Report: Public employers can ‘re-skill’ and ‘up-skill’ to meet staffing demands

Amid a historic workforce shortage, public employers and local governments are struggling to keep up with hiring demands. But while much effort has been put into looking outward to fill administrative needs, a new report from Deloitte highlights the important role holistic educational programs can play in re-skilling and up-skilling current employees to fill vital organizational needs.

“With unemployment still at near-record lows, the fight for talent can be ruthless. And learning opportunities—or the lack thereof—have a key role to play in who wins the talent race,” reads a brief about the report, “The Future of Learning in Government,” published by Deloitte. Given the fluidity of the modern workforce, “It is increasingly important to develop and retain current employees, while making sure new hires can learn quickly enough to fill gaps. This often means enhancing talent development, which should include moving learning programs from a nice-to-have to the forefront of agencies’ people strategies.”

To that end, the report outlines five design principles administrators should consider when crafting a learning program: They should be based on and driven by desired outcomes; they should be focused on skills, well balanced, adaptive and optimized for an intuitive learning experience.

By creating programs that are focused on meeting specific goals, public employers can re-train and up-skill employees to meet mission-specific demands. This approach to learning (prioritizing outcome achievement) can also be incentivized by tying it to career growth. Other important aspects of a strong development program include personalized, user-driven programs, and the ability to understand different kinds of skills. The report also highlights the effectiveness of curating existing training tools rather than creating new ones.

This last piece is notable, given the oftentimes constrained budgets public organizations find themselves working within. The report says the key to optimizing learning “is to not reinvent the wheel, and instead leverage the capabilities of partners within a wider learning ecosystem. … Working with the right partners can help agencies tap into leading technology, learning resources, tools, and providers to build an optimized learning environment for the government workforce.”

The report also projects future adaptations to the learning environment in the public sector. As the government workforce continues to evolve at lighting speed and as it brings in generations of digital natives who deeply understand connectivity, learner experience will become more important as mobile, interactive and immersive programs will be expected.

Driving this, learning technology is expected to change, becoming more holistic in its ability to integrate disparate systems like course catalogs and learner records into a “data-driven learning environment.” This will allow the learning environment to become more personalized for individual users, and for it to be integrated into the daily flow of work. It will also importantly connect learning to an employee’s career path within the talent management system, the report says.

More broadly speaking, the report calls out a need to “transform” the public sector’s approach to learning and development. This need “has been evident since the digital revolution. What’s less obvious is how. At its core, learning is a human behavior (rather than a mechanical process) and should be approached as such,” the report continues. “This means ensuring learning programs are outcome-based, self-directed, flexible, accessible, multimodal, personalized, agile, intuitive, and rooted in optimizing the learning experience according to needed skills.”