HR Learning: 16 Dec, 2022

1.

Volkswagen India recognises and rewards sales & service personnel

Through the Sarvottam Skill Contest, the Company conducts extensive training programmes for over 5,000 personnel across the 157 sales and 125 service touchpoints in 117 cities. Volkswagen Passenger Cars India successfully completed the seventh edition of its annual Sarvottam Skill Contest. This upskilling, learning and development programme focuses on recognising and rewarding excellence among the sales and service team members, within the Volkswagen India network. Through this Contest, team members from the sales function are trained on product know-how, technological advancements within the product, soft skills and understanding customer requirements. The service personnel are taught the fundamental principles for technical problem solving, customer satisfaction and loyalty, thus ensuring that the service advisors and technicians deliver on the Volkswagen promise of enhanced service and peace-of-mind ownership experience.

2.

One way to turn the tide of employee retention

"A workstation is a place where employees spend most of their time. HR leaders There's a surprising link between skill development opportunities and job satisfaction. Jeremy Braidish, Chief People Officer of Cyara, shares some ways of boosting skilling and thereby talent retention. Organisations across the globe are facing the challenge of skilled labour shortages. Hiring new employees can be a significant financial and administrative investment that takes time, so prioritising the retention of existing staff has become a high priority. Reducing staff turnover not only saves money but also helps foster a positive company culture and develops future-focused thinking. However, according to PwC’s 2022 Workforce Hopes & Fears Survey, four in ten employees in Asia Pacific are not satisfied with their job and one in five intend to switch to a new employer in the next 12 months. A key area of effective employee retention centres around upskilling (developing existing skills to optimise performance) and re-skilling (teaching new skills for a different role). By focusing on both sides of the skills coin businesses can foster new capabilities, stay competitive, show commitment to its people and ensure employees are ready for the demands of the future. Only 10% of APAC employees expect to be back in the office full-time in the next 12 months while 90% plan to work remotely or in a hybrid capacity. This shift towards non location-specific or remote work arrangements means companies need to create training programs that can work well anywhere. A big challenge for employers is the ability to coordinate and balance virtual and in-person training, ensuring both types of training are invested in appropriately and deliver the same quality outcomes. Companies need to be careful not to overlook those who work fully remotely. In-person time has become increasingly valuable due to the pandemic, especially with employees located across various locations. Organisations need to think about purpose. Why are you getting employees together? What do you intend to achieve? It’s important to be intentional and mindful, making those in-person opportunities more about the people's needs than the business. Many successful organisations plan ahead and develop long-term training strategies for their employees. However, future-proofing a workforce is a two-pronged approach. Firstly, providing ongoing, broad-based skills and training to every employee in the organisation is essential. Secondly, identify individuals you believe are capable of taking on more responsibility and filling critical positions within the company. 

3.

A key focus for L&D going into 2023 should be business alignment: Degreed’s Venkat Subramaniam

 

Venkat Subramaniam of Degreed believes that learning is core to business success and organisations need to invest in the right processes and technologies to adapt to continuous change. Venkatachalam Subramaniam is the Regional Vice President of APAC at Degreed. He comes with over 2 decades of rich & extensive global exposure in Strategic Business Development & Management, Operations Excellence, Stakeholder Engagement and People Management. Venkat is a People Leader who has successfully led and motivated teams in cross-cultural & geographical environments towards growth and success in the organisation; created a clear & compelling view of the future through coaching and execution.

Before joining Degreed, Venkat was a General Manager, Head of Sales at Oracle NetSuite India. He also had successful stints at ADP and Adrenalin — leading HCM product and services organisations. In conversation with People Matters, Venkat outlines critical trends that will impact L&D strategies moving forward, the urgency of investing in power skills, aligning learning solutions to business outcomes and employee experience and more.

Organisations are dealing with multiple pressures in these turbulent times, including the shift to hybrid and remote work, and the recession impacting some countries (less so in APAC region, but still a factor in the global economy). Understanding the outlook is key for L&D teams planning for 2023, but that ties in with a wider shift — becoming more strategic and aligned with the business. Because everyone in the organisation needs to see, clearly and undoubtedly, that learning is core to business success. That’s the only way you can justify learning budgets and gain buy-in for innovations in learning. why aren’t more organisations building power skills? It’s because they cannot be easily taught in a traditional way; you cannot learn them easily in a classroom. They also can’t be assessed as easily as a hard skill like coding. Degreed helps organisations build power skills through several means, including enabling L&D to curate the best learning resources available to teach a power skill in different ways. Whether through an online pathway, videos, podcasts, or peer learning. Then a learner can stretch their skill by practising it on real-world applications like stretch assignments or projects. It allows someone to develop the skill in the best way that suits them and the skill being learned. Offering personalised learning opportunities that are tailored to someone’s interests and goals will make the overall experience more engaging. We’ve become used to having content served up seamlessly through Netflix, Spotify, Facebook and others. It’s time for company technology to do the same. It’s important to note that the days of having a rigid three to five-year strategy are gone. Learning leaders, above all, need to be comfortable with change and their strategy needs to be able to pivot as needed. Uncertainty is the only certainty these days and learning is at the forefront of this, one of the first to be impacted, because as a business suddenly changes, so too do the skills that employees need. To achieve this, having processes and technology that can easily adapt is a must. So too is the ability to understand the market, changing needs, and new trends. Gathering skill data from your various HR and learning systems will help you understand the internal environment for your employees. Simultaneously, gather market data to understand how skills are evolving and where your business needs to be next, in order to thrive.