Digital disruption is fast, and the need to respond is urgent. Learning and development is key to adapting to disruption. From getting new hires up to speed quickly to upskilling current employees for new initiatives and business needs to ensuring a pipeline of effective leaders, a good talent strategy is a prerequisite not only for growth but simply for sustainability.
Fortunately, technology is not only disruptive but also helpful, and innovations in the training industry are enabling the use of big data to identify and fill talent gaps. Using data in this way, organizations can develop a talent strategy that informs business decisions and positions them for success now and in the potentially unpredictable years to come.
The Growing Importance of Data
“I don’t suggest using personality analysis as a primary indicator of employees’ future success, due to the innate difficulty of judging someone else’s inner workings,” wrote Adam Rogers, chief technology officer of Ultimate Software, in a Forbes article. Nor does he recommend “relying on manager nominees and performance reviews” or even employee performance. Instead, “thanks to big data and tech innovation, today’s leaders possess detailed profiles for each employee, [and] by coupling this people data with statistically accurate algorithms,” human capital management platforms can identify high-potential employees more objectively.
Rogers was writing specifically of leadership development, but organizations are using these systems in other functions as well. For example, Emily Sands, head of data science at Coursera, says that one customer needs to “ramp up” its machine learning capabilities, but machine learning engineers are hard to come by, especially in the number that this customer needs. Instead of relying on recruitment to fill this talent gap, the company is using Coursera’s new skills benchmarking tool, announced earlier this month, to identify existing employees who can move into these machine learning roles, either as they are or with “some light upskilling.”
Harnessing Data With Technology
With over 100 million enrollments to date, Coursera is well-positioned to use data to help companies make talent decisions. The benchmarking tool, along with Coursera’s skills graph, uses the learning and assessment data gathered from those enrollments to help organizations understand their talent pool in relation to their competitors as well as the skills they need to accomplish their strategic goals. Then, they can train employees, invite them to shift into new roles and hire new employees as needed.
Other companies are developing the digital assessment tools to identify employees’ knowledge, skills and abilities in order to then make those types of decisions. “When used properly, automated assessments have the potential to provide a much more reliable, accurate and efficient means of measuring human characteristics than their erstwhile (paper-and-pencil) counterparts,” says John Scott, Ph.D., chief operating officer at APTMetrics. Organizations are using these assessments for such talent decisions as promotions, leadership development, hiring and succession planning.
Scott cautions, however, that “the exuberance shown for technology-enhanced assessments has, at times, led to a press on the boundaries of good testing practice in the name of exacting maximum value from the latest technology.” He stresses that assessment validation is a necessity, not a luxury, and “an essential foundation for the high-stakes decisions made through assessments.”
Jeremy Auger, co-founder and chief strategy officer of D2L, says that many organizations are not fully leveraging the data they have available to them. In addition to using data to make decisions about employees’ roles, “data – properly used – allows an organization to truly personalize learning and assessment, create faster feedback loops, give insights into learners, and assess program efficacy.”
Ultimately, our programs are only as good as the data that inform them, and our data are only as good as the systems we use to collect and manage them. By using digital tools and platforms, organizations can use data to make more informed talent decisions and, ultimately, produce better outcomes for the business.
