Kelly Palmer, CLO - Learning, Talent Development & Inclusion, Linkedin You've hired the best talent possible. Now how do you keep them happy at work? Learning can be your biggest competitive advantage.
6. Future
talent
The war for
the best people
87%
of organizations are revamping,
restructuring, or considering a redesign
of their talent acquisition function
Source: Bersin by Deloitte
Predictions for 2014: Building a Strong Talent Pipeline for the Global Economic Recovery
7.
8. Build strong
company culture
Invest in career
transformation
Provide learning
and opportunities
to be successful
The recipe for engaged employees
9. Key ingredient
to engagement
Build strong
company culture
Invest in career
transformation
Provide learning
and opportunities
to be successful
The recipe for engaged employees
Biggest competitive
advantage
Learning
15. And, traditional training doesn’t work
$160B
Spent by US businesses
annually on employee
learning and training
80%
Is said to be forgotten
within 30 days
<15%
Successfully apply
what they learn
Source: Grovo, 2015
17. How do millennials learn?
Watch
lessons online
Work online with
classmates
33%
Research
online
85% 32%
18. Learning
what you need,
when you need it
Collaborative cohorts
Building skills & solving
real problems
30% in person
Independent &
Collaborative,
on-demand
70% online
Good morning – I’m thrilled to be here today.
I’m Kelly Palmer., CLO for LInkedIn.
I’ve been at LinkedIn for 3 years now and joined the company to start the learning organization. But I wasn’t always in learning. I spent many years in high tech in Product Development and Corp Dev and although I was successful, I just wasn’t happy. I didn’t feel like I was making a difference…. I did some soul searching and found that I was really passionate about learning. I really believe that learning has the power to transform lives and change the world.
So about 10 years ago, I completely changed my career. I did that so I could have purpose and meaning in my work.
My experience isn’t unique. Lots of people are looking for purpose and meaning in their work.
This is my son Cameron (kindergarten, high school, and now in college). He’s also looking to find meaning and purpose in his life and what he is studying and what will be his future career
He found that after about a year and a half, he was uninspired by his major. I encouraged him to find something he could feel passionate about and last quarter, he actually decided to change his major to something he felt more purpose and passion about.
Cameron will be entering the workforce soon
And some of you might even try to recruit him!
Cameron is like a lot of people about to enter the workforce –
people who want to enter their career with meaning and purpose.
84% of millennials would prefer to make a positive difference in the world than receive positive recognition
The reality is that there is a war for the best talent out there!
How many people here are responsible for bringing in top talent for your company?
You have a tough job and it’s getting even tougher
Many companies, in fact, are developing internal talent because they can’t compete for the best external people
The challenge is that companies not only need to figure out how to hire the right talent, but also how to make sure they are engaged once they start their job
But what exactly is engagement??
Engagement is the level of personal investment employees bring to work every day.
When our employees care about what they are doing at work, they’re proud, happy, and excited to do what they’re good at.
Engagement is how employees do their best work.
You can feel the impact of engaged employees throughout the company—And that’s great not only for our employees, it’s also great for business.
Great people are getting harder and harder to recruit, engage, and keep -- you’ve worked hard to recruit your talent and you really want them to stay, right?
So, focusing how we can keep these great people engaged becomes an imperative
So how can companies create engagement?
I think in a large part it will depend on these three things:
1. your company culture – is it a place where people feel they can thrive, be their best, and have purpose and impact the world. Is it an inclusive culture?
2. a focus on their career development – our promise to our employees that we will invest in their careers – one year or ten years
3. providing the learning opportunities that they need to be successful
Learning is the way you can help your employees be productive, successful and happy
That means engaged employees
Learning is the foundation for creating a great culture
--- there is nothing more empowering to employees than learning new skills – it makes them feel better, work harder, and spread positivity creating a great culture
Learning is the way people can grow in their careers – and that gets people excited
--People want to know how to get better at the job they already have and how they can learn the skills to get their next job or their dream job.
They want guidance on building a personalized path for how they can succeed professionally and learning can help them do that
60% of millennials would choose a job with strong development prospects over one with regular pay raises
Learning is and can be the foundation used to transform ourselves, our companies, and our world
Personal transformation through learning
Company transformation through learning
Changing the world through learning
Learning is the biggest possible competitive advantage available to companies today
But most companies don’t really understand what learning is…
Most companies focus on training instead – but this is where there is a huge shift. The future of learning is about the learner because learning is all about motivation. Daniel Pink, in doing extensive research in what motivates us says that “the secret to performance and satisfaction – at work, at school, and at home is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world”
And unfortunately sitting in a classroom and listening to someone lecture and then taking a test is generally not very inspiring
Training is transactional:
Lecture hall, memorization: did not give him meaning. This is training
Learning is transformational.
Let me give you an example. I told you about Cameron – he’s a junior in college right now. Over the summer, he got an opportunity to do
a social media/marketing internship. He hadn’t learned how to create a marketing plan yet in any formal classes, but he discovered that his university offers Lynda.com content for their students.
So, Cameron took a few of the Lynda courses online for creating a marketing plan as well as social media basics. He was then able to apply those skills immediately to do real work for a real company over the summer. You can’t get that if you are sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture. And he was motivated because he wants to get experience to put on his LinkedIn profile that will help him get a job when he graduates.
Training on the other hand just isn’t effective, but we keep doing it.
How many of you have sat in a class, and maybe even liked it, but then you went back to your jobs and kept doing what you were doing before you went to the class?
Companies believe that “training” can solve many of their business
US companies spend $160B annually, yet 80% is said to be forgotten within 30 days (90% within a year)
And fewer than 15% of employees successfully apply what they learn
There’s got to be a better way and the new workforce of the future is going to demand that it be different – we’re already seeing this happen.
In 2020, his generation will make up 70% of the workforce
And they are used to learning with technology – it’s part of what they’ve always done
The future workforce are spending enormous amounts of time online – so it’s critical that we start thinking about how we can meet them where they are.
So maybe we can think about doing learning a bit differently
Imagine a world where 70% of what we learn is online, on-demand, just in time, just for me. High-quality curated content. Meeting our employees where they are so they can get what they need and when they need it!
And don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of getting people together to learn so there is a place for in-person learning as well. Just because formal classroom training isn’t effective, it doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to bring people together for learning.
It can be incredibly effective if you use the in-person time for collaboration, practicing skills, and solving real business problems
The Benefits helping your employees learn this way are huge!
Learning is your competitive advantage when it comes to talent
Attracting talent
Engaging talent
Retaining talent
But let’s be honest, this is a big change for companies and the role of CLO changes completely!
That can be scary.
If learning really is the key, then we must inspire learning NOT control learning
We need to create an environment where people learn not because they are forced to, but because they want to,.
Technology enabling this disruption
Not just learning, either!
PR no longer controls company messages
Employees are an extension of your brand
Learning is disrupted too – people are finding ways to learn whether we help them or not. I’d rather help them and enable them to learn.
Thinking about learning differently can really help you have a competitive advantage with your employees and help them stay engaged and happy at work.
Let me show you how it works at LinkedIn today to give you some ideas on how to create your own learning strategy to engage your talent
Let’s start where the employee starts – with onboarding! What people might not realize is that this is the time to really ENGAGE your employees from day 1! Our employees’ day one experience is all about how we make the employees feel – we want them to feel that they just made the best decision of their career by coming to LinkedIn.
Aligning your employees to your company’s culture – it connects the employee to the vision and mission of the company so they know where they fit in and how they can have an impact (purpose)
New Hire experience – starts with an amazing in-person experience and then moves to online independent learning
Day One: A first day experience for all LinkedIn employees that is inspirational, engaging, and unforgettable
Then they have some time to go through all the onboarding tasks – it doesn’t all need to happen on day 1
Next, our promise to employees is that they can transform the trajectory of their career through learning, so we get them started on that right away.
We get employees started with a personalized transformation plan – helping them building the skills they need to get better at the job they have or help them get their ultimate dream job
First we ask you some questions to help you decide where you want to go on your journey
And then we guide you though a few easy steps to build your transformation plan
When you’ve finished answering the questions, we’ll provide some options for you to add learning assets to your transformation plan, where you can then share your plan with your manager and have a great career discussion, but then you can track your progress as well.
This way, you can see your learning journey as part of your regular cycle at work and talk about this with your manager every quarter as you would when discussing your OKRs.
To create a learning culture and help our employees find all the learning they need, when they need it, we’ve developed our own internal learning platform called Learnin. Here they can find personalized content (like that I just showed you though the transformation plan and new hire roadmap), but also curated content and social features. Let’s take a look.
So we have already talked a bit about personalized content – that’s your own individual transformation plan – your path for what you will do to get better at the job that you already have or the skills you need to acquire to get your dream job.
One of the things we know is that people want to learn from their peers and also from people and leaders they admire. So when we talk about influencer collections, we’ve curated content from some of our thought leaders at LinkedIn, but you could do this for leaders from your company as well. In this example, we’ve got some curated content from Jeff Weiner our CEO. When you click on his collection, you then see all the content associated with Jeff – videos, blogs and …
Another way people learn is by realizing they need to know something because they need to do something on the job. For example, say you have a meeting coming up and you need to give some tough feedback to an employee or peer. Here you could go to a learning collection by topic – in this case “feedback” and get some learning about how to give effective feedback.
One other useful way to curate content is for a manager to recommend particular learning to an employee. In this case the employee could choose to add the recommended learning to their personal transformation plan.
In addition to allowing others to contribute to LearnIn where people can create peer-to-peer learning, there are several other social features that we’ve built into the platform. We’ve got the ability to collaborate on learning using a linkedIn group on the topic, the ability to create favorites or to send a particular learning asset to someone to say “check it out” and we can also show in real-time the learning topics that are trending in the company to get a sense of what others are learning.
So, I’ve shown you ways in which curated online content can be very powerful to help in your employees development.
But the content also has to be great – or your employees will not keep coming back to the platform!
We partnered with Lynda content early on when we created our learning strategy
So, I’ve shown you ways in which curated online content can be very powerful to help in your employees development.
But the content also has to be great – or your employees will not keep coming back to the platform!
We partnered with Lynda content early on when we created our learning strategy
In this example, we’ve a short, interactive and fun video that guides you through creating a rock star LinkedIn profile – so you can actually update your own profile while going though the learning!
This is a blended solution – online, cohort based, interactive – videos, discussions, practice, virtual meetups.
This is a real learning experience over time.
Motivation is critical to learning. What’s powerful about a learner-centric approach is you can focus on impact and motivation instead of whether people sat in a classroom. Then, insights and analytics can help you understand what your employees are learning and what they want to learn. It is less about control and more about enabling and guiding.
Recap huge value and competitive advantage
attracting, engaging, and retaining talent
I’ll leave you with this thought and a quote from Gautama Buddha.
<read quote>
And I’d like to encourage all of you to find your purpose and make it count -- in your work, and in your life.
Tie it back to the beginning – me finding purpose, Cameron finding purpose, and we all have this need to find our purpose – When we find our purpose, we get inspired and through inspiration we get the best out of learning --