Ananth Balasubramanian, Solution Principal - APAC, and India, Skillsoft and Prakash Ramaraj, Learning Program Architect, Skillsoft delivered an insightful session on “Building L&D Capabilities in Rapidly Shifting Tech Space.” The session focuses on how L&D can navigate the dynamics impacting the shifts in IT and the skills required by employees to cater the future uncertainties.

Here are the few insights from the session:

•The recent changes in IT can be contributed to factors like product innovation, changing technology, changing business needs and career development. Additionally, the companies are focusing on moving up the value chain which requires focusing on activities like R&D, product design, logistic purchase, etc. These shifts demand the current workforce to update themselves with the emerging technologies to stay relevant with the business needs.

•There is a considerable skill gap in emerging technologies like IoT, Automation and Artificial Intelligence (59%) as well as in areas like Cloud (57%), Data Sources, Apps & platforms (59%), Cybersecurity (55%), Digital Business Transformation (57%), Software Development (55%) and Data Analytics (53%).

•Due to fast morphing business models, technology disruptions, vast skill shortages, and ambiguity in the IT space, L&D needs to reinvent themselves to build employees capabilities. These dynamics demands L&D to be agile, to adapt, anticipate, prepare, intervene and evolve in order to combat the uncertainties and build employees capability.

•Understand the different phases of learning to design an effective learning program. One of the keys to designing an effective program is by analyzing business requirements and analyzing skill gaps and map learnings to the competency needs of each employee.

•Prakash emphasized the importance of continuous learning by discussing Ebbinghaus Forgetfulness Curve which demonstrates the decline of memory retention in time i.e. how information is lost over a period when there is no attempt to retain it. Learners’ knowledge retention is one of the major challenges faced by the L&D department and continuous learning is one of the ways to prevent it. 

In the end, the speakers also emphasized that creating a culture of learning is of utmost importance in order to bridge these skill gaps. 

Tune into the video to watch full session.