It’s time to explore hyper-personalized learning solutions to upskill telecom workforce

The telecom industry is very fierce when it comes to working expectations from its human resources. As a competition led industry, the employees work round-the-clock to beat the competition and be adept in offering the latest solutions. Inadvertently, the increased consumption of internet and customer-specific data plans has pushed telecom service providers to redefine its tariff structure that is cost-effective yet sellable. Aside from the expectancy from the workforce to skillfully craft the best-selling, revenue generating model, the industry also demands that the workforce is updated in advanced and latest technologies that can spin out-of-the-box solutions. Obviously, this doesn’t mean companies should constantly keep recruiting new talent. What is needed in this era is upskilling solutions and new age Learning and Development (L&D) tools.

Kamal Dutta, the Managing Director of Skillsoft and SumTotal for India and SAARC region, brings out his views on why legacy learning systems are a passé. Headquartered in Dublin, Skillsoft offers an engaging learning experience through a simplified content delivery product. Skillsoft provides innovative, cloud-based learning and performance support resources to organizations, giving them a competitive advantage through enterprise-wide knowledge and skill enhancement. The platform consists of 120,000 pieces of content, including over 7,000 courses, 65,000 videos, and 46,000 book options.

Skillsoft group also has an intelligent learning platform which has the learning content in an app and helps the working professionals to ‘learn on the go’. Percipio allows them to take advantage of pre-curated channels and micro-learning courses and offers the choice of where, when, and how to learn. It has 500+ channels.

Through this article, Kamal Dutta has enabled VoicenData to interpret why and how it is necessary to upskill the existing workforce.

The digital economy has transformed not just the way organizations adopt and enhance their external customer facing engagements but also how they manage the L&D needs of their employees.

Evolution of L&D offers reskilling options to working professionals

The digital economy has transformed not just the way organizations adopt and enhance their external customer facing engagements but also how they manage the L&D needs of their employees. With the rapidly evolving digital business models, both leaders and employees are now required to possess technical expertise in advanced technologies like AI, Cloud Computing, Big Data, IoT, Augmented Reality, and so on, as well as business-centric qualities like the ability to work with cross-functional teams, risk taking abilities and change management. Across the board, the company needs to have an agile and growth mindset to succeed in the digital economy.

“Legacy learning management systems or instruction-led training programs are no way capable of fulfilling the above-mentioned requirements and often deliver unsatisfactory results. As an efficient substitute, Learning Experience Platforms (LEPs) are coming into focus. L&D thought leaders recommend these platforms since they facilitate a hyper-personalized learning experience to each user. As a result, users can choose any mode of learning based on their preferences – anytime, anywhere and on any device – to augment their skills for the evolving job landscape,” said Kamal Dutta throwing the first insight.

Understanding the need, Dutta has placed his learning products appropriately. He indicated that his company, Skillsoft, is working with large enterprises both in India and across the globe to provide a superior learning experience covering different content types (videos, courses, books, audio practice labs etc.), which is capable of driving high engagement and increased adoption of learning within the organizations.

Dutta said, “In the coming years, we’ll witness an emergence of networked enterprises and adoption of gig economy across different industry verticals both globally and in India.

AI, Cloud Computing, ML solves the problem of sourcing the demand for specific skills

Today’s CIOs are realizing the cost-effective benefits of automation. The advanced AI systems are capable of building up decision-based algorithms from multiple inputs like the chat-based data, customer profile and history (if available), heatmaps of activities happening in real time interaction to analyze patterns and come up with relevant future based predictions for the same. Then these artificially intelligent systems can deliver data-driven chatbot-based responses to customers. Companies can thus leverage the virtual workforce to fill up certain job roles more effectively and efficiently, while also saving the costs of salaries, recruitment fees, etc.

Pointing out to the trend forward, Dutta said, “In the coming years, we’ll witness an emergence of networked enterprises and adoption of gig economy across different industry verticals both globally and in India. Therefore, it is imperative for leaders to build systems and processes that lend to the adoption of these evolving models to thrive in the digital economy.”

Telecom companies warm up to the online platform for reskilling needs of its employees

Since professionals are now required to manage dynamic job roles, a scalable learning management system is no longer optional, it has become a necessity. Consequently, companies are augmenting their traditional Learning Management System (LMS) with new Learning Experience Platforms (LEP) that offer a host of user-centric benefits. These include consumer-grade user experience and diversity of content, including access to open and free content.

Offering an explanation to the augmented upgradation, Dutta said, “Companies are further enhancing the effectiveness and engagement of these programs with respect to employees by tying the initiatives with social features like gamification. Fusing them with peer-supported communities and incentivizing reward-based positive actions further supplement and drive employee engagement. Other approaches used by organizations to enhance the quality and reach of L&D programs include facilitating efficient, convenient and superior mobile experience to employees along with enabling the programs with AI-driven intelligent recommendations, creating learning journeys and better curated and engaging content and just in time learning.”

Learning is now a key component of an organization’s ability to accelerate innovation and rapidly scale their business while significantly enhancing the customer experience.

Transformational Learning Journey: A future-proof strategy

Learning is now a key component of an organization’s ability to accelerate innovation and rapidly scale their business while significantly enhancing the customer experience. Skillsoft has increasingly seen examples of leaders focused on skill development to future-proof their organizations.

The top key imperatives for building a world-class learning journey includes moving away from pure instructor-led classroom training to scalable and flexible learning platforms that provide a superior learning experience, curated content, personalized recommendations and different consumption options across a host of different media types, from books, to labs to videos as examples.

The learning journey needs to be built and carefully curated to organizations needs but also industry standards for specific roles. This will help employees to upgrade and reskill for greater opportunities internally as well as contribute externally.

“Learning platform hence should support both informal and formal learnings. A great way to benchmark your learning solution is to see if your employees are doing “binge learning or not” and if they are not then L&D has to look elsewhere to better their system, content and processes,” points out Dutta.

In India we need to address both, the consumer who could be in a college hostel or at home and the ‘Prosumer’ — Professional Consumer.

The Emergence of Prosumer

Skillsoft, with its abundant experience in providing e-learning solutions, has identified that in India there is a marked emergence of ‘Prosumer’.

Questioning who is a Prosumer, Dutta answers, “In India we need to address both, the consumer who could be in a college hostel or at home and the ‘Prosumer’ — Professional Consumer, who could be in a shared cab or office campus and provide them with our curated learning journeys and our modern learning experience which will help them re-skill and upskill. Some of these market segments we can engage directly but for many areas, we need to build partnerships to be able to scale and be pervasive especially in a vast country like India. There is tremendous opportunity to scale and build emerging business models in India and Skillsoft is very focused on building these markets to address our target consumers which were earlier beyond our reach.”