How do you shape a business to be as agile and responsive as the product it offers?
Bridging the skills gap at a global eCommerce company, an innovative digital business focused on establishing the right foundations for the future.
The Challenge
In a constantly evolving, technology-led organization, what matters above all else is the ability of its people to evolve and grow at the pace of market developments. The organization is a world-leading custom marketing materials business. Yet there was a real and growing risk of a skills gap opening between its technological and human resources.
It also knew that the traditional consultancy model – with its tendency to make dependents of “host” organizations – would be expensive and ineffective for what this organization wanted to achieve.
Approach
Our goal was to properly embed best working practices within the teams. So we devised a work-based learning program that together with the Emergn Academy would help people adapt – and actually adopt – the skills required to tackle new and emerging projects.
Data and our own experience tell us that work-based learning is highly effective. By learning “on the job” in real time, you can encourage cultural change too. With this as our guiding principle, we developed an education pathway for people to follow.
It was built around our approach to work-based learning. This allows learners to quickly apply new practices to their day-to-day work. We also introduced an Expert Coaching Program to enable the organization to develop Agile leaders from within, with less reliance on external consultants.
The Executive Coaching Program ran for 18 weeks, and explored VFQ topics in detail. With work-based assignments, participants could see the results of what they were learning, which led to continuing engagement from learners.
Our impact
The core focus for our learning program was to close the gap between potential technological advances and the reality of the skills available among its people in deploying them. This fundamental transformation means that the organization is now able to fully deliver its brand promise to customers.
The education pathway together with the Academy has established a common language for change and development. This is helping to shift the culture in a more innovative direction. And by developing pools of expertise we’ve also minimized its reliance on external consultants, which is reducing the overall cost of change.
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