How LinkedIn’s Skills-First Approach Keeps Employees’ Skills Competitive & Increases Retention

We’re in a new era in how talent and opportunity meet, creating opportunities for employers to diversify talent and simultaneously expand the ways people can access jobs and new skills.

Through the past two tumultuous years, L&D has helped employees and leaders adapt to change to meet the needs of a rapidly changing world of world, building confidence and resilience by putting one of the most valuable assets in their hands: skills — especially future-ready skills. 

But the way they've been delivering those skills opportunities is still in development, as employees continue to re-evaluate how, where, and even why they work - resigning, reshuffling and reprioritizing their lives.

This is why it's critical for organizations to implement learning programs with content that is accessible, tailored and enables the missed connection employees crave.

As talent leaders relook at their employee base in reference to the skills moving in and out of the company, they need insights into how these skills are distributed, what skills are being developed and what skills they need to stay competitive - looking beyond not only upskilling but shifting behaviors and mindsets and bringing back a human feel to a digital world.

Connecting Learning Outcomes to Skills

Improving Retention By Helping Companies Focus on Their Employees' Growth

Driven by LinkedIn’s comprehensive skills taxonomy (a dynamic list of relevant skills for your organization/industry), LinkedIn Learning Hub connects learning outcomes directly to skills. This skills-building platform gives L&D pros and learners a clear understanding of the impact of their learning strategies and how their people’s breadth of skills stack relative to competition in their market and industries.

LinkedIn Learning Hub aggregates learning content and connects learning outcomes to tangible skills on LinkedIn’s Skills Graph – the world’s most comprehensive skills taxonomy. With AI-driven recommendations from across an organization’s learning resources, Learning Hub meets learners where they are with relevant and applicable content based on their learning activity and skills profile.

Learning Hub aggregates all of an organization’s learning content in one place so that L&D leaders can access skills insights, measure engagement across their learning sources and customize the learner experience with curated learning paths – all within an existing flow of work.

We also recently announced that we're making key investments to accelerate the capabilities of our LinkedIn Learning Hub. Employees will soon be able to pinpoint the skills they need to be successful in their organization–easily discovering engaging, role-specific content and internal job opportunities based on their career goals.

Learner insights power L&D teams with an understanding of the people in their organization with the greatest appetite for learning, and individual and team progress towards closing skills goals, and LinkedIn is primed to help lead organization-wide efforts like skills-first talent development and internal mobility through our LinkedIn Learning Hub. 

Empowering Members to Further Develop Their Skills With Live Events

Knowing that the skills our members need to achieve their career goals are changing faster than ever before, LinkedIn is also continuing to invest in new ways to learn in real-time, like our live events that tap into the power of the LinkedIn community.

In the last year, our instructors have hosted over 500 live events ranging from topics like The Rise of Black Entrepreneurship to Landing Your Dream Job" to Making Sense of Ethical Challenges in Web3, showing us how powerful it is when we give our members the opportunity to invest in themselves.

In this changing world of work, with new challenges emerging every week that professionals are eager to discuss, LinkedIn also introduced Office Hours – a feature that lets instructors host live events on LinkedIn Learning.

Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen learners embrace social learning features like Q&A, where they can ask the LinkedIn Learning community a question and get answers from instructors, their network or their co-workers. 

With Office Hours, learners can do just that - they're able to stay on top of industry trends and interact with experts and fellow learners in real-time by posting questions, comments and reactions.

We're trying to create an environment where we collaborate more closely and intentionally with our colleagues, and have our learners do so as well in a setting that allows for community-based learning.

Connecting Skill-Building to Business Strategy

KPIs

To create a skill-building program that is in lockstep with business strategy, it’s important to make sure you’re looking at the right KPIs. Hours of learning and course completion rates are often not as meaningful as focusing on what skills are lacking in your organization.

What I hear most from my colleagues in gauging the success of their upskilling and reskilling programs is qualitative feedback from employees and employee engagement survey scores; so listening to our learners will be a critical component for L&D success in the coming year as well.