What future skills and behaviours are most critical for your business?
Ongoing talent acquisition and retention difficulties have re-emphasised capability and skills development as a central L&D challenge. Therefore, it is not surprising that for a second year running ‘soft skills development’ is the number one innovation that survey respondents wanted to see. In fact, there is a huge 30% year-on-year growth in the number of respondents stating this focus as being centrally important.
Indeed, those surveyed state that skills development is so crucial that growing capabilities necessary for the business to thrive is now a top three driver of learning strategy. However, with learner engagement a top L&D challenge — and the role of L&D in driving employee engagement dropping down below capability development as something that strategy must do — functions must be careful to ensure this doesn’t undercut any efforts.
When it comes to the skills that L&D needs to develop, we asked respondents what future skills and behaviours would be most critical to their business going forward. Their answers could be grouped into key groups of which the first being management and leadership skills, followed by communication, then coaching, and then resilience. Diversity and inclusion capabilities, digital skills, emotional intelligence, data abilities and change management made up the top ten most cited.
It is unsurprising that leadership skills are top of mind in 2023. It is therefore clear that L&D needs to develop managers and leaders who can drive organisations through unpredictability and change. At Hemsley Fraser we have done just this, creating a learning framework that guides the development of individuals who can self-manage and self-develop, and then also successfully manage and develop their teams and organisations.
Which of these is driving your learning and development strategy?
