Learning Content for Business Continuity
As companies continue to wrestle with the overlapping crises of the pandemic and its associated economic challenges, new ideas are emerging around business continuity planning. In the past, disruption scenarios centered around maintaining infrastructure and physical facilities, and focused on handling short-lived events like catastrophic weather, natural disasters, accidents, cyberattacks, or even fraud. That viewpoint must be fully reassessed, as now we know that some disruptions may last for months or even years.
To develop the people skills necessary for long-term resilience, L&D will play a critical role in business continuity planning and execution. Learning leaders must be prepared to guide the organization to adapt and persevere by implementing the right technology and fueling it with targeted, strategic training content – ultimately to create an unprecedentedly adaptive workforce.
Join Litmos for this webinar on the new realities of business continuity, which offers insights on:
- Developing employee skills through crisis
- Being prepared with critical learning content
- Nurturing the emotional impacts of crisis
- Creating a “marathon mindset” for adaptivity
- Answering your questions on content for continuity
Organizations are only as strong as the adaptivity of their people and technology ecosystems. To stay competitive, organizations need adaptable people engaged with flexible, agile systems in order to maintain business continuity, not to mention to deliver experiences to the market in new or updated ways. Companies that can’t do this quickly now know the hard way that they won’t make it for long. McKinsey reports that “More than 50 billion-dollar companies have filed for bankruptcy in 2020 in the United States alone.”
As stated on Chief Executive, “In the coming years, survival and success will rely on people and machines that together achieve excellence in creativity, agility and collaboration. Data will be pervasive, and real-time performance measurement and adjustments will be expected. With this mix of human capacity and advanced technology, organizations should adopt proven approaches to become ‘ambidextrous’ – balancing efficiency with creativity by matching the right approaches to different jobs.”
This idea is particularly valuable to those in Learning and Development (L&D). Now more than ever, L&D functions must pull together the power of technology and the power of people to sustain the organization, especially in times of change or crisis, and to attain new levels of agility. Training connects these two powers.
Clearly, without intelligent, centralized learning technology, an organization can not continually develop its people to adapt to changing roles. Add to that the challenges of scaling learning to large numbers in very short timeframes. Even before the pandemic, the average half-life of a learned job skill was estimated at just five years. COVID shortened that span significantly.
To be an adaptive organization means having a continuous learning culture able to make quick pivots at any time and with minor disruption to the business – both from the customer point of view as well as internally. Training must now be woven into the highest-level strategy with plans to deliver reskilling and upskilling within days, not months.
