Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

Upcoming webinar: Kick-Starting a Corporate University

Learning and development are a crucial component of a well-defined talent management strategy. A solid talent management program not only increases employee engagement and leadership effectiveness – but it places employees ahead of the competition and drives customer success.

Join Skillsoft and First Data for a complimentary webinar
Kick-Starting a Corporate University
Thursday, September 6 from 1-2 p.m. EDT

Join Skillsoft and Mary Miller, Vice President, Learning Architecture, First Data, for a webinar that will show you how to create an aligned human capital strategy.

Introducing Throw Back Thursdays, a new series

We receive so much valuable content from our customers, partners and internal subject-matter experts. On Thursdays, we thought it would be fun to do a “throw back” and bring back an older post that was valuable to our audience. Today’s throw back discusses how training can help small to mid-sized businesses.

Training is not just for the big guys

In today’s economic climate, it is more important than ever for businesses to have a skilled workforce to help with the strategic growth of the enterprise. For Small to Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs), developing and retaining a skilled workforce is vital to their success. Unfortunately, many SMBs are so focused on staying afloat that they don’t realize that training their employees can go a long way in strengthening their overall business.

In a recent article on SmallBusinessTrends.com titled 11 Tips for Building and Managing a Team, a question was posed to the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invitation-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs:

“What one employee management tip would you give entrepreneurs who are building their team?”

The number one response:  “Train Them.”

The value of learning and development is clear. A highly skilled workforce, and the continued development of those employees, can be a strategic differentiator. Employees with well-developed professional skills are more innovative and productive--this investment in training results in a better future for the business and the employee. Large enterprises have recognized this value for years. It’s time for learning managers at SMBs to find learning solutions that deliver the training their employees need in a way that works them.

Skillsoft offers a variety of solutions that can help SMBs train their employees like large enterprises do - by utilizing technology to deliver learning. Regardless of size, businesses need both comprehensive and targeted learning assets that are highly engaging and accessible for today’s time-pressed leaders.

With Skillsoft® Leadership Advantage™ , SMBs can benefit from the combination of formal and informal learning modes. Interactive practice sessions, self-assessments, self-serve resource centers, and online communities allow learners to build skills as needed.  The latest version of the company’s targeted leadership development solution leverages multiple modes of instruction, including text, videos and interactive activities to help leaders build the skills they need to drive business performance.

IBM to acquire Kenexa

By John Ambrose

This week’s announcement that IBM is acquiring Kenexa for $1.3 billion has generated a lot of buzz. As I wrote on the Skillsoft blog back in December when SAP announced it was acquiring SuccessFactors, this sends a clear message to other large traditional software/services vendors - it’s all about the cloud. And as Josh Bersin wrote in his blog post on the acquisition, after SAP‘s acquisition of SuccessFactors and Oracle‘s acquisition of Taleo, it’s IBM’s turn to jump into the HR and talent management market.

Organizations are recognizing the significant hard- and soft-cost advantages of procuring software and content in the cloud. For the past decade, SaaS vendors including Skillsoft have been extolling the financial and deployment advantages of cloud-delivery models.

Skillsoft has always been a cloud-based provider and maintains relationships with many talent management vendors, including Kenexa. This relationship and our commitment to our common customers will continue.

IBM acquiring Kenexa, just like SAP’s move did back in December, underscores the importance of integrating talent management with existing mainstream corporate infrastructure. This is good for corporate users as they do not check their consumer tendencies at the front door of the company and expect and deserve a better, more seamless talent management experience.  

Learning content is key to any successful talent management program from recruitment to retirement. Skillsoft will continue to provide this essential ingredient to the talent process for our clients regardless of whether they are an SAP, Oracle or IBM shop. 

This deal, along with SAP’s acquisition in December and Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo earlier this year, confirms that organizations value employee development as a competitive differentiator more than ever before. The industry has moved from tactical (but necessary) human resource administration toward higher-value human capital management (HCM), where developing people, not the process, is the focus.

Sun Life Financial takes a blended approach with Skillsoft resources

Robin Mahadeva, Sr. Consultant, Global Talent Development, Sun Life Financial, disusses how her team uses a variety of Skillsoft resources to support core competencies, including leadership development.

Sun Life Financial leverages a variety of Skillsoft resources from Skillsoft on Vimeo.

Skillsoft Mentoring Services offers study tips

Skillsoft Mentoring Services provide online support, guidance and encouragement to learners to help them and their organizations maximize business performance. The online resource, a team of mentors that hold more than 1,000 certifications and accreditations, utilizes a combination of learning content, information resources, flexible learning technologies and support services to help professionals advance their careers and contribute to the success of their organizations.

In an effort to provide learners with helpful guidance, Skillsoft Mentoring Services has compiled a list of useful study tips. These tips aim to help learners focus on their task and maximize their studying time for successful results in the most efficient way possible.

Some sample tips from the Skillsoft Mentoring Services team include: the importance of taking notes, which serves as mental engagement when studying; uncluttering your environment so that you can remain focused on studying and impervious to outside distractions; finding a study partner, in keeping with the adage “two heads are better than one.”

Virginia Clark, The Distinct Edge Group, LLC discusses importance of a global mindset

Virginia Clark, Co-founder, The Distinct Edge Group, discusses the challenge of implementing learning across global enterprises.

Virginia Clark, The Distinct Edge Group, LLC discusses learning on a global scale from Skillsoft on Vimeo.

Like what you saw? Watch an on-demand webinar with Virginia Clark on the connection between talent management and business performance.

2012 Skillsoft Perspectives Canada: registration now open

By Melynda Hilliard

Here is a 2012 Skillsoft Perspectives Canada update from Melynda Hilliard, Skillsoft’s Events Marketing Manager. Stay tuned for more exciting details!

We are thrilled to announce that registration is now officially open for 2012 Skillsoft Perspectives Canada. Perspectives brings together our customers, employees, and other elearning industry experts for a unique opportunity to hear from distinguished speakers, discuss hot topics in the industry, and learn about our plans for the future. This year’s event will take place October 4 at the Old Mill Inn & Spa in Toronto.

At the event, Skillsoft customers will be able to network and learn from one another, reaping the benefits of a collaborative atmosphere that not only encourages participants to share experiences, strategies, and challenges, but also drives discussion around the connection between learning and business value. The theme of this year’s Perspectives Canada is “Driving Value Through Learning.”

Skillsoft helps children in need gear up for back to school

Back to school is quickly approaching, and Skillsoft is helping send students back to the classroom with tools to help them learn and succeed.

Employees at our corporate headquarters in Nashua, NH recently participated in the Nashua Soup Kitchen & Shelter Inc. Backpacks for Back to School program. Together, we collected 70 backpacks and filled them with binders, notebooks, pencils, pens, rulers, glue sticks, calculators, dictionaries and more!

The backpacks will be delivered to students in grades K-12 in the greater Nashua area as they head back to school this fall.

A huge thank you goes out to our generous employees who donated their time and resources to this worthy cause. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Skillsoft helps you think like a CFO

In today’s business where departments are competing for more resources and budget, professionals need to make a strong business case and value proposition for their operations. Managers need to have a chief financial officer (CFO) mindset when running a department to help them make decisions and business proposals that are more likely to win senior management's support, as they’ll be based upon sound financial and operational analysis.

To help professionals take a strategic view of financial decisions and activities in their organizations, Skillsoft today announced a new solution created to help managers develop a CFO mindset in the management of their departments to ensure that their decision making is founded on solid financial considerations and aligned with the overall goals of the organization. 

The new series, Thinking like a CFO, is offered through Skillsoft’s award-winning Business Skills Library. The new series is based on the financial priorities and mindset of a CFO, including growing the top line, keeping fixed costs low and maintaining cash flow needed for paying bills and making funds available for new projects. The series also discusses how to make key organizational decisions involving financing, investments, and risk.

To learn more about Skillsoft’s Business Skills Library and specific products such as the Thinking like a CFO series, please visit http://www.skillsoft.com/online/fy12/courseware-innovations/?srcID=BLOG

Is free training actually effective?

By John Ambrose

Since the dawn of the web, “free” has been a seductive concept.  Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine has made a career touting the “free” model.  Yet, Wired magazine is not free, nor are Chris’ speaking fees. 

The latest “free” craze is university curricula as well-known universities declare their intentions to post some or all of their courses on the web.  How will this affect corporate learning departments? 

It won’t.

“Free” is not new.  In fact, MIT had been making its courses available online for nearly a decade now.  While free university content will appeal to some individuals, it is no substitute for the highly sophisticated and organizationally aligned learning & development models that have evolved over the past decade. 

Relevance Matters.

Think about the extreme for a moment.  What if every university put every course online for free.  Users would then have everything they need at their fingertips, why bother with corporate training of any kind, right?

First, this sounds like the same argument when web search engines like Google first appeared.  That simply having access to content − is somehow equivalent to doing something useful with it.

Second, there would be massive redundancy.  Most university curricula are differentiated by instructor and approach, not topic or objectives.  Users would face a dizzying array of options (not unlike how we feel with a typical Google search) and corporate trainers would face a daunting task of alignment.

Third is inherent mission conflict.  We all now know that the mission of search engine content is simple: Drive page clicks that generate advertising revenue.  The mission behind putting university curricula online is not altruism, but self-preservation. Clay Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class, was a wake-up call to all universities because their business model is no longer sustainable. Higher Education costs have risen even faster in the US over the past decade than health care costs! Tuitions are no longer affordable and with the balloon of student loan debt, universities are scrambling to find replacement revenue fast.