By Erin Boettge

How are you preparing your organization and your employees for tomorrow’s needs?

We’re living in a time where the skills and competencies needed to succeed in the workplace and in the economy at large are changing rapidly. As machines have displaced people in many factories and the market has become more competitive than ever, soft skills and competencies are becoming the standout traits that land people jobs and grow businesses.

But is it even possible to keep up in what’s been described as “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”? The answer is yes, but you’ll need the right tools.

The Changing Demand for Skills

The way we live and the way we work is changing. In the next five years, many jobs will disappear and in their wake a whole new set of jobs will grow, jobs that don’t exist currently and that are powered by creativity. Because of these changes, the way that we train and equip our workforce, by necessity, must also change.

Training today’s workforce for tomorrow means that we must develop key competencies in our employees as an investment in our business’ future.

According to a report by the World Economic Forum which interviewed chief HR and strategy officers from leading global employers, this shift in the workforce means a major change in desired skills from 2015 to 2020 – massive shifts in just five years.

Desired skills are shifting from an emphasis on coordinating with others and active listening to things like critical thinking, creativity and emotional intelligence. Organizations need a way to deploy training to their people that develops these skills and competencies, fits into the modern learner’s busy schedule and creates real behavioral change.

How Training Produces Results

Using online employee training is just the first step to setting your workforce up for tomorrow’s challenges. You’ll also need access to content that’s constantly changing and updating with the needs of the workplace and that focuses on short, bite-sized videos.

Partnering with an organization that’s committed to your success and has proven ways of ensuring that your program is marketed effectively, launches quickly and produces results is also vitally important.

“Organizations who aren’t working to create a pipeline for the skilled workers they need may very well have difficulties surviving.”

The Association for Talent Development

Training your employees using short-form video that’s available on mobile and is relevant to their jobs greatly increases your employees’ skill sets and your organization’s probability of surviving.

Maximizing Your Results

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, implementing a great training program is only the first step in ensuring your organization doesn’t fall fatally behind in the marketplace, and it’s a huge step. But to ensure you’re gaining maximum ROI and performance enhancement, the science of learning tells us we must boost what our employees learn.

Research shows that learners forget 70% of what they learn within the first 24 hours of learning it. That number jumps up to 90% after just one week. But by systematically boosting training in the form of quiz questions and other memory stimulating methods in the days and weeks following training, you can improve your employees’ retention of what they learned.

BizLibrary has a training reinforcement platform designed to boost content. We’ve integrated this strategy into our overall content library because we believe the science is clear: boosting increases performance and it increases your odds of being competitive during the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

It’s Not Too Late

It’s not too late to start training your workforce for tomorrow and setting yourself up for future success!

It starts with identifying strategic competencies for your organization and your people and then training them with effective short-form video. Maximize your results and set yourself up for success by implementing a training reinforcement or booster program to ensure that performance is improving.

In this new landscape we’re all dealing with, training your employees is no longer optional, it’s necessary for survival.

Have questions about boosting training to see better employee performance? This Q&A will help you understand the ins and outs of post-training reinforcement!

Erin Boettge researches and writes on a variety of business topics, including workplace dynamics, HR strategies, and training trends and technology.