Skillsoft / Sumtotal EMEA Perspectives 17

I was up especially early on Tuesday to attend Skillsoft's European conference , mainly to participate in a pre-conference roundtable reviewing new research from David Wilson from Fosway. There were a few quite interesting findings in their report, including that:

• 87% of HR practitioners see skills gaps continuing to increase. This includes soft skills just as much as it does digital. Leadership skills are seen as slightly less lacking, probably because the people completing the survey saw themselves as leaders.

• Learning will therefore continue to increase in importance, becoming the most important part of an employment value proposition.

Most of the roundtable focused on the need for employees to learn more quickly, which I agree is a growing requirement. However I think a still deeper need is to learn more, and more deeply. To me that puts a focus on 'search to learn vs learn to retain' and the evolution of mini into micro and now nano-learning in some doubt. I'd have liked to have raised this point.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, I wasn't there to participate in the roundtable at all but just to report on it (so I suppose I'd better do so). That led to my second main insight from the event which was a reinforcement of the importance of giving control of the learning agenda to the people wanting to learn, and involving them in steering their own learning process. Having a small group of people speaking and another group listening and asking a few questions at the end strikes me as rather bizarre in today's social world.

The speaking group also talked quite a bit about the need to give HR credit for the learning that people do as this is not often recognised. Really? I think that as long as HR / Learning acts strategically and effectively it will get the credit it deserves. More metrics may help but they tend not to be the main cause of business concerns about learning, or  a main way of dealing with them.

Learning and the rest of HR also need to be less siloed, which I completely agree with. However I disagree that using reward is the way to deal with it. Start with organisation design, linked performance objectives, whole group meetings - that will sort the problem in the vast majority of cases.

And a lot of the change is being driven by millennials, who value meaning and like taking sabbaticals apparently! (Actually we all value meaning and I took a sabbatical in 1990.)

There was nothing wrong with the research but I didn't enjoy my role in the session and so didn't hang around for much of the rest of the conference to see whether 'Percipio' would have much impact on any of the above, but the Twitter stream looked quite positive.

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