If talent is the currency of innovation, smart organizations and employees understand that investing in learning and development today pays future dividends at the individual and enterprise level. To explore rapid shifts occurring in the workforce and strategies for preparing talent for the future of work, a panel of industry leaders convened at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Innovate Carolina Junction for a conversation titled “Future Proof: Innovation Skills of Tomorrow.” Panel moderator Ursula Mead, CEO and Founder of InHerSight, led an interactive discussion with other experts in the field, including:
- Michael Hogan, Economic Development Analyst, Research Triangle Institute
- Watson Leffel, Senior Consultant, Future of Work Institute, Deloitte
- Geoffrey Roche, Director of Workforce Development, Siemens Healthineers
- Victor Sundararaj, Head of Education, Infosys
In part two of their discussion, the group turned its attention to how organizations can develop their current and future employees. Find out what they had to say about how to create internal learning and development programs that work, the role of technology in employee education, creative ways that industry and academic institutions can collaborate on talent, and how companies are working smarter to help employees explore new career paths. Want to learn more? Read part one of the discussion.
1. How are companies creating learning and development programs for employees?
Victor Sundararaj: Different companies approach learning and development in different ways. Some companies completely outsource learning and development. Others guide their employees on what to learn, send them out for education, and bring them back to deploy their new skills. At Infosys, first and foremost, we invest in employee education inside the company. We have an internal education group of about 800 full-time educators to meet the learning needs of all 350,000 employees. We also have a flexible working educator model. In this model, employees go to work inside different business units within the company and then come back and contribute as educators in our education group. We use a structured onboarding program where the company pays to ensure new employees receive necessary education before they start working on projects. This is a full-time foundational program that the company invests in. And, of course, we focus on continuous education to provide opportunities for upskilling and reskilling. This is how we have institutionalized an ecosystem internally to help employees learn. In fact, our chairman and co-founder at Infosys has said, ‘The only friction between an employee and their learning should be their motivation.’ This is the philosophy that drives us.
Geoffrey Roche: Being consistent and learner-centric is important for learning and development experiences. At Siemens, we have three global training centers: one in Cary, North Carolina, one in Erlangen, Germany and another in Shanghai, China. These training centers are all in person, but they also offer virtual training from classrooms. On any given day, you see cohorts of classes, whether they are focused on biomed or imaging, coming in from across the globe. What is taught in Erlangen is taught in Cary and Shanghai. The learning is consistent, so we are lifting the imaging profession consistently across the globe. It’s also important to keep the perspective of the learner at the center of learning and development initiatives. You can’t develop a learning and development solution for somebody if you haven’t walked in their shoes. In health care, that means focusing on the clinician. For instance, at Siemens, our education and workforce solutions were developed by a medical technologist. That’s important because we always think about learning and development through the lens of an actual clinician. We never create a learning program without that lens.
Sundararaj: One best practice at Infosys is that we have a skills learning council that constantly guides us. We follow a horizon model that allows us to identify and differentiate the skills of the past, present and future. The skills learning council constantly monitors, revises and publishes these insights. Our business and sales units contribute to the council, and we get input from clients. We also have a research group that conducts research on the latest skills.