PMI Global Insights

By Denise Hummel, CEO, RevWork, Inc.

The pandemic highlighted a tremendous need for workplace innovation and growth. Workplace trends for 2021 and beyond point to a focus on remote wellbeing, learning technology, and talent mobility. New research shows 94% of employees recognize the career benefit of learning at work and over 50% of tech enterprises are revamping skill-building approaches. The time is now to harness these trends to drive new levels of growth and engagement in daily work life.

But uncertainty still looms large. Only 37% of companies feel they have a good grasp on how the ‘future of work’ will be defined post-COVID, and just 18% have any idea of which employees will thrive in a permanently remote capacity. Companies must also address the knowledge retention curve that continues to cap the business impact of learning today.

Additionally, 80% of spend for a growing enterprise learning market is wasted due to poor learning retention. According to research, upwards of 75% of learning is forgotten within a day of training.

There are a variety of reasons for this. Relevance, timeliness, delivery, consistency, and reinforcement have all been lacking in traditional learning. On top of this, companies continue to struggle to deploy and track the progress of these initiatives with consistency and scale.

How the Workplace Learning Experience Needs to Change

Learning experiences need to focus more on soft skills.

Among L&D professionals polled on LinkedIn, skills like ‘leadership,’ ‘creative problem-solving' and ‘communication’ were the most important skills they aimed to focus on. Both companies and employees are recognizing the importance of soft skills. Companies recognize its importance in building a more agile workforce that can pivot through disruptions. Employees also recognize this benefit towards their ability to pivot to new fields and protect their long-term career prospects. 

When we transition our focus from hard skills to soft skills, we are suddenly tasked with tackling a new challenge: How do we drive behavior change and do so daily? How do we track and benchmark the benefits of these behavior changes effectively?

Learning experiences need to be efficiently deployed, scaled, and personalized.

In that same study, 80% of employees across all generations think personalization is valuable in their learning experiences. Personalization is vital to both engagement and retention of learning. Without these, we do not achieve behavior change. 

Personalization helps us achieve better results in these areas because we can:

• Meet the learner where they need to grow.
• Tap into the motivations of why the learner wants to grow.
• Deliver learning how the learner wants to digest it.
• Deliver learning when the learner wants to/has time to learn.

Technology and AI allow us to personalize a learning experience that maximizes results at the individual level and enables us to efficiently deploy said experience at a scale that is more cost-effective and impactful for organizations.

Join the Discussion on 25 March at 1:00 p.m. ET

In my PMXPO presentation, “Behavior Change Technology: Igniting Our Workplaces in 2021,” I will share insights into learning trends and address such questions as:  What are the emerging needs for professionals and organizations? What factors will power successful workplace learning experiences? And what should companies be looking for when exploring potential digital learning solutions?

Join me by registering today for PMXPO. This event is complimentary for PMI members; non-members can attend for US$29 and take advantage of the full suite of live and on-demand offerings.

By Vibhu Sinha, PMP

Why should we care about learning how to pitch? Can you think of a situation where you want others to look at the world from your perspective? Perhaps you want your business sponsor to provide funding for a new project; perhaps you want to embark on an acquisition as part of an inorganic growth strategy and you need to convince the Board that the acquisition is worth undertaking; perhaps you want to convince the interviewer that you’re the right candidate for the job; or on a personal note, perhaps you want to convince your children that eating popcorn is bad for their health. All of these situations require making your stakeholders (even if they’re your children) appreciate your view of the world or your vantage point. If you can envision the possibility of being in the midst of one of these or other similar situations, you will need to learn the skills of pitching.

Often people perceive that pitching is about looking sharp, memorizing facts, and making an impression on the audience by demonstrating their business or analytical acumen. It is not so. These attributes will help but they will not “move” your stakeholders. Often people also perceive that pitching is about using elegant words and flowery phrases. It is also not so. Pitching is about telling a story…a story that only
you can tell. What do I mean by “a story that only you can tell”? It means that the level of authenticity, passion and relevance you would bring to your story, no one else would.

Perhaps you have been narrating stories your whole life or perhaps you’re new to it. The good news is that from the perspective of Behavioral Psychology, storytelling is less of an art and more of a science. There is a “formula” to storytelling that can be mastered and applied to pitching. And the formula is universal – applicable across industries, business sectors, geographical boundaries and cultures. 

If you’re interested in learning more, join me on October 20 at 11:25 a.m. EDT (UTC-4) at the PMI Virtual Experience Series, where we explore the concepts behind storytelling in greater detail and participate in Q&A. This presentation was originally scheduled for 3-hours under the category of “hot topic”, in the format of an in-person workshop, at the PMI EMEA Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, earlier this year, but with the onset of COVID-19, we transitioned to a 25-minute session at the Virtual Experience Series. Ergo, I will make my best effort to answer as many questions as I could within the allotted time.