Learning and development takeaways from LinkedIn’s annual report

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The 2023 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report has landed—and it contains some very interesting facts and figures. The report’s headline is the importance of agility, for both organisations and individuals. Agility enables individuals to grow and develop their careers, and stay relevant to the organisation and the workforce. For organisations, it can mean the difference between being able to pivot to survive during hard times, and not having that option.

However, what do we mean by agility? The LinkedIn report defines it as constant learning. This makes sense, because you need to learn to develop your skills. It’s worth digging into the report a little more to understand what you might need to do to improve your individual or organisational agility.

Retention and recruitment remain concerns

The LinkedIn report highlights concerns among business leaders about recruitment and retention. Overall, 93% of respondents said that they were worried about employee retention. We also know that since 2015, 25% of job skills have changed. Analytical skills, for example, is now the eighth most-wanted skill on the list, considerably up from 10 years ago.

The report also provides another interesting piece of information: a massive 75% of employees are likely to stay with the same employer if they are able to make an internal career move. Career growth is important to one-third of employees under 35 years old, and meaningful work for a third of those over 50 years old. Developing new skills is another motivator (along with salary and flexible location). It therefore seems likely that organisations could address at least some of their concerns about retention by facilitating internal moves by staff, and supporting practices like job crafting and job enrichment.

So why aren’t they doing that? The answer may lie in the detail that barely more than one-quarter of organisations have built a learning culture where staff are challenged to learn new skills, and fewer than one-fifth (just 14%) encourage employees to create career development plans.

Creating a learning culture

The next question, therefore, is what can organisations do to create this learning culture? And how can individuals respond and develop their own skills? The LinkedIn report provides three ‘three-minute takeaways’, which are a very good start. They are:

Reach for opportunity in the storm. New and improved skills are the answer to making yourself invaluable as an individual, and to enabling organisations to rise to new challenges.
Agility means the ability to build more relevant skills more quickly. The internet contains many, many resources to allow you to develop particular skills in a short space of time. For example, SAS offers a lot of learning resources to build skills. At organisational level, some subscriptions to learning packages could pay significant dividends. One SAS customer found a 1:4 cost benefit from a subscription to SAS Premium Learning.
Embrace six priorities:
1. Invest in cross-functional relationships, both within and beyond the organisation. For example, link yourself to other learners, and other learning organisations, to learn from and with each other. Create links to schools and universities, and bring in new ideas.
2. Hone your focus onto the learning that really makes the difference. Look for good return on investment for your organisational learning and development spend, and make it count;
3. Champion diversity, equity and inclusion, because this will enable you to create higher-performing teams and groups, with better problem-solving skills, and ability to challenge and ask questions;
4. Improve your data literacy, both organisationally and individually, through courses and learning, because insights from data are essential for better decision-making;
5. Activate people managers to encourage those they manage to learn and develop their skills; and
6. Prioritise learning at both individual and organisational level. It is essential to create time and space for learning, and to encourage people to ask questions and experiment.

Prioritising development at organisational level

Many organisations need agility to help them to survive and thrive amid economic headwinds and wider global tensions. A flexible and skilled workforce will enable C-level executives to respond appropriately to the shockwaves caused by the pandemic, inflation, skills shortages and the ripples from the invasion of Ukraine. The way to obtain that flexible and skilled workforce is to prioritise development at both individual and organisational level. Give employees space and encouragement to learn new skills, and see where it takes them and the organisation.