Attendees will hear from Kelly Palmer, a globally renowned thought leader on the future of learning and career development.
The Covid-19 pandemic has driven the desire to learn. People the world over have been forced to work from home or, in cases where it was not possible to work, just forced to stay home during national lockdown period, and many have taken that opportunity to upskill themselves.
According to Raconteur, LinkedIn Learning had more than four million hours of content was consumed globally in March alone. Meanwhile, other corporate learning providers like Hive Learning have seen a 20 percent increase in logins since lockdown began in the U.S. and Circus Street has noted not just a 64 per cent increase in weekday learning and an unprecedented 500 per cent increase on Saturdays.
Degreed chief learning officer Kelly Palmer says this is because the pandemic has made the changing world of work something very real and not some imperceptible trend synonymous with the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
“While many employees may have heard about the future world of work and the need for continuous learning, they won't necessarily have taken those trends to heart until now,” says Kelly who, on Thursday 16 July 2020, will be the guest speaker in a webinar for HR professionals interested in shaping the learning strategies of their organisations to be fit for a post-Covid-19 world.
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“Now is not the time to think about reducing the learning budget. To the contrary, this is the best time for companies to invest more in upskilling their people because, when things get back to normal, those are the companies and employees that will be most ready thrive in the new world that emerges,” she says.
Having spent her entire career in Silicon Valley, Kelly is a distinguished expert in learning technologies. She also co-authored a book called The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete and Succeed, which highlights the way in which work and jobs are changing and how learning needs to change along with that.
Prior to joining Degreed four years ago, she was the chief learning officer at LinkedIn where her mission was and still is to build technology that enables people to learn organically. Her work is about helping people recognize that learning is about more than being in a classroom.
Degreed brings all the learning that is available together, whether that be videos, podcasts, books as well as in-person classroom training, helping companies and employees track their skills gaps and plot learning journeys. It's about helping people take ownership of their own learning by identifying the skills that will help them get better at the job that they currently have and the skills they will need for their next role. after people build new skills, Degreed allows people to match their skills with opportunities, whether that be a new project, stretch assignment, or completely new role so they can apply the new skills they learned. After people build new skills, Degreed allows them to match their skills with opportunities, whether that be a new project, stretch assignment, or completely new role so they can apply the new skills they learned.
Says Kelly: “The manner in which organisations deliver learning programmes is still too antiquated. I mean, when someone wants to learn something in their spare time, they google it or watch a youtube video. So why is it that when companies provide learning they want employees to read a textbook?”
In the context of Covid-19, Kelly says companies that already had an online learning strategy in place were pretty well-positioned to help their employees work from home. Among them are Standard Bank, which has long had a learning strategy based on the way people learn in today’s world.
Webinar attendees will also gear from Standard Bank group head for learning governance and assurance Riana De Bruyn, who will outline how the bank is designing innovative learner ecosystems that empower each individual to reach their career potential.
