Page 48 - FCW, July/August 2018

CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT
Training employees
for the digital
world
Agencies need to help employees develop the necessary skills to support citizen engagement
Deanna Grady
Senior Manager of Federal, State and Local Government Sales, LinkedIn Learning
shrinking, the result is a multitude of skill gaps.
The role of talent developers
Businesses are fighting to stay ahead of the curve, trying to hold onto their best talent and struggling to fill key positions. And employees are conscious of the need to stay relevant in the age of automation.
Enter the talent developers. These organizational leaders create learning opportunities to enable employee growth and achievement. They have the ability to guide their organizations to success in tomorrow’s labor market, but they can’t do it alone.
Training for soft skills is the No. 1 priority. Areas of importance are leadership, communication, collaboration and role-specific skills. The most important areas of focus for talent development in 2018 are training for
soft skills, identifying trends to prevent skill gaps, understanding the impact of technology, offering consistent global training, delivering insights on internal skill gaps and tracking skill development.
The rise of digital technology is transforming talent development. Talent developers depend on online learning solutions to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse, multigenerational workforce — and there’s no turning
back. Our survey results indicate
that talent developers rely on online learning solutions more than ever before. Furthermore, 68 percent of employees prefer to learn at work, 58 percent prefer to learn at their own pace, and 49 percent prefer to learn at the point of need.
IS YOUR AGENCY engaging with citizens? Are you communicating with them in a thoughtful way through social
media or other channels? In order to do that, your employees need to be aware of the current skills needed for success in today’s world.
Talent developers are being asked to play a central and forward-thinking role in strategic workforce planning by increasing the breadth and depth of
learning programs, while catering to a multigenerational workforce and scaling programs across regions.
For LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report, we surveyed over 1,000 talent development professionals, 200 executives and 400 managers to provide a holistic view of the state of modern workplace learning. We learned that the path to opportunity
is changing. With the shelf life of skills being less than five years and the labor pool
davooda/Shutterstock/FCW Staff
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