Learning matters – to your people and your business. When asked why they look to learn new skills, the top answer given by employees was ‘to improve performance in my current role’. Career progression and promotion fell behind that as considerations.
Your employees want to learn to improve their performance. And that can only be good for your productivity.
But currently, employees aren’t getting access to the training they need in formats that work for them.
A third of employers (33%) don’t offer their employees regular opportunities to learn new skills. Employees can find it hard to locate the resources they need. For a quarter (26%), it can take 16 minutes or more . That matters when employees say they need more time to focus on learning. And it’s time when they’re neither learning nor getting work done – most likely they’re just getting frustrated.
When employees do identify training, it’s not always relevant to their role or lacks quality.
All of that is resulting in employees turning to the internet, social media and gen AI to find relevant learning that’s delivered in more appealing and interactive ways. A fifth say they prefer to do their own research online – that rises to a third of 18-24-year-olds.
We surveyed 2,000 working adults in the UK to find out about their experiences of learning. Off the back of that research, we’ve put together five tips on how you can improve your training offering.
We asked respondents what improvements they’d like to see to the learning offered at work. The number 1 answer was being given more time to focus on training.
Your people are busy doing their jobs. And they’ll always prioritise that over learning. So, if you want a more highly skilled workforce, you need to encourage a culture where it’s seen as a good thing to take out time for learning.
You could put aside some time each week for learning activities . We’ve seen organisations successfully roll out ‘meeting free’ days or half days to make it easier for employees to find time for learning.
Putting greater focus on training is going to become increasingly important as the pressure rises to reskill and upskill your people as the world of work changes and becomes ever more digital.
Employees want time to learn
The time you’re given to focus on training
The training’s relevance to you
Quality of the sources
Delivery method of resources
How easy training is to access
N/A Don’t know
Other
It’s great to give employees access to lots of learning. But sometimes it can feel overwhelming – especially for employees who feel short on time to learn. They want to be able to find quality training that’s relevant to their role, quickly.
Review your current learning content and build suites of learning that are relevant to specific roles. That might mean asking your middle managers to take some time out with their teams to work out what learning would really add value.
You can also look at how tech can be used to make it easier for your people to find learning content that’s relevant to the task at hand.
On average, our survey respondents are spending 12 minutes searching for online learning resources offered at work. Only a fifth (22%) can locate resources in less than five minutes.
It can take a long time to find online training resources
Within 5 minutes
5 – 15 minutes
16 – 30 minutes
Longer than 30 minutes
Not sure
N/A
When we’re looking for answers to a question at home, we reach immediately for our smartphones. We run quick searches on Google. Or we may use a gen AI app.
We can give those same experiences to our employees. That starts by cleaning the data – ensuring that we have coherent suites of relevant learning. Then we can build AI-powered frontends to serve up results quickly.
Frustrated employees are already turning to gen AI to learn new workplace skills. That’s especially the case among younger employees – well over half (56%) of 18-24-year-olds are doing so.
Unsurprisingly, when asked in what areas they need to upskill to do their jobs better, our respondents gave ‘digital skills’ as their top answer.
There are no jobs that aren’t or won’t be impacted by tech in some way. And as organisations put more focus on how they use emerging tech like gen AI to their advantage, how and where we work is going to change.
That means you need to be on top of emerging tech. And your people do, too. Your employees recognise that – it’s why 61% of them would like training on how to use gen AI.
After digital, our respondents saw industry-specific knowledge as the next most important area to focus on. And just a short way after that came soft skills.
Demand for soft skills was particularly high among 18-34-year-olds. Two-thirds (66%) say they want to improve their communication and leadership skills. What those skills look like, of course, is changing with more communications done remotely rather than face-to-face. Does your soft skills learning reflect how you work?
How do you prefer to learn new workplace skills?
Every age group – apart from the 65s and over, who favour the classroom – said online courses and virtual workshops.
Employees like to learn online
Virtual workshops
Learning by doing
In person courses
Own internet research
Reading books and textbooks
Social media
Podcasts or audiobooks
N/A don’t know
Other
After that, was ‘learning by doing’ – although 18-24-year-olds were less keen on that, perhaps favouring more structured learning early in their careers; or perhaps finding that in a hybrid world learning on the job is harder to do, requiring more formal courses. Of course, it’s not a simple case of one approach or another – classroom or online, on the job or formal. It’s about thinking through your employee profile – how would different groups of employees prefer to access learning? And, crucially, it’s about delivering training in the most suitable format for what you’re trying to achieve.
Traditional classroom-based learning is far from being a thing of the past. But that doesn’t mean it will look the same. Look at how technology can enhance the learning experience, even in the classroom, and deliver training in a way that matches how people learn outside or work.
Most UK workers (62%) have used social media platforms to learn new workplace skills. A fifth (20%) do so regularly. It’s a trend you should hook into.
We’re seeing a growing number of employers roll out platforms where their employees can exchange experiences and learn skills in a more informal way. It’s particularly important for remote workers who can miss out on learning by watching others.
On social platforms, our experiences can be dominated by social influencers. Showcase your exceptional employees and provide a platform for them to share expertise and reflections on their work . It’s a powerful way to engage employees and share skills in a way that’s familiar in the modern world.
You should also look to learn from how information is shared on popular streaming platforms. They often offer concise videos and podcasts, perfect for watching or listening to on the commute or in short gaps between calls.
You can emulate this microlearning approach by offering easily accessible short videos and interactive quizzes, for example. Create short, insightful podcasts that can be consumed easily at any time.
That’s also a great way of making learning easier to find. We’ve done it ourselves at KPMG by sharing learning tips – as short videos and posts – on our internal social channels at the same time each day. People really engage with that type of content and it can encourage peer to peer sharing of best practices.
