Investing in Workforce Development: A Few Examples

INVESTING IN

Workforce Development: A FEW EXAMPLES

The Public Policy Forum and the Diversity Institute released a series of reports1 in 2020 exploring certain challenges in Canada’s skills ecosystem. One of these reports, titled Return on Investment: Industry Leadership on Upskilling and Reskilling their Workforce, looked at the skills gap and how Canadian and international employers are investing in employee training. It was written by Wendy Cukier, a professor at Ryerson University's School of Business Administration and a Canadian expert on disruptive technologies, innovation processes and diversity.

We have selected a number of case studies from this report detailing the efforts of Canadian and international employers to invest in employee training. The following are summaries.

In the technologies sector: AT&T

This American company launched its Workforce 2020 (WF2020) program in 2013, after determining that nearly half of its 250,000 employees had skill gaps or that their skills would be inadequate for future technologies. WF2020 aims to upgrade employees' science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills, using online courses in collaboration with Coursera and Udacity, partnerships with leading universities and the creation of a career centre to support learning and plan for the jobs of the future. Each employee has a bank of 10 hours of training per week.

An online portal gives employees access to several tools:

› A career profile tool that allows you to assess your skills and work experience and compare them to the requirements of other jobs to identify skills that need to be developed; › Lists of open positions within the company, with their associated skills and the ability to connect to a nearby employee in a similar position. › Analytical data on the growth or decline in demand for certain types of jobs. Since the program's inception, AT&T has invested $250 million in employee training, including $30 million annually for tuition. The company offered up to $8,000 in annual tuition for various degrees and up to $25,000 per employee for undergraduate education and $30,000 for graduate education. At the end of 2019, 140,000 AT&T employees were taking or had taken training and nearly half of AT&T employees had completed 2.7 million online courses related to data science and management, cybersecurity and Agile project management.

1 This series, Skills Next, was funded by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre (CCF), a pan-Canadian organization dedicated to “helping Canadians gain the skills they need to thrive in a changing labour market.” : https://fsc-ccf.ca

In the banking and financial sector: Royal Bank of Canada

The Royal Bank of Canada has chosen to invest on two fronts: its own employees and young Canadians with no work experience. The RBC announced a program called RBC Future Launch in 2017 with a commitment of $500 million over ten years to help young Canadians better enter the world of work. For its employees, RBC launched the internal Spark! portal to help them explore other jobs. Another digital platform also provides employees with tailored learning experiences and a professional development library. The company also launched RBC Upskill, a free, personalized, interactive tool that allows people to explore hundreds of career options by taking into account interests, skills, education and work history relevant to a particular job.

In the consulting sector: Accenture

Between 2016 and 2020, this global consulting firm invested $1 billion in training activities for nearly 65% of its workforce, or 300,000 employees, using its "New Skilling" learning framework, This approach consisted of different phases:

› Building awareness of new skills required; › Skills assessment to establish a training pathway; › Job preparation, with several stages of observation, learning, simulations (including virtual reality) and experimentation; › Continued mentoring and monitoring throughout the process.

In the retail sector: Walmart

Walmart has embraced the digital shift by investing heavily in its e-commerce infrastructure, which has required developing training and upgrade plans for its employees. In 2018, the company launched an expanded educational initiative, offering employees the opportunity to complete various online degree programs with six different universities in 14 areas of study, including business, technology and supply chain management, for a cost of $1 per day. In 2019, 7,500 employees were enrolled. Also in 2019, Walmart announced a partnership with Penn Foster's healthcare development platform to offer optician or pharmacy technician training on the learning platform to its employees, again at a cost of $1 per day.

According to Wendy Cukier, the lack of empirical data makes it difficult to rigorously evaluate the success and impact of these investments, as most companies do not publicly report the results of their investments in employee development (with the exception of AT&T) and these strategies do not have performance evaluation systems.

She also points out that there is no clear consensus on who is responsible for upskilling and reskilling. Historically, the Canadian government has provided significant funding to the public school system and to post-secondary education, although this support has decreased significantly in recent years. If continuous learning and retraining are seen as essential for employees who wish to participate in the new digital economy, then the financial responsibility for these activities will have to be borne by both governments and the private sector. Furthermore, as digitization becomes increasingly embedded in economic activities, it will affect the type of skills that employers need, and it will become necessary for Canadian companies to adopt continuous learning cultures to ensure their employees have the appropriate skills.

For access to the full report: https://ppforum.ca/publications/ return-on-investment-industry-leadership-on-upskilling/ ■