The ever-changing technology landscape affects both employees and organizations. According to Deloitte’s Human Capital Trend Report, it is estimated that 90% of organization will redesign jobs, and 54% of the workforce will require reskilling. Employees are concerned that their jobs will be obsolete as skills gaps widen. The fear of being replaced by someone better suited is a harsh reality for many employees. 

Move From Fire And Hire To Reskilling

From an organizational perspective, firing talent and hiring instead comes with increased costs and time to attain organizational goals. Instead, organizations start to focus their efforts on re- and upskilling current talent. This means organizations get to keep their current talent and build on top of existing knowledge. And offering these learning opportunities increases the attractiveness of a job and the organization as a whole, making it less likely for top talent to leave. The first step towards re- and upskilling is to identify skills needed. This can be done through a simple Excel spreadsheet outlining skills available and needed for roles within the organization. Alternatively, there are a multitude of software programs out there to help ease this task. Once gaps are identified, learning professionals can use a multitude of time-tested marketing techniques, such as a marketing funnel. a content strategy, and campaigns to develop training programs for re- and upskilling.

It’s All About The Learner Experience

Marketers work proactively in understanding a prospect’s and buyer’s journey, an element often overlooked in L&D. Instead of looking at training as a one-time event, we have to expand our horizons and think about the learner’s experience before, during and after the training. When working on a learner journey, think about all the different touch points you have with a learner. Leverage data where possible, such as downloads, likes, mobile vs. desktop, time of day and comments, to truly understand where and how your learner is already engaged. 

The Marketing Funnel

You can base your learner journey on the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel is a tool consisting of multiple stages, starting from awareness of a product or service, all the way through to conversion and beyond. A prospect moves from one stage to the next as their interest in a product increases. They exit the funnel if they are no longer considering a product. Marketers understand that prospects and customers have different content needs based on the funnel stage they are in. For example, in the awareness stage, marketers educate prospective customers about their products in order to show value. Prospects won’t be engaged by sales-heavy content at this stage. 

Use A Marketing Funnel To Plan The Learner Journey

In L&D, a funnel for an onboarding program could look like this:

• Awareness stage (get buy-in): send out a short video a couple of days before employees’ first day to promote your onboarding program
• Consideration stage (convince learners that they want to take the training): use testimonials from current staff to tell new hires how the onboarding program helped them in their career
• Conversion stage (learners take part in the actual training offering): personalize content as much as possible to increase engagement, and allow learners to pick and choose content
• Loyalty and advocacy stage (support behaviour change): help learners with performance-support resources such as infographics or chatbots. Role models and mentors play a big role during this stage

Understanding the learner journey not only helps identify skills gaps, but allows learning professionals to fill them with the appropriate experience. Job descriptions and manager observations in addition will help to truly understand where gaps are. With the experience mapped out, it’s time to take a look at content. 

Content Strategy – Not Just For Marketers

Marketers use a content strategy to identify what content is in use, what content is needed, and why. Content includes written content, images and multimedia. Marketers identify content as a business asset, which makes sense given all the time that is spent creating it. Data allows marketers to further identify which content is in high demand, which content has barely been touched, and shed light on how content is being accessed, i.e. mobile vs. desktop. The result is the creation of meaningful, engaging and sustainable content that allows marketers to send the right content at the right time and place to the right audience. 

Getting Started With A Content Strategy

When faced with a new training initiative, many L&D professionals think about it as a one-time event and they look at the initiative itself, but hardly think about the content as a stand-alone element. When it comes to re- and upskilling, and really any other training initiative, it’s crucial that learning professionals think of content as a business asset. Here are six steps towards a successful content strategy:

• Analysis: Identify learning content requirements, including delivery channels. and what content will help fill the gap. Map it to the learner journey.
• Strategy: Develop the actual content strategy. Determine topical ownership areas and processes for content creation. 
• Plan: Develop the content strategy plan including topics, objectives, resources, meta tags, stakeholders, etc. Use any of the free online project management tools to help plan this stage and work collaboratively with your team. 
• Create: Create structured and engaging content that is reusable. For example, if marketing created an eBook for clients on a particular topic, leverage this and create engaging webinars for your staff. 
• Deliver: Deliver the right content at the right time and place, i.e. mobile vs. desktop. Take another look at the learner journey to ensure appropriate timing.
• Measure: Measure training success.The best way to create successful measures is to align them to your business objectives. Use learning platform data to better understand when and how content is being accessed. Measure content usage throughout, not just at the end of a training offering. 
• Maintain: Keep content fresh and up to date.Manage content in your content strategy plan, schedule periodic audits, continuously improve high-value learning content, and set regular intervals for maintenance. Maintenance also means removing content completely if it didn’t hit the mark and wasn’t consumed as expected. 

As learning professionals map content needs to the learner experience, content gaps will show. You can then start to prioritize content creation based on skills needed the most in your organization. 

Other Marketing Tools

The use of marketing tools and techniques doesn’t stop there. To further create outstanding experiences that help address the skills gap, learning professionals should leverage the concept of learner segments and personas, coupled with learner campaigns, to truly understand who their learners are and share relevant content. Learner personas help L&D professionals to focus on what learners see, hear, think and feel, and put learners at the centre of training. This will help personalize content as much as possible. For example, an email campaign that uses dynamic content, content that changes based on the recipient, can truly hit the mark and increase learner engagement. Campaigns are an excellent tool to make learner experiences come to life. Coupled with the overall learner experience, campaigns also help learning professionals to address specific skill gaps, and deliver content at the time of need. 

To sum it up, L&D can learn a lot from marketing, especially when it comes to re- and upskilling. Once you have identified skills gaps, focus on emotions and engagement throughout the learner journey and take a critical look at your content. You want to be able to answer the question “What content fits which needs, when and where”. Update content as needed, and if it hasn’t been utilized in a while, don’t be afraid to retire it. Follow a campaign approach to drip content over time to learners and engage them in the moment of need and make content come to life. 

Tonight, I was walking around the city, no real destination, just passing by stores and shops. What struck me was the line-up of people in various stores and shops. The exact same pattern everywhere: people in line, on their phones. Now, this is nothing new of course. We’ve seen this kind of behaviour more and more over the last couple of years. Why it struck me today was that I just had read IBM’s report on closing the skills gap. There has been some chatter around it on LinkedIn a while back as well (see thread and link to report here). There is a ton of good insight and surprising facts. Two things really jumped out at me:

First, approximately 120 million professionals need to be reskilled to deal with AI and new digital business environments. Yet the biggest gaps are not digital skills, but behavioral skills. And here I am walking around the city, seeing people, young and old, in an environment in which they could easily practice these behavioural skills. Yet, everyone chooses to hide behind their phones. Isn’t it ironic that the very technology that is disrupting not just our personal lives, but our professional careers could be the very reason that we actually have these behavioural skills gaps? 

The second fact that stood out to me has to do with the question who’s responsible for reskilling. The report states: “In addition, many executives tell us it’s not the enterprise’s responsibility to provide reskilling and retraining. According to a recent survey on AI and ethics, only 38 percent of CHROs say their organizations have an obligation to retrain or reskill workers impacted by AI technology. If nations aren’t prepared for the challenges associated with adopting intelligent automation and most CHROs don’t believe reskilling is the organization’s responsibility, what is the path forward?” Clearly, things need to change in the educational system, before workers join organizations. But at the same time, I feel very strongly about an organization’s responsibility to retrain if they want to stay competitive. We live in interesting times and learning professionals, in my humble opinion, have a responsibility to consult organizations when it comes to reskilling. We are in dire need to address these challenges head-on and offer employees the best possible options to fill the skills gap. 

Let’s take a step back, understand employees’ needs and personalize training, reskill staff as needed, cross-train them and find roles within our organizations that might be a better fit for them. It’s not rocket-science, but someone has to take responsibility! 

I recently switched to a different internet provider and was really impressed by the entire experience. Once I had decided on the plan, I received an email informing me about my purchase and my upcoming appointment for a technician to come in. The time and date wasn’t the same than originally mentioned to me on the phone, but that wasn’t a problem. A link allowed me to change the appointment to my desired time and day, which I did, and again, received an email confirmation with the updates. Then, 24 hours before the appointment, I received a text message asking me to confirm, and someone from the company called as well leaving a voicemail. That was the first time that I was a bit taken aback. I had the hardest time understanding what the person was trying to tell me. If it hadn’t been for the text message, I would have not known what the call was about. It was loud in the background, the person didn’t start talking until about 5 seconds in, and I could clearly tell he was reading a script, way too fast and in broken English (English isn’t my first language either so I can say things like that!). Anyway, the next day, the technician comes in, I get my internet, and I receive a text message and email after, informing me that the job was done and asking me for some quick feedback. Two days after that, I received another phone call from the company. I missed the call and they didn’t leave a voicemail (right away, I checked my connection to make sure it still worked….I mean, I don’t know why they called!). Two days after that, they call again, I pick up and I could swear it was the same person who called me the first time! Again, I didn’t understand a word. After some back and forth, I figured he just wanted to know if I had questions, and of course, if I was interested in buying more stuff. Fair enough.

Why am I telling you this long story? Well, the company did an excellent job mapping out the user journey, figuring out different toucpoints where they should engage with me, managing my expectations, providing the service, getting feedback, and even adding an upselling opportunity. But they dropped the ball with the phone calls. Clearly, the person calling is makes minimum wage, follows a script, works in a call centre, and he simply doesn’t like his job. I get it, but I heard it in his voice and it changed how I felt about the entire experience, and the company.

All that to say, there is lots of talk in L&D about learner journey mapping, and the learner experience (which I’m a big fan of as well), but it’s not enough to identify all the different touch points at which we interact with our learners. We also need to take a close look at what we are actually delivering at these touch points. And I feel that we aren’t doing a good job at that right now. We are so happy that we came up with a great learner journey, that the content becomes secondary. But we can’t put lipstick on a pig. If your content, and content delivery to make the connection to my internet story, isn’t up to par, our learners won’t really be engaged. Maybe we even push them to the other side and they are more turned off than ever!

So next time you plan out a learner journey, think about how learners will perceive your content, how they will interact with it, how it will make them feel, and how it impacts the overall experience. You can have the greatest learner journey, but if you break that trust at one step during the process, if you miss the mark, if you don’t deliver what they really need and expect, it can negatively impact your entire training program. Focus on the learner and remember that creating the experience isn’t enough, you have to fill in the gaps with engaging content that resonates with your learners.

Like most people in 2019, I do enjoy the occasional podcast here and there. I recently came across “The Chernobyl Podcast”, which explains how the HBO hit show written by Craig Mazin and directed by Johan Renck, was made (I have to admit, I haven’t watched the show yet) .To really enjoy the podcast, you gotta watch the show first though. Anyway, I still did listen in a bit and was struck when Craig said (warning: spoilers ahead) “I showed the explosion right in the beginning. I also showed that Valery Legasov, the main investigator, committed suicide in the first couple of minutes. People would have googled this right away anyway.”

I really like this approach. Craig knew, people watching the show would pick up their smartphones and research the events while they are watching. This is what we do nowadays. We are ever connected and can quickly find answers to questions. The brilliant piece for me here is that Craig anticipated what viewers would do. 

Take this and apply it to L&D. When was the last time you anticipated what your learners would do? Instead of creating linear training programs, anticipate what your learners really want, and what they would do even if you spoon-feed them content. Two main options come to mind. 

First, look at data that you can leverage to make educated decisions. What content has been used in the past, what keywords are learners searching for, when do they access content, do they use their mobile phones or a desktop, do they like and share content? This information is extremely helpful. As we all know, actions speak louder than words. 

Second, armed with data, host a hackathon or design thinking session in which you identify learner segments and personas. This way, you can better understand what your learners think and feel, see, hear, and do. You want to identify their pain points and understand what drives them. Going through the exercise of creating personas will help you do exactly that. Ideally, you want to create 3-5 learner personas that represent your typical learner. From there, you can anticipate what content will resonate the most with each persona and start building your content. The best part is, you just increased the chances of content actually being consumed because you identified the learners’ needs and personalized the learner journey as much as possible.

L&D professionals have to start anticipating more with the help of data and design thinking in order to stay afloat. Otherwise, we will drown. 

Want to learn more about learner personas, and other cool tactics you can borrow from marketing? Check out my Little Black Book of Marketing and L&D.

When I came home from a conference the other day, I called my Lyft and hopped in. I wasn’t sure if I would actually make it home in one piece. It was a scary experience. The driver was changing lanes way too quickly, only looking over her shoulder occasionally, and going at a high speed. If you have ever driven in Toronto, or are familiar with the traffic here, you probably understand the fear for my life.

I did make it, and when Lyft asked me to evaluate the ride, I decided to tell the truth: a two star rating based on the driver’s skills. It took less than 15 minutes before I had an email from Lyft’s customer service, apologizing for the bad experience, and telling me that I was “unpaired” from the driver moving forward. Meaning, I won’t have to worry that this driver will ever be matched with me again in the future. For one, that makes me feel so much safer, and of course, I will continue using Lyft because I know I won’t have to worry about this particular person driving me again (knowing I gave her a bad review, she would probably drive into a ditch just because). What a great way of saying, it’s ok, we know we didn’t get it right this time, but please give us another chance. We know, we can do better.

Of course, that got me thinking about our learners and how we just dump content on them that they don’t need or want. Imagine if we would actually leverage data points to understand what content has been consumed and when, and what content has barely been touched. We could engage our learners and let them know that we “unpaired” them from certain content because we realized they already know all there is to know about a particular topic. We would create an environment in which learners wouldn’t worry about the next training or coaching session, the next digital offering or resource we share, because they will know we only share what really makes a difference to them. What a glorious world that would be!

The good news is, we have enough tools at our disposal to actually make this happen. Leverage data from your learning platform or Google Analytics. Start using your marketing automation tool to deliver training through campaigns, and you will get a whole other set of data you only dreamed about before. Creating positive learning experiences isn’t difficult. We just have to out our minds to it, be open to new ideas and really listen to the learner. It’s about what they need, not what we think they need.

If you want to learn more about how to leverage marketing for your L&D strategy, download my eBook “The Little Black Book of Marketing and L&D”.