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.
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.
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:
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.
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