Emerging talent are an important solution to workforce skills gaps. The pillars that support an effective online learning program for emerging talent include practitioner instructors, practical projects, assessment, and support for diverse learners. Such training equips emerging talent with practical skills, at scale, for recent graduates from all backgrounds.
Business leaders know that people are the most important factor in their organization’s success. The skills employees have determined which companies innovate faster, meet the needs of customers better, and gain the competitive edge. However, despite the huge amount of time and money organizations invest in recruitment, they often still don’t have enough skilled talent to move at the pace they need.
How can businesses access more skilled talent?
One way is to bring in emerging talent who are trained in the specific skills they need to perform in a role. But how do you equip them with the practical skills they need, at scale, and make it work for people from all backgrounds?
Charity Jennings, WileyEdge’s Associate Dean of Academy, has trained over 1,000 graduates who started roles in technology at some of the world’s largest organizations. In this presentation, Charity will cover the main pillars that support an effective online learning program for emerging talent. She shares insights gained through training emerging talent at scale across 15 technical disciplines in 11 countries.
Pillars of success:
- Instructors who have experience in the real-world. They can share examples from the real-world, helping to contextualize theory by showing trainees how it applies in business.
- Hands-on, practical projects: Giving trainees a business problem which they need to solve through technical solutions. Bring in technical daily stand-ups, individual projects, and teamwork. Taking a module approach, select modules like Lego pieces to tailor courses to meet the skills required for specific job roles. To make this realistic, you can’t 100% customize the courses: they need to be built using component curricula.
- Assessing on a weekly basis, through automation and instructors. Taking an agile development approach to training requires continuous evaluation of trainees, to make sure people are learning at on a pace to start their new job.
- Supporting everyone to achieve through touchpoints and always providing a main point of contact. No one gets left behind. Specialized support for those who are neurodiverse and those who are the first to go to college from their families.
- Diversity: access to careers outside of your network. Those who are the first to go into a corporate job won't have as much support of family members to mentor them through the journey. You need to provide that support. You need to counterbalance this with professional skills training and individualized support.