Guest blog: Skill Based Learning

From a master's course at the University of Twente, we, Cera and Amber, spent the past three months working on a consulting assignment for Next Learning Valley. The question from Next Learning Valley was: 'How can organizations ensure that skill-based learning is adopted within the organization?'

Skill Based Learning

Instead of organizations working with functions and roles, skill-based learning focuses entirely on working around skills. Organizations are increasingly aware that skill-based learning could be a good solution to, for example, their recruitment problems. Think of the specific ability to hire personnel with skills that are still lacking within the organization. What is covered by skills, you might ask. Here we use the model of Bersin (2022), which shows that capabilities (a larger overarching whole) such as leadership can again be subdivided into a number of skills, for example communication and listening.

Adoption of Skill Based Learning

That more and more organizations are recognizing the value of skill-based learning and want to implement it within their own organization leads to the question of how to ensure that the concept is also adopted within the organization. Important factors contributing to adoption are perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and facilitating conditions.

The perceived usefulness will first have to be made clear within the management of the organization. This can be done, for example, by highlighting problems that the organization is currently experiencing and showing how skill-based learning can help solve this problem. Once management is convinced, employees within the organization will also need to be convinced. Again, for this group, you can show them the benefits to them of switching to skill-based learning and how it can help them.

Perceived ease of use of skill-based learning will need to permeate within all levels of the organization. One way to do this is to demonstrate that working with skill-based learning is not complicated and that the technology involved is user-friendly. Here, Next Learning Valley's Learning Experience Platform will play an important role as well as the way it is explained. It is important that everyone will see switching to skill-based learning as a relatively easy step that requires little extra effort.

The last factor is facilitating conditions. Here you can think of supportive behavior from superiors toward employees regarding skill-based learning. Here again, communication is very important. Another good facilitating condition that Next Learning Valley can provide is again the Learning Experience Platform that can make the transition to skill-based learning a lot easier.

Conclusion

All in all, we believe these three factors will play a major role in the speed and extent to which skill-based learning is adopted within an organization. We learned a lot from this collaboration with Next Learning Valley and this was a valuable learning experience for us. Our understanding of skill-based learning has grown enormously. In addition, our understanding of the consulting profession has changed and we are now more aware of all the do's and don'ts.

Source: Bersin, J. (2022, February 4). Building a company skills strategy: Harder (and more important) than it looks. Josh Bersin. Retrieved March 27, 2023, from https://joshbersin.com/2022/02/building-a-company-skills-strategy-harder-and-more-important-than-it-looks/