Market Perspectives

Business continuity — especially during a pandemic, natural disaster, cyber event or geopolitical situation — requires business and risk mitigation processes. Unfortunately, few organizations are prepared to respond appropriately. Whether an organization rises to the challenge or descends into survival mode is determined by the way it meets the expectations of the workforce, customers, stakeholders and potentially shareholders.

Some organizations are challenged to adequately address business continuity concerns and adapt to workforce needs rapidly enough to remain competitive during a “black swan” event. A wide range of disparate and outdated legacy technology — like learning management systems — and less-than-impactful focus on worker knowledge and skills is missing from investments. This has led to a new learning experience imperative linked to business continuity preparedness.

In the digital era, business continuity requires virtualization of underlying learning systems to overcome workforce development challenges. Organizations are operating through continuous disruptions to meet workforce, customer and stakeholder expectations and must invest in continuity planning and enablement for workforce effectiveness. Establishing a strategy to address business interruptions requires leadership commitment to programs — like digital learning technology — that continuously engage workers to deliver the requisite competencies and skills for organizational readiness. Ventana Research asserts that through 2021, one-half of organizations will realize that digital transformation investments have not established the organization’s readiness needs for business continuity, requiring new investment.

Business continuity must be a top priority, requiring supercharged learning experiences that optimize engagement at every opportunity, building worker effectiveness. Determine where competencies and specific skills need to be improved and how those improvements can be addressed through continuous learning processes. Examine ways to optimize the employee experience, prioritizing the presentation of job and skills improvement that can be addressed through streamlined learning experiences. Ventana Research asserts that by 2024, two-thirds of organizations’ executive leadership teams will determine that the digital experiences used by their workforce are unacceptable and ascertain their investments are misappropriated.

Ensuring workforce readiness requires the virtualization of employee engagement to ensure full potential is realized for the individual and organization. Overcome the challenges in digital effectiveness and impediments that face every organization. Organizational learning efforts can be challenged by existing approaches that lack virtual design, require digital experiences and lack support for rapid skills training. These systems often fall short of the flexibility to adapt, improve and help workers provide dependable performance. Innovating digital learning experiences requires engagement that supports skills development, knowledge pathways, virtualization in learning experiences that embrace collaborative learning, and experiences that gain feedback on worker needs to advance work. These improvements assert that by 2024, three-quarters of organizations will find micro — and even nano — learning integral to learning management, including notifying workers of improvements.

Organizations should assess the impact of virtualization and increased pressure on the workforce, recognizing the needs of workers to respond under any circumstance. Consider these best practices for an impactful digital learning strategy:

• Adopt a focus on workforce experience dedicated to engagement and work optimization. Assess your efforts through feedback, and establish a skills-engagement plan to create an environment for continuous learning.
• Establish learning pathways to enhance skills and readiness. Ascertain your technological approach for skills, and gain leadership buy-in for pathways that link to career advancement
• Embrace knowledge and skills development. Articulate the value of skills development and build coaching capabilities among managers to advance the workforce, with technology as a unified digital experience

Business continuity requires an organizational commitment to skills improvement and anticipating workforce learning needs, including:

• Establishing learning paths that are adaptive to the needs of workers and work and simplify the engagement to learn.
• Examining how to facilitate and improve learning technology in a modular approach that integrates with existing tools.
• Unifying your operational and corporate learning efforts by prioritizing a strategy and systems to build impactful experiences.
• Defining how workforce readiness efforts support business continuity plans.
• Adopting best practices designed for the experience and the agility of your workforce.
• Ensuring the employee experience investment is designed to meet or exceed worker needs.

Take these steps now to improve digital learning and assess a path to effective employee experiences that will ensure the organization is ready to thrive in a challenging environment. Prioritize knowledge pathways and simplify skills training to advance digital and physical work, and embrace learning technology designed to help realize the full potential of your workforce.