Adaptability and Resilience to Uncertainty Requires Investing in Employee Growth

If there is one thing the world has required of organizations over the last three years, it is adaptability to unprecedented change. As the year 2020 began, the world did not seem immensely different from recent years. Then COVID-19 hit, and everything began to change:

• COVID-19 forced organizations to embrace remote work, furlough or lay off employees from closed locations, continue to pay healthcare costs, apply for loans and grants from the government, and then begin the process of trying to re-open again.[1]
• A renewed demand for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives grew in response to injustices. DEI initiatives went from a “nice to have” to a “must have”. Organizations had to respond and increase staff dedicated to DEI as well as DEI spending.[2]
• Global supply chain issues impacted everything from semiconductors to grocery store staples. Organizations had to plan to manage this shortage, such as better use of data, closer demand analysis, assembling response teams, and scenario planning.[3]
• Inflation began to climb, and with that organizations saw their costs increase. This involved knowing how to respond such as updating FP&A processes and cash flow projections, diversifying supply chains, prioritizing spending, being strategic about pricing, and re-evaluating products.[4]
• Russia invaded Ukraine, and many companies had to evaluate their operations not just in the conflict zone, but many also decided or tried to withdraw from Russia altogether. This meant meeting the challenges associated with the interdependence of global operations, ethical challenges, the difficulty of liquidating assets, and meeting other regulatory burdens.[5]

Despite COVID restrictions being lifted in many places, inflation is not yet resolved, supply chain issues continue, and Russia is still in Ukraine- while the world increasingly discusses the potential of conflict between China and Taiwan. Additionally, a pending Supreme Court case in the United States challenges the future of affirmative action in higher education, with potentially negative implications for companies’ newly augmented DEI programs.[6]

In short, the need to adapt quickly to change is not a temporary trend.

What can employers do to future-proof their organizations?

In a poll of 3,600+ global executives by Deloitte, 72% of respondents identified “the ability of their people to adapt, reskill, and assume new roles” as the top-ranked item to navigate future disruptions.[7]

Organizations ranked in Deloitte’s High-Impact Workforce research were:

• 3.9x more likely to provide opportunities for development and growth (as compared to lower-performing organizations in the same study).
• 7x more likely to investment in workforce development as the primary means of meeting needs for skills and capabilities.[8]

Similarly, those same organizations were also:

• 4.9x more likely to manage change effectively.
• 4.5x more likely to meet talent needs by putting people in the right roles.[9]

The benefits of organizations who prioritize development and growth are not just limited to talent and adaptability to change. Those organizations were additionally:

• 1.7x more likely to meet their financial targets.
• 2.8x more likely to innovate compared to their competitors.[10]

Investments in skills, development, and growth not only make organizations better equipped to manage change, but they can also have a positive impact on innovation and the bottom line.

How does investing in development and growth opportunities impact recruiting and retention?

The need to recruit and retain good employees is as significant as ever. However, the current environment is challenging.

The world talked about the Great Resignation in 2021 and 2022. However, in 2023 this issue is still present. In 2023, approximately 61% of American workers are considering quitting. Generation Z is the largest demographic, with 72% considering leaving their jobs.[11]

In a study of employees across generations, two factors were the most important to those age 18-34 when considering a new job opportunity: opportunities for career growth within the company and to learn and develop new skills. Employees aged 35-49 were only slightly behind. [12]

However, that is where the disparity lies. Of those employees who engaged in upskilling, it helped 43% of them advance, with 23% moving into new domains and 18% landing new jobs.[13] Similarly, internal mobility is also extremely helpful. At the two-year mark, 75% of employees who have made an internal move are likely to stay, versus 56% who did not. Unfortunately, only 26% of employees say that their organization challenged them to learn a new skill and only 14% of employees said their employers pushed them to build a new career plan.[14]

On the recruiting side 70% of employers have noted having both too few candidates and too many unqualified candidates. However, 75% of job seekers consider an employers’ brand before deciding whether to even apply for a job, and that includes access to training resources.[15]

In short, investing in employees’ skills and career development drives satisfaction, retention, recruitment, and resilience to change, but employees do not feel their employers are doing enough.

Do employers understand the benefit of investing in their employees’ skills?

In a Deloitte study on Skills-Based Organizations, further analysis was done on organizations who view workers as individuals with skills and capabilities that can be “fluidly deployed” to work according to their interests. This includes skills which already exist or can be cultivated via development.[16]

This study shows that corporate executives have certainly heard the facts about focusing on skills and investing in their workers; 90% of executives say that they are “experimenting” with skills-based approaches. This is a hopeful sign given that skills-based organizations are 107% more likely to place talent effectively, 98% more likely to have a reputation as a great place to grow and develop, and 89% more likely to retain top performers.[17]

However, while 77% of executives agree that they should help their workers become more employable with relevant skills, these experiments have not yielded a mature solution for these organizations. Only 14% of these executives strongly agree that their organization is using the workforce’s skills and capabilities to its full potential, and only 5% say they are investing enough in helping people to learn new skills.[18]

Despite the “experimentation” claims by 90% of executives, only 63% of HR executives claim to have skills-related technology embedded in core HR systems, and an ever lower 33% have a single source of skills data across the entire workforce.[19]

When business and HR executives were asked about the top barriers in transforming into a skills-based organization, the largest reason was “legacy mindsets and practices.” The least cited reason was a lack of effective skills-related technology. Executives know the importance of skills and they know technology exists to help that transformation. They have simply not yet been able to lead the necessary change to become a skills-based organization.[20]

Similarly, when organizations were asked where they were in the maturity curve in reskilling and upskilling in 2023, 40% stated early stage, 54% stated midstage, and only 2% said late stage. These numbers increased only incrementally from 2022. However, one upside is that 7% more L&D professionals reported working collaboratively with non-HR executives in 2023 as opposed to 2022, showing some incremental momentum in the effort.[21]

While many top leaders know the importance of skills, the motivation and momentum to make that journey still requires more advocates and deeper change. However, that shift to focusing on skills and development is exactly what is needed to mitigate the continued talent exodus.

How does Oracle Grow fit in?

Oracle Grow is a first-of-its-kind growth solution that unifies learning, skill development, and career mobility in one hyper-personalized experience. With Oracle Grow, employees can take the guesswork out of what will help them level up in their role or to their next role. Acting as their personalized development coach, Oracle Grow looks at all employee data and uses AI to continuously deliver the most relevant growth opportunities that will help employees be successful today and tomorrow. Oracle Grow is designed to surface the possibilities normally out of sight. Now, employees can visualize the different ways they can move in the organization, discover AI-recommended roles they may not have considered, and understand what skills they need to acquire to better qualify for those roles. Managers play a critical role when delivering a great employee experience. With Oracle Grow, they have the insights and tools to ensure their team is on the right track and cultivating the skills they need to move themselves and the business forward.

Oracle Grow helps employees advance in their current role, acquire new skills, and discover multiple career paths and options by delivering personalized insights from unified data in Oracle Cloud HCM, such as Oracle Learning, Oracle Dynamic Skills, and Oracle Talent Management in one interface.

Capabilities include:

• Unified Growth Experience: Delivers the most relevant insights and AI-driven development opportunities employees need to adapt to changes in their role, discover new growth options, and achieve their career aspirations. By unifying people data from Oracle Cloud HCM, Oracle Grow provides clear, personalized guidance into what next steps employees should take based on their responsibilities, career interests, and changes in the business.
• Career Paths: Empowers employees to discover different career opportunities in the organization and provides step-by-step guidance and development plans tailored to each individual based on their Oracle Cloud HCM profile. With skills identification, tailored development journeys, and learning resources, Career Paths helps employees uncover and better prepare their qualifications for future roles.
• Personalized Development Playlists: Helps employees curate their own development journey that is tailored to their goals and aspirations. The development playlists in Oracle Journeys enable employees to create unique goal-based content that provides guidance on finding coaches, classes, gigs, internal and external development resources, and more.
• Enhanced Team Skills Center: Enables leaders and managers to monitor skills needs across the organization, assign specific skills needed to achieve business objectives, and automatically add them to every employee’s Oracle Grow experience.
• Personalized Development Preferences: Gives workers the power to decide how and what skills they want to develop by catering to different learning styles and preferences. With Oracle Grow, employees can determine which skills to acquire, learning topics to follow, careers of interest, and more. Changes to their preferences are automatically reflected in their development recommendations in their Oracle Grow experience and continuously updated as individual growth continues.

There is no doubt that terms like learning, skills, and growth are commonly used across the landscape of HCM solutions. For example, Workday’s Talent Optimization’s features include skills management, career development planning, and goal management.[22] There is also Workday Learning, which just announced the availability of a consolidated location for content in late 2022.[23] However, Workday does not offer a unified product that cuts across learning, talent, skills and even Journeys all in one solution.

Similarly, SAP SuccessFactors has lagged in the talent management market in recent years in only introducing an opportunity marketplace in 2021,[24] and making its Growth Portfolio and Skills Ontology product available only in an early adopter program in Q4 2022,[25] with full general availability not slated until an unspecified date later in 2023.[26]

For either product to even attempt to match Oracle Grow’s depth of functionality, an additional third-party integration would be necessary. This removes the benefit of being natively built as part of the HCM solution as a single source of truth, which as earlier indicated only 33% of HR executives are currently able to use.

Want to learn more about Oracle Grow?

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