Building a Post-COVID Corporate Learning Strategy

Building a Post-COVID Corporate Learning Strategy

The entire world today has been whipped into a frenzy by the Coronavirus – a disaster of epic proportions that has swiftly morphed into the black swan no one saw coming. Isolation within our homes was touted to be the best possible solution, and more and more countries adopted this extreme measure to flatten the curve and beat the virus, bravely taking on the downside of an economic slowdown and a dystopian future.

While companies across the globe scrabbled to deal with the resultant impact on work and capability development, it was soon obvious that the corporate world was in a binary state: adapt or perish. In order to come out on top, organizations would require flexible and multi-pronged learning processes in place. Companies who are aware of the skillsets their employees possessed and are open to experimenting with newer and more interactive forms of learning will successfully ride this tide. Digital learning was always a business imperative – it is now so, more than before.

The first rule of learning strategy is to be agile, and no one knows that better than today’s corporates who encounter engendered digitization on a daily basis. Businesses cannot afford to pull the plug on skilling employees. Neither can they afford to be stuck at the bottom of a steep learning curve. Corporate Learning Officers of today need to devise long-term solutions that work for the company and make a meaningful difference in the way employees learn and apply to learn. As business leaders, they need to be clear about how they can continue to enable and deliver value to their customers, and reskilling their employees is always going to be a step in the right direction.

In The Aftermath: Do The Math!

1. Create flipped learning strategies that adopt bespoke interactive learning methodologies (both synchronous and asynchronous) – these will cause the needle to move for employees and also encourage instructional scaffolding.
2. Assemble learning response teams that are constantly exploring alternative digital strategies. Shed the myopia, understand that VUCA is the new normal, and create your learning roadmap with branched trees of possibilities.
3. Have a remote working setup in place, with trackable parameters like deadlines and work quality, so transitioning to virtual work mode becomes BAU. Also, discern the behavioral shifts that seem permanent, and change course accordingly. Most importantly, ensure systems resilience.
4. Understand and assess the skills and competencies of your employees vis-à-vis the organizational requirements, and reinforce the knowledge they need by way of bite-sized nuggets. Also, encourage the blurring of lines between the teacher and the taught – employees will often surprise you with their innovative and intuitive approaches to learning.
5. Invoke attitudinal shifts in your organization through regular use of disruptive technologies like AI, AR/VR, and collaboration platforms to create an immersive learning experience. Take the occasional green bet and tie-down its effectiveness to business outcomes to build credibility.

It has often been observed that societal crises impact consumption patterns for time immemorial. People are forced to adopt technologies and ways of living, and when the constraints are lifted, they often integrate them into their lives. The bottom line is we, as businesses of the future, need to pick the right lessons from this time and create practices that will drive lasting innovation and chart the future of learning as we know it.

– By Charulata Razdan, Instructional Design Manager at MPS Interactive Systems