The need for a revised e-learning solution for businesses is reflective of a skills shortage in relation to new hires and of the reality that there is less time within firms for hands on training.
According to Harvard Business only 41 percent of employees feel that their managers are able to help them understand the skills they require to move their careers forward and 61 percent, from the survey, said the most helpful guidance to make learning more relevant to their job or career goals would be help in aligning learning to their goals or skill gaps.
This tallies with a recent PwC report which captured a widespread CEO concern relating to a lack of key skills. The general skills-shortage was found to be hindering each organization’s ability to innovate. The effect of this was to cause personnel costs to rise, and consequently impacting their ability to provide an optimal customer experience.
To address this, Harvard Business has developed an update to Harvard ManageMentor® Spark™. This new platform leverages Degreed’s learning platform. Degreed is an education technology company that is engaged in enabling and recognizing professional and lifelong learning and skills. The platform is now complimented with 15,000 learning assets from Harvard Business School and Harvard Business Review.
Through the ManageMentor platform organizations we will be able to cultivate a continuous learning culture that is better in tune with today’s fast-paced work environments. The focus is with engaging and developing talent, as reflected in concerns expressed by global executives who have told Harvard Business they expect to need to retrain or replace a quarter of their workforce within the next five years.
The platform works on the basis of personalized learning. This approach embraces things like content that covers a lot of areas so that learners can access to content that covers a broad swath of topics, ranging from budgeting to design thinking.
It is also important that employees receive learning that is relevant to them, not least because learning can be put to immediate use. The range of content also needs to vary, from short exercises to longer articles, so that the trainee is kept engaged. This also tallies with the need for personalized e-learning to be a social experience.
According to Degreed’s Sarah Danzl: “Through this partnership, Harvard ManageMentor Spark will have much of the same functionality as Degreed’s stand-alone platform, under the Harvard ManageMentor Spark branding and design.”
