By Nicholas Greene
A new study entitled Workforce 2020, produced by Oxford Economics and SAP SE, states that most global companies aren’t doing enough to develop knowledge in their employees, with a whopping 80 per cent of those surveyed having not received company-sponsored skills training in the past five years.
To counter this, SAP has announced an expansion to its SuccessFactors Learning program, which will include quick guides and program capabilities, and new partnerships with Coursera, lynda.com, Open HPI and Udacity, to help companies more easily create and maintain a culture based on continuous learning.
“Employees want to develop new skills and executives want to fill talent gaps from within,” said Jenny Dearborn, chief learning officer, SAP. “But despite best intentions, there is a gap between what companies and employees want and what’s actually being delivered. Through the use of technology, we are empowering companies to close that gap and deliver true business benefits from a more educated and skilled workforce.”
The quick guides and program features and content partnerships are designed to enable companies to deliver employee-driven, self-sustaining learning.
A secondary goal of the new partnerships is to reduce costs for employee education, with the survey showing that the cost per learning hour has increased 20 per cent in the past three years to now be more than US$1700 per hour of e-learning content.
With the quick guides feature, companies can generate their own content that is both relevant to the subject at hand and personalised to specific teams or groups of employees, so those employees feel valued.
The content can also be accessible from a host of different devices and not limited to access at work. Employees can also utilize the software to make step-by-step instructions and produce digital content to be shared with co-workers. Interval programs can also be incorporated, to come into play as employees progress along their career paths, or to give temporary employees only the ‘bare bones’ skills they need in their roles initially and helping them develop over time.
