Skills Graph walk-through

Strategies and Tools for Driving Learner Engagement

Many organizations are prioritizing learning to attract, retain, and grow top talent, but implementing the strategies at the right time for the right learner can be tough. Doing it with tight resources, even tougher. Andersen Corporation has experienced this. They knew it wasn’t enough to follow the standard “if you build it, they will come” mentality for learning. In this session, Strategies and Tools for Driving Learner Engagement, you’ll come away with: New ideas from the Andersen team as they share how they’ve been able to achieve a consistent increase in the consumption of Cornerstone Content Anytime (CCA) courses month over month Considerations to help you get started building your own effective communications strategy Tips and tools for executing a sustainable plan that drives continuous engagement and builds a culture of passionate learners In addition to hearing about Andersen’s content journey, you’ll also get a refresher from the Cornerstone team on the learner engagement tools we have available and ways that you can leverage your partnership with Cornerstone to get the most out of your learning content. Watch Now

Sitting on the bench: strengths, talents, soft and hard skills

Before knowing what individual skills we have to sacrifice for the good of the company, we have to understand what skills we have in our organisation. In HR circles we talk a lot about skills. Most of us have experienced university students entering work life with fresh knowledge that seemed obsolete before the internship ended. For this reason, companies that are committed to innovation understand the importance of an always learning approach to growth. If we create a learning culture, we can adapt to a changing world and win the battle to volatility. Ok – great! Understood – we need new skills all the time. But which skills do we have to teach and how can HR departments identify them? This is one of the biggest difficulties that learning departments face today. But, fear not! Technology can come to the rescue. Just like Netflix knows what I'm interested in watching, thanks to AI, a complex algorithm and a huge database, skills can be identified and developed through the same processes. However, building what's called a skills taxonomy, like the one Cornerstone offers, from scratch would be just as insane as pretending to build my mobile phone myself from my desk at home. Let's leave that specialised work to those who have the time, the resources, and use their knowledge to our advantage. Hard skills, soft skills or strengths. We know that technical knowledge or hard skills can be acquired easily thanks to technology. This interconnected world with millions of online tutorials offers us a never-ending portfolio of knowledge and explanations that we can access anytime and anywhere. Soft skills, on the other hand, are not so easy to acquire and develop, yet are of greatest importance. How can this be possible? Do you remember the intern that started in your company and didn't understand the dynamics of the office, but could create some bad-ass Excel tables? When talent is brought in that has never been in work environments before, we realise that they may lack skills such as active listening, a feeling of responsibility or even motivation. These are skills that allow our graduates and new talents to solve problems, collaborate, and have critical and constructive thinking. This means that the skills taxonomy will not only help us understand what hard skills we will have to develop in individuals, but also which soft skills we must encourage in teams. But rather than focusing on the skills that we lack, what if we could focus on our strengths? What skill do I have, what am I particularly good at that is very necessary for my job? How can I improve on that skill and optimise it so that the whole team benefits from it? Let's think positively. Let's not focus only on everything we don't know and what we still have to learn, but on what we know we are good at and how we can elevate and multiply it. Therefore, a successful strategy understands that as an employee I need to grow and learn new things - be it soft or hard skills - that take me out of my comfort zone, but at the same time also have access and be able to understand what my strengths are and how to improve them. Individualism. Happiness. Sacrifice for the team. The Playbook is a documentary on Netflix that interviews some of the best sports coaches in the world and you can see a trend in team sports: the role of the coach is to help the team work together, even if the individual player has to make a sacrifice. Change the word coach for manager, team for department and player for employee. The role of a manager is to help the department work together, even if the employee has to make a sacrifice. This concept confronts us with a dilemma: we live in an individualistic society. We all believe in the right to be in a search for happiness and purpose at work. We feel we have the right to be promoted and, at times, in this myopia we lose sight of the department or, even worse, the company needs. Without a company you don't need employees. If we want to build an innovative and resilient organisation, we have to hire talent that complements and makes the community stronger. A community that works as a whole and that has team members that can develop their skills – and their strengths too. For this reason, skill taxonomies have to focus not only on a micro level, but also on a macro level. Trade failure for learning. In this video by Paolo Gallo, asks the audience what the opposite of achievement is. People shout failure in unison to which Paolo responds "no, the opposite of achievement is learning." This concept is perhaps a bit utopian, but very necessary if we really want to generate a culture of learning in our companies or work groups. We all have to build a space in which to innovate and take risks as part of our day to day. Sharing the learning processes - failures - with the group provides us with transparency, empathy, creates understanding between people and provides us with a macro vision of the team we are part of. Thus, synergies and opportunities for collaboration will emerge and collaborative learning will naturally evolve. To accelerate these values, we can look for examples within our companies where learning or “failures” have led to great achievements. Also offering post-mortem meetings for large projects involving the entire department or even rewarding those who take the risk, even if they haven’t quite got it right. In conclusion, it is our duty as an employer to educate and provide the transparency that our employees need to understand the needs of the whole team. This concept is closely linked to the idea of ​​social responsibility, with initiatives that are committed to values such as diversity or the environment. As an employee, my responsibility is to be in a constant learning process, not to lose curiosity and to understand that my skills must be complemented with those of the rest of the team. Consequently, we will have an understanding of the macro and the micro that will help us understand and know when we have to wait and sit on the bench.

Cornerstone SMB Learning Management Survey Results

“Smooth seas do not make skillful sailors.” Often attributed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this old African proverb helps us realize that some days can be tough on our journey. It is helpful to remember that rough seas help us learn how to manage, how to cope. And it is not just life skills we are talking about; it is an organizational dynamic. Learning has often been billed as a competitive advantage, being able to adapt and adjust faster is how businesses think of employee learning and development (with the notable exception of those who are just focused on maintaining compliance). The thought process goes, “by developing and training our employees, well have the most skilled workers, which will translate into productivity, retention, and ultimately success in our marketspace.” All of which are true, but the year 2020 taught the world of work some additional, hard lessons about the value of investing in learning: the key to adaptability and survival of every business starts and ends with learning. Remote work, virtual collaboration, and new skills training became the lifeboat that saw us to shore. To our surprise, we found that not only could we survive this way, but we could also thrive. We may not be able to predict the next crisis, competitor, or marketplace change, but you can prepare your workforce to be adaptable and your business to be ready to take on any challenge.