, your branding settings, users, permissions, and content are all automatically pulled from your LMS to power the functionalities of your new self-directed development portal. From there, you’ll have dedicated support from both our services and product teams to help you configure Cornerstone Xplor for your organizational initiatives. Download this services datasheet to learn more about how we can better support your experience with Cornerstone Xplor.
Enabling career growth is your competitive advantage
In today‘s environment of unrelenting business transformation, roles are shifting quickly. Skills are becoming obsolete faster. Your organization needs to identify, acquire, and develop the skills needed to transform, compete in new markets, and thrive. So how do you upskill your people in a scalable way that keeps you competitive rather than constantly playing catch-up? In short, by providing career growth opportunities. But often, employees think it’s easier to find a new job outside their company than inside. And in many organizations, there are internal cultures holding back career growth and internal mobility. In this webinar, Global Industry Analyst Josh Bersin shares why it’s time to navigate the shift from jobs to work, and the importance of connecting skills development to a career path in order to drive people and organizational success. Companies that do this well (through a combination of technology, HR processes, and culture) are the companies that will grow, outperform, and out-innovate their peers. In this webinar, you will learn: How to accelerate career growth based on people’s skills, interests and potential How to tap into hidden talent by surfacing skill adjacency How to use holistic people data rather than instinct or unintentional bias to build a sustainable talent pipeline
What you need to get started with Cornerstone Xplor
Getting started with Cornerstone Xplor is faster and easier than you might think. With its intelligent skills AI framework, your organization can improve your people’s skill growth in record time. Here’s what you need to know to prepare for implementation. That and more is what you can look forward to with Cornerstone Xplor.
Build a resilient and skilled workforce
How we live, work, socialize, and learn is changing. Skills and roles are rapidly shifting. Developing talent today requires more flexibility to meet the evolving nature of work and skills. So to ensure your organization’s success today and going forward, you need a new model that empowers employees with tools for setting and developing meaningful goals and growth pathways. Cornerstone Xplor is that model. Download this report to learn more about Cornerstone Xplor and how it revolutionizes the way organizations and their people learn, grow, and evolve their skills.
Meet the Future, Ready: A Guide for Talent Leaders Shaping the New World of Work
“Unprecedented times.” “The next world of work.” “The great reset.” You’ve heard these phrases repeatedly. And it’s true: The COVID-19 pandemic and other world events have radically changed how we work, where we work, and what employees expect from work. But in many ways, that’s a good thing — because a shift in the way we work has long been in the cards. Standing at the edge of a 5th industrial revolution, employees are now heading back to work after the most intense period of change the modern world has ever experienced. This also means organizations have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to re-build work in a way that works for everyone. And the future of work now lies squarely in the hands of HR and talent leaders. Like no other business leader, talent leaders hold the golden thread to reimagining the workplace for today — and whatever comes next. As agents of change, you have the opportunity to empower a more connected, collaborative, and future-ready workforce. The future belongs to organizations with the courage and mindset needed to reimagine how they work. To meet the future ready — with agility, resilience, shared purpose, and alignment — you must deliver a connected experience that creates value for people, and an environment that’s designed for collective growth and success. This opportunity to redesign the way we work and pursue what’s possible may never come again — let’s not waste it. To help guide your path forward, we asked talent practitioners around the world – as well as renowned thought leaders from companies like The Josh Bersin Company, The Fosway Group and more – what they have to say about rebuilding a future that works for all. And what they had to say may just give you a new lens through which you view your organization’s approach to work. Filled with proven strategies, revealing statistics, and practical examples, this guide will give you the insights and inspiration you need to meet the future ready. You’ll learn why (and how) you should: Make learning foundational to people and business growth Turn skills into your new growth language Connect skills development to career paths Let artificial intelligence (AI) do some of the heavy lifting Download the guide now to learn how you can rebuild a workplace that empowers everyone to adapt, grow, and succeed!
3 Key Attributes of Holistic People Experience Design
Your employees crave a work experience that’s uniquely personal, and where growth and development is rapid and continuous. At the same time, your organization needs to be ready to retrain and redeploy talent to remain competitive in rapidly shifting market conditions. The stakes are high. And yet historically, work design has centered on efficiency. The result is rigid structures and workflows that don’t meet employees’ needs or flex with fast-changing conditions. The good news is that effective practices around people experience design can drive significant impact for business, people, and innovation in an organization. In this webinar, Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst, Future of Work with Forrester Research, and Mike Bollinger, VP, Strategic Initiatives with Cornerstone, share how taking a more human and holistic approach to people experience design connects people with growth opportunities, and business goals with purpose. To help everyone achieve extraordinary outcomes — together.
What's your career agility quotient?
Why Agility is the New Path to Success and How to Become a Career Acrobat Traditional career paths and ladders have rapidly become a thing of the past, and that straightforward, linear climb is not likely to return any time soon. After all, 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 haven't even been invented yet.* But while career paths just aren't as predictable as they once were, this also presents a tremendous opportunity – for those with the right approach to career development. So how can HR and learning leaders cultivate employees’ career acrobatic skills to be more versatile, flexible, and able to rapidly adapt to workplace change? The key to charting professional success in today's evolving business landscape: adopting an agile career development mindset. Take the 3-minute quiz in this guide to determine your career agility quotient - or share it with your people and encourage them to do the same. Use the results and best practices outlined to discover practical steps you can take to future-proof your career and successfully navigate the changing world of work. Get the guide to find out why career agility is the new competitive advantage – and how you and your people can become career acrobats to propel your careers to new heights! * Institute for the Future (IFTF), 2017.
How to keep your employees from jumping ship
Learning. Empathy. Advancement. Purpose (LEAP). The key to retaining employees, especially in times of low unemployment, lies in building a company culture based on these four words. Low unemployment means that employees are in the driver's seat, choosing the jobs they want and jumping ship for better opportunities when they come along. Job openings are plentiful and employees have a lot of choice in front of them. It's a great situation for employees, but what does it mean for businesses? Retaining your top talent has become more difficult and more important than ever. Filling a vacant role by an employee who jumps ship can cost up to 150x that employee' annual salary to find, onboard, and get new talent up to speed. To hold onto your employees, your business needs to LEAP. Take a look at our infographic to get a breakdown on how to get started.
Building a Strong Development Culture
With baby boomers retiring in droves and millennials becoming the largest generation in the workforce, todays talent landscape is in flux. And as senior employees prepare their exit strategies, younger generations are eager for development opportunities that put them on the path to filling these soon-to-be-vacant leadership positions. As a result, career mobility is becoming a key differentiator for organizations when it comes to retention. According to the 2018 Brandon Hall Group Career Development Study, 87 percent of workers say development is important to them and 57 percent insist that a clear career path would compel them to stay longer at an organization, saving companies from the costs of recruiting and training new hires. Development impacts more than just retention, though. The digital revolution has introduced new technology to the workforce, such as highly automated, AI-powered software and hardware. More than 50 percent of all jobs today already involve new tech requirements, according to CareerBuilder, leaving many of todays workers in need of upskilling. What's more, as automation plays a growing role in the world of work, employees have to sharpen the soft skills that make them uniquely human: clear communication abilities, empathy and critical thinking. While its partly up to employees to show initiative in seeking out the skills they lack or simply need to strengthen, organizations and L&D teams must provide the resources—learning content, digital courses and social sharing capabilities—that learners need. In this guidebook, you'll learn how to develop talent and, in doing so, gain a competitive advantage. After all, empowering development that grooms leaders, boosts employee retention and closes skill gaps will not only advance your workers careers, but also help achieve your organizations business goals by ensuring that your employees are producing quality work. With eight articles covering everything from thriving in the skills economy to creating cultures and content that foster learning, our featured pieces will help you continuously empower your people and enhance their employee experience.
Ten Ways to Improve Your Internal Mobility Programs
Attracting talent is challenging, and once you have brought an ideal candidate on board, the last thing you want is for them to leave. Your existing workforce is the lifeblood of your organization and can be one of the best sources of talent to tap when you have new openings. Retaining and growing your talent is especially critical as masses of baby boomers begin to retire, driving large gaps in leadership throughout many organizations. But despite this, the new reality is that employees aren't staying in one position for the long term. They are aspiring to continuously build their careers, constantly thinking about how they can make an impact, and quickly looking elsewhere if those opportunities are not immediately apparent. For this reason, enabling internal mobility is more critical than ever. Fifty percent of individuals who recently changed jobs said they wouldn't have left their previous employer if there was a role that better fit their skills. - LinkedIn study(1) A good internal mobility program can help retain your employees by keeping them productive and engaged, and facilitating their ability to take on new projects, roles and challenges throughout your company(2). Critically, internal mobility is not something driven entirely by the talent acquisition team, and requires the active involvement of recruiters, managers and employees. Below are 10 key tips to driving an effective internal mobility program. These tips will help you enable a culture of internal opportunity, and continuously leverage your employee base as a key sourcing channel. TIP #1 ENGAGE AND EMPOWER YOUR MANAGERS Employees interact with and are influenced by their direct managers more than any other organizational leader. As such, managers need to be equipped with the skill set to engage and develop their teams. Ensure that manager training and development programs are in place to facilitate this - which might include formal training, self-paced learning, informal mentoring programs or ideally a combination of these. It's also important to identify and discourage managers who are talent hoarders. TIP #2 PERFECT THE ART OF LISTENING In most cases, employees know what their career goals are, but sometimes, they are unable to articulate them. In an organization focused on internal mobility, mentors and managers have a responsibility to ask questions, listen and re-communicate an individual employee's career goals to ensure these goals are properly understood. This may not come naturally, so be sure you provide access to training to help managers with this critical skill. TIP #3 HELP MANAGERS HELP THEIR TEAMS MOVE TOWARD THEIR GOALS Encourage managers to ask employees about what they want from their careers, and then work with their employees to identify key projects and goals that will help each employee build their career over the short term and advance toward longer-term aspirations. Employees who feel they are progressing will be more engaged, stay with the company longer, and will be the leaders of the future. TIP #4 ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH - ENCOURAGE CONTINUOUS DISCUSSION AND COACHING Even if aspirations are understood and plans are in place, continuous discussion is key to keeping employees engaged and ensuring progress toward goals. Managers should already be meeting with their teams regularly, but ask them to identify specific and regular times to discuss career goals. If teams are not in a single location (as is often the case), suggest that managers go beyond phone conversations and leverage a video conferencing tool to make interactions more personal and enable response to body language - which is often an overlooked component, but critical to truly understanding whether an employee is engaged. TIP #5 ENABLE EMPLOYEES TO EXPLORE, PLAN AND DEVELOP ON THEIR OWN Employees should be accountable for their own career growth. Encourage them to schedule time to focus on their own personal development, goals and interests. Critically, ensure that employees have access to information on what opportunities are available, and what skills are required to get there. This could be in the form of an internal job board, or preferably a career planning system that enables employees to explore jobs in (or outside of) their career ladder, view skill gaps, identify mentors, and put a plan into place to get to the next step in their career. TIP #6 POST YOUR INTERNAL MOBILITY PROCESS AND POLICIES Ensure that employees know not only about internal opportunities, but how to apply for them and when they are eligible. Put these in a prominent spot on the intranet or even in the halls so that folks will see them whether they are looking to change jobs or not. Consider leveraging services from third-party job boards (like LinkedIn) that can showcase internal opportunities to your employees as they begin to look at external opportunities on those channels. TIP #7 SOURCE FROM YOUR INTERNAL EMPLOYEE BASE FIRST It's easy to assume that the best talent works somewhere else, so be sure that your recruiting team is tapping your internal employee base before looking externally when new opportunities arise. Commit to posting jobs internally for a period of time before they are posted externally, giving employees the first opportunity to apply. TIP #8 PROACTIVELY IDENTIFY INTERNAL TALENT Your recruiting system should have the ability to serve up internal candidates that have the right skills for your job openings. If it doesn't - look for a new one! Meanwhile, you can leverage tools like LinkedIn to monitor the skills and interests of employees, and internal social networks for employees receiving positive peer recognition. If career planning systems are in place, view what positions are targeted as part of employees' plans and evaluate their readiness for openings. TIP #9 CONTINUOUSLY EVALUATE YOUR COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS Forbes Magazine recently reported that employees who remain at a company for two years will earn 50% less than their job-hopping counterparts(3). Compensation, as well as flexible schedules, telecommuting, healthcare, and other benefits, are important considerations for employees and senior leaders, especially in this job seeker-driven economy. If possible, leverage technology (often within a talent management system) that can proactively flag employees that are at risk of departure due to factors such as compensation, and recommend what it would take to retain them (such as a compensation increase to stay competitive). TIP #10 MONITOR TRENDS TO FOCUS ON WHAT MATTERS Monitor key metrics across your employees to understand how talent is moving up, across or out of your organization. Understanding, for example, what positions, departments and locations are showing high attrition may indicate a lack of opportunities for internal mobility in those areas, awareness of those opportunities or other factors that could be addressed. In addition, understanding where employees are typically moving within your organization (e.g. from engineering into product management) can provide helpful insights for HR and managers when discussing career path options. As you implement your internal mobility program, identify what metrics and data sources are available to you, to not only track current trends, but the success of your program as it progresses. References 1. "Three Product Updates That Make Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent Even Easier, and You Even More Productive," Parker Barrile, April 10, 2014. http://talent.linkedin.com/blog/index.php/2014/04/recruiter-profile-internal-mobility 2. The Conference Board, "The Conference Board CEO Challenge® 2014: People and Performance," C. Mitchell, R.L. Ray and B. Van Ark, January 2014. http://www.conference-board.org 3. Forbes Magazine, "Employees Who Stay at Companies Longer Than Two Years Earn 50% Less," Cameron Keng, June 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees-that-stay-in-companies-longer-than-2-years-get-paid-50-less
3 Benefits of internal career mobility
Bringing in fresh, new talent every so often is important, but the next time you need to fill an open position at your organization, consider looking internally—it will pay off. Filling open positions with internal candidates via internal career mobility not only saves employers money (job listings are pricey, as is lost productivity), but also shaves time off of new hire onboarding and involves less variability. Internal career mobility can also go a long way in giving current employees the opportunity to grow and move into new roles, whether laterally or upward, because the promise of mobility incentivizes workers to commit to learning and personal development opportunities. Overall, internal career mobility is a win-win for companies and their workers because: 1) You’ll fill open roles faster, while rewarding top performers For employees changing roles within a company, much of the onboarding process is complete before the transition starts. Presumably, existing employees have long been aware of the company’s mission and values, are fluent in the companies organizational processes and are up to date on necessary trainings. And, references are built in: an employer has a direct line to that candidate’s last supervisor. Hiring from within also means spending less time ramping up employees, especially because there is a level of established trust already. An Insights for Professionals piece points out that internal hires will already know the business—a fact that can be a huge time-saver from a training perspective. Plus, a worker that has proven herself to be a top performer in one department will likely work just as hard when given an opportunity to transition to a new team. New hires, on the other hand, still have to prove themselves. 2) You’ll inspire employees to keep learning Creating opportunity for employees to move around within the company is a motivating incentive for employees to continue to learn and develop their skills. In a Deloitte Insights article, consultants Robin Erickson, Denise Moulton and Bill Cleary note the importance of continuing to teach and train employees. A company culture that involves continual coaching and employee development is one in which relationships are built, they note. “At many high-performing organizations, recruitment and internal mobility are inextricably linked,” they write. “These organizations expend meaningful effort and energy creating experiences and expectations for talent that encourage growth, learning, engagement, and communication.” Knowing that there is a lateral or upward move to work toward gives workers reason to developing existing skills and learning new ones. That’s why it’s critical to be transparent about open opportunities using internal career sites—you want your current workers to be made immediately aware when there’s a new opening and what skills they’ll need to brush up on (or gain) to be considered for certain roles. Cornerstone On Demand’s Recruiting Suite, for example, enables recruiters to not only share open positions with current employees via an internal career site, but also provide them with a clear outline of what they’ll need to do pursue those positions, including fulfilling any application requirements or taking courses. 3) You’ll boost retention rates by keeping workers engaged and happy Bringing the right employees onto your team is a challenge. Keeping employees on that team is even more difficult. According to a LinkedIn Talent Solutions report, which references LinkedIn’s 2016 Global Recruiting Trends Report, 41% of survey respondents said they remained at their company for less than two years. But 42% of employees who left said they would have stayed longer if their employer had taken some sort of action, the report says, such as offering them an opportunity to gain new skills or move within the company. “Employees want to develop and grow their skills,” writes management and organization development consultant Susan M. Heathfield for "The Balance Careers". “If they’re not able to do this in your jobs, they’ll find one where they can.” Showing employees that there is opportunity for internal mobility, be it a move up within the company, or a lateral transition to a position that is more appealing to them, is incentive for workers to stay. Creating opportunity for growth within the company could be the factor that motivates an employee to look for opportunities within the company rather than outside of it. Looking for a tool to empower you to better vet external candidates and entice internal candidates? Learn more about Cornerstone OnDemand’s Recruiting Suite today.