It seems like a no-brainer: develop your staff effectively and you not only help to create the talent you need, but you enhance your employer brand. And yet, not every company takes an active role in helping employees develop new skills to use in current roles, or in new roles that the company needs to fill. At From Day One’s January conference in Seattle, focused on “Listening to What Workers Want,” a panel of experts talked about the urgent need for companies to foster a learning culture built around new skills.

Samreen Aslam, the director of learning strategy at AMP Creative, says that in the current landscape, knowledge is currency. “The more you have, the stronger you are, the more powerful, the more opportunities. That is the pathway, whether you are looking for the next promotion, or to pivot industries entirely,” she said.

Besides the need for specialized skills, employers are emphasizing broad and balanced skills as well. Microsoft focused research in 2019 and 2020 on hybridizing work skills, said Karen Kocher, the company’s global general manager of talent and learning experiences. “It used to be that you focused on your area of expertise, but now you need more. You need to have data literacy, digital acumen, and customer-service skills–not just if you are front-line customer service staff, but companies want everyone to have that. You still have to pay attention to your area of expertise, but you have to be learning all the time.”

Given how tight the labor market is, with as much as one-third of workers leaving their jobs every year, having a learning culture is a key factor in gaining and retaining staff, said Tom Griffiths, the CEO of Hone, a people-skills learning platform. “Millennials will tell you that there are two things more important than salary: mission and opportunities for growth. So you can attract and retain people if you have a culture of learning.”

Sonia Vora, the director of talent at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, places a great emphasis on reskilling, as the organization regularly seeks out “elite talent” in areas of science, education, and development to help run its programs. But these people have often worked in academia, or in situations where they didn’t guide large teams. “A concept of a learning mindset is not unusual, and they thrive on that. But how do they work with people who have been under extreme stress and massive changes that are both internally and externally driven?”

The Gates Foundation helps its employees learn to work with vendors and consultants and government functionaries, Vora said. “Suddenly you start talking about your value proposition to your employees, and your retention strategy, and how are you managing performance and setting goals.” They can be surprised that they are tasked with these things, not just finding a vaccine for malaria. “This is what people leadership means. It is a direct path from there to the impact you are trying to create in the world.” But since this isn’t necessarily their natural mode of working, Vora said, it falls to the foundation to help them learn those critical skills.

The Challenge of Reluctant Learners

While many employees value the chance to expand their skills, some are uncomfortable with it. Aslam said learning is what happens “between necessity and fear.” Necessity is what you need to learn to get by–which is why people remember how to submit for paid time off. But fear is a learning killer. “How do you get people who just want to plug away at their job to want to learn? You have to talk about learning as part of the job,” she said. Reskilling should be part of employee accountability and sit in a place of importance aligned with other business values. “When it’s not a side thing, people are more likely to get on board,” Aslam said.

Griffiths estimated that 20% of people are “super-keen learners who will eat anything you send,” 60% will do what is asked of them, and that last 20% will have to be reminded that this is important in settings like performance reviews or in conversations with supervisors.

“When it’s aligned to their strengths, they get excited to learn,” said Aslam. It could be part of their job description, but it will be something that helps give them a sense of purpose in their job.

Microsoft launched a program last year to allow people around the world to pursue new skills at no cost. Kocher said that one of the main barriers to learning is that people often don’t know which skills are of increasing importance and which are not. “I need to know how to acquire those skills, and if I get those skills, I need to have more opportunity because of it. Nothing is worse that spending effort to get skills, and a year later, being in the same job with the same pay and no opportunity presented.”

People tend to love learning, but they don’t always like how they’re taught, said Vora. “We have to break out of the mindset that learning happens in a classroom, for instance. We have to figure out the best mindset and do work up-front to figure out what that is.”

Griffiths agreed. “So often we focus on skills and behavior, but we need to figure out what is their motivation.” A scientist may want to focus on research, but if the scientist also learned people-management skills, they could have a large team that expands the reach of that research.

Learning to Listen Effectively

One thing that can be really hard for some people is learning to listen, said Vora. “The power is in closing our mouths and opening our ears and using the power of storytelling.” For Aslam, new technology is another way to achieve learning goals. AMP Creative uses augmented- and virtual-reality technology to help people understand other perspectives. “I think listening is perspective-taking. It’s being able to understand what the other person is saying, and then respond to that.”

How to listen effectively is the first skill that Hone teaches in management boot camp, Griffith said. “We want managers to be more of a coach, and to do that, they have to listen deeply.” He tells a story of a manager responding to a call from an employee who needed help solving a problem. After asking her what she needed, he put his phone on mute. He kept asking questions as she spoke. She came to a resolution, thanked him, and hung up. Only then did he realize that his phone had been on mute the whole time and she figured it out for herself, never having heard a single follow-up question.

By necessity, the methodology of teaching new skills changed during the pandemic. Hone created content for remote management education, but in the end, Griffiths said he realized the company had to rewrite the entire management curriculum to be something that would work for both in-person or remote management.

At Microsoft, most learning had previously been face-to-face, said Kocher. “We didn’t have anything available in other formats, and had to figure out what were the most high-priority learning needs and how to address them in virtual ways.” The company stopped offering courses that were uniquely suited to face-to-face instruction.

Currently, Microsoft is working to expand offerings that align needed skills with needed results, Kocher said. “What do people really need to learn and to optimize? In the old days it was about the job, but now It’s more about skills.”

Lisa Jaffe is a freelance writer who lives in Seattle with her son and a very needy rescue dog named Ellie Bee. She enjoys reading, long walks on the beach, and trying to get better at ceramics.