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Proven Method for Improving “Speed to Skill”

Today’s workplaces have a need for speed. The relentless pace of technological advancement requires leaders and teams to adapt, learn, and execute efficiently to compete and succeed. It’s predicted that the rate of change will be so rapid that by 2030, 85% of jobs will be entirely new, requiring new skills for survival.1 As skill development becomes increasingly integral to the future of work, there is a growing emphasis on speed to skill.

What is Speed to Skill and Why Does it Matter?

Every employee requires a necessary investment of time and money for onboarding and training. Until they reach proficiency, businesses can’t harness their full value. This is where ‘speed to skill’ becomes crucial – it measures the time needed to onboard and upskill individuals or teams, equipping them with the essential abilities and confidence required for competence in their respective roles.

Swiftly bridging the divide between training and proficiency is paramount. Accelerating onboarding and skill development boosts return on investment (ROI) and profitability and directly impacts key business outcomes such as reducing employee churn and amplifying overall productivity.

22% of staff turnover occurs within the first 45 days of onboarding, with the cost of losing an employee in the first year estimated to be at least three times their salay.2

5 Ways to Accelerate Speed to Skill

Fast-tracking skill development can be a bumpy road. Common hurdles to speed to skill include time-consuming tasks such as one-on-one coaching and personalized feedback. Moreover, demonstration of training mastery presents another challenge, underscoring the crucial role of assessment in effective skill development.

To pave the way for efficient and effective learning and development programs, incorporate strategies that proactively address competency gaps, help learners quickly retain new information, and foster a dynamic learning environment.  Increasing the speed at which skills are acquired will, in turn, accelerate the time it takes to see an ROI by enhancing organizational efficiency.

Here are five best practices for fast-tracking speed to skill:

1. Establish Precise Learning Goals

Start by defining clear expectations. Align your objectives with training materials to optimize the learning journey. Well-defined goals enhance engagement, keep learners focused, and fuel a desire to learn and retain information quickly.  Learning objectives also need to align with the real-world job experiences the learner will have, allowing them to see the connection between instruction and application.

2. Provide Timely, Personalized Feedback

Boost speed to skill through real-time, contextually relevant feedback. Provide immediate feedback within the learning flow to affirm positive behaviors, correct mistakes, and heighten learner engagement. Learners can promptly adjust their actions by receiving instant feedback, promoting timely and relevant knowledge retention so they are performing their job at their highest potential.  Offering feedback at every step in the learning process is nearly impossible, as trainers, managers and even peers cannot be ever-present and so uncertainty in skill acquisition for the learner is constant. Feedback often happens only on the front lines, when it may be too late to correct a misunderstanding that can impact business operations and outcomes.

3. Facilitate Skill Development through Practice

Skills are honed through practice, and deliberate practice reigns supreme in expediting the journey to proficiency. Ensure your training program emphasizes and consistently delivers measurable opportunities for practice, allowing learners to engage with and reinforce their newly acquired skills. Additionally, provide a safe environment where they can fail fast but safely, fostering an atmosphere conducive to effective learning and skill development.

4. Create a Consistent Evaluation Process

Set up a solid evaluation process that aligns with your learning goals to catalyze effective skill assessment and fast-track your employees’ competency. It keeps you from going down the wrong training paths, ensuring learners stay on track and progress toward the desired skill proficiency levels.  When the expectations, methods, and terminology for feedback are consistent, learners have a framework that instills confidence. In addition, having a consistent methodology across the organization helps set standards that lead to faster growth and application of learning.

5. Leverage Tools

Harness the power of tools (especially now that we have AI-powered ones) to accelerate skill development. Tools can act as a force multiplier across your business. And AI tools can multiply that again by quickly pinpointing learning objectives and offering scalable feedback. They can also ensure the continuity of consistent learning and practice experiences and streamline skill assessments. This technological edge increases the speed of skill acquisition while scaling training efforts across the entire business.

Sources:

1 Realizing 2030: Dell Technologies Research Explores the Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships

2 Help New Hires Succeed: Beat the Statistics

Learning Impact at Every Stage of the Employee LifeCycle

Author: Dave Seligsohn, Chief Product and Services Officer at Alterity

I believe:

  • Learning does not operate in a vacuum
  • Learning is an essential part of Change Management
  • What gets measured, gets done
  • Learning is most effective in the “moment of need”

Establishing a seamless foundation for an effective learning organization involves applying these four statements to every stage of the Employee Lifecycle: recruitment, onboarding, management, development, promotion, and exit/retirement.This integration is crucial for driving overall business growth and improvement. Let’s look at these one by one:

Learning Does Not Operate in a Vacuum

Once you move past compliancy and required minimal training activities, you begin to focus on actual behavioral change.  When behavior changes, you have the ability to observe and measure results, leading to performance improvement (hopefully) and, by definition, learning has just bled into performance or talent management, career pathing, salary and bonus payments, etc.  Learning may be the catalyst, but its impact is far reaching.

Learning is an Essential Part of Change Management

To remain successful, companies, their teams, the roles and the people in them are in a constant state of change. After all, if something isn’t constantly changing, then by definition, it is dying or already dead. The paradox here is that few of us love change. So, we need training, enablement, support and encouragement to help us not only embrace the change, but to prepare for it and equip ourselves to successfully execute it once it is here. Change Management without learning as a key enabling factor is doomed to fail.
 

What Gets Measured, Gets Done

There is a basic “math” equation I like to use in this instance: Here is our business today. Add in the “change.” What is different? Business + Change = ??? Learning should result in measured behavioral change (hopefully for the better!). Improved individual behaviors will equal better team performance, which, in turn, will lead to measurable business results (increased revenue, reduced cost, higher customer satisfaction and/or retention, removal of risk, etc.). The key is tying learning to the anticipated business result BEFORE you implement the change. In this way, you can track it, determining if the change did what you thought (or hoped!) it would.
 

Learning is Most Effective in the “Moment of Need”

Research clearly shows that when there is need – and the more urgent and significant the need, the greater the imperative – full adoption and expression of learning is more frequent and more impactful as measured by performance improvement. The opposite is also true – learning without an urgent need or triggering event is often lost fairly quickly and may never be applied to actual job performance. There is an inverse relationship between when the learning takes place and the timing of its application; the longer the interval, the weaker the impact of the learning event. So, how do we measure learning when it happens in the moment of need? The key here is the right combination of quantitative (factual numbers, outcomes and measurable results) and qualitative (observed behaviors, team interactions, peer, customer and manager feedback) data to paint the right picture. Only looking at one of these can lead you to missing the mark on the true impact of learning or the intended change.
 
Taking the above foundational concepts and applying them to the Employee Lifecycle, here are some ways you can apply and measure learning at every stage:

To learn more, or talk about this in greater detail, contact us today.