Summary: Global Survey Results — HR is failing to prepare the workforce for future job skills demands; Almost 1/3 of employees feel insecure in jobs as result.
The survey found that 39% of all HR respondents and 35% in the U.S. cannot sufficiently prepare their workforce for tomorrow’s skills demands, leaving 32% of employees overall and 26% in the U.S. feeling insecure in their jobs as a result.
So, who is training current employees for job transitions?
The survey also found that 82% of respondents overall and 74% of those from the U.S. agreed that employees have to learn more and faster to succeed in their roles than they did five years ago; yet 51% of HR leaders overall and 38% in the U.S. confirmed that they are some way from delivering to their full potential when it comes to providing employees with the right training and knowledge for their roles.
Thomas Berglund, director of Learning at Lumesse, commented, “With 75% of HR leaders agreeing that organizational change is happening globally much faster than just five years ago, HR professionals are being asked to achieve more with much less, and to do it right now. To overcome this challenge, HR leaders need to adopt more agile learning strategies that respond incredibly quickly to change and that are easy to deploy across intuitive technology platforms that employees trust. Doing so will help organizations and HR leaders to minimize the disconnect and time delay between skill needs being identified and learning deployed.”
This makes good sense. As we were developing the Engagement, Retention and Growth: 10 Strategic Solutions for Corporate Expansion and Retention training summit we were keenly aware that training time needed to be short and the price tag very affordable for strapped HR departments and employees.
Further key findings:
- Only 10% of leaders overall and 17% in the U.S. believe HR is seen as an ‘extremely useful partner’ by employees for skills development.
- Some 71% of HR leaders overall and 69% in the U.S. believe that employees see HR as providing little or no learning, or just the minimum skills for them to succeed.
- Some 40% of HR leaders overall and 39% in the U.S. believe that employees would not seek help from HR if they needed to develop new knowledge or skills quickly.
- The majority of employees see their colleagues as a more valuable resource for acquiring new skills or knowledge than their internal Learning Management Systems.
The survey was conducted by a third-party research house in the U.S., Europe and Asia with 769 HR executives working at organizations of all sizes. While more than half of respondents work in organizations with less than 1,000 employees, more than 10% work in organizations of 50,000+ employees.
