We deliver employee retention
Research shows that the more competent people become, the more engaged and satisfied they become and that leads to retention. What’s more, having learning/training opportunities and career development options are more important to people than financial compensation and job security. According to Gallup’s 2021 "The American Upskilling Study”, skills training is one of the top reasons people leave or stay with an organization.
Career development is a necessity now. It's a bottom-line issue and, as report after report shows, an engagement and retention opportunity. Employees who can't see a future within the organization will find a future elsewhere. What is new is the recognition of how powerful a genuine effort to enable career growth can be in the engagement equation and the employee value proposition.
– Beverly Kaye, Lindy Williams
Do the math
There are many costs of turnover including replacement, disruption and stress to remaining employees, diminished morale and other turnovers, and loss of competitiveness. Turnover costs are mostly commonly estimated at 1.5 times an employee's salary.
When you add those costs up in your organization, a small investment in providing employees with what is expected of them in their job (competency model), and their ability to control how quickly they can meet those expectations (competency assessment and personalized learning), it’s a clear net ROI. Download a business case template.
What you can do
In the past, Learning & Development (L&D) perceived their customer as the various organizational departments. They performed learning needs assessments by asking department leaders what they felt like their teams needed, and then provided what was requested. They were order takers.
Today, the customers are the employees, not the departments.
This customer-focused approach can only exist when L&D can provide customers with the organization’s expectations for their role in terms of, “how do I do the job?” The expectations are the tasks they must perform, the behaviors that make the tasks executable, and the required levels of proficiency. That’s a competency model.
To support this customer-focused approach, the learning organization must have an agile, customer-focused mindset – rather than creating content that may be quickly obsolete. L&D must be highly responsive and able to pivot quickly.
| To be learner-centric, you must ensure: | How SkillDirector addresses the need: |
|---|---|
| Each person gets exactly (and only) what they need and want. There should no longer be role-based “learning plans”. There should be a personalized learning plan – 1-size-fits-one. | The Self-Directed Learning Engine (SDLE) enables people to perform a competency assessment which identifies their individual skill gaps and automatically create a Personalized Learning Plan. |
| End users own their learning and hold themselves accountable – you exist to make this possible. | The SDLE empowers each person to drive their development, through guided workflow, reminders, and personal analytics. |
| You provide materials that reflect true customer needs: ~70% activity-based, ~20% collaborative, and ~10% formal. |
The SDLE supports learning recommendations across the 70-20-10 spectrum, and makes everything one-click away, regardless of where content or supporting materials live, both inside and outside the organization. |
| You support identification of task-based mentors so everyone in the organization can be both a mentor and a mentee on a regular basis – it will simply become a part of the organizational culture. | The SDLE provides automatic task-based mentor recommendations and enables those links to be tracked and stored in an individual’s Development Plan. |
| When a need arises because of a change in the environment, you can provide resources in near real-time to meet the new need. Maybe it’s as simple as a link to a YouTube video, industry article, and blog post. | The SDLE makes it easy to add and update recommendations based on explicit requests, as well as through activity analytics. |
Get Started Quickly
Our competency development system takes just 2 weeks to implement. We provide everything you need to be successful, including communication toolkits and best practices tailored to all levels of the organization – employees, managers, and leaders.