How do workforce enablement challenges affect specialized industries?

This is the first in a two-part blog series on workforce enablement. In this piece, we’ll address the key challenges that enterprises are now facing as well as help you understand what workforce enablement is.

The great reshuffle is upon us, not to mention the impacts of rebuilding workforces after the global pandemic. Retaining, developing and rapidly certifying new and existing employees is becoming critical for short and long term business growth and differentiation.

Particularly hard-hit due to stringent and extensive operational requirements are highly specialized or regulated industries such as transportation, high-tech manufacturing, mining, and life sciences.

Workforce enablement impacts all aspects of a company’s workforce both internal and external, but it’s become crucial for enterprises to understand their immediate workforce challenges and look for sustainable solutions to initial and ongoing competency certification.

Organizations stand to lose millions if they don’t address current workforce enablement challenges

Even before the pandemic, many organizations were experiencing challenges when it came to remaining compliant and having scalable and integrated training & certification processes for their employees.

Additionally, investors are looking to increase returns and margins in a hyper-competitive post-COVID world.  However, as organizations attempt to ramp up operations post-pandemic, they’re finding that disruptions exist across every level of their business that are imposing heavy costs and limiting growth:

Inability to deliver and track certifications and skills

Highly specialized organizations need to assign, deliver, and track employee operational certifications and skills to schedule workers as part of an integrated, accessible, and automated process.

But many are still relying on localized spreadsheets, manual intervention, and individual heroics to manage these processes. With the rapid ramp up post pandemic these inefficient processes are causing daily productivity disruptions. This can affect anything from whether an aircraft is scheduled to fly or a manufacturer can fulfil orders on time. 

Struggling to stay compliant

It comes as no surprise that businesses in transport, healthcare, mining, and manufacturing must follow strictly enforced OH&S, FAA, FDA, or other mandated regulations and laws.

Businesses that are unable to fulfil their duty of care to their employees run the risk of employee and external party injuries and fatalities – resulting in hefty fines, director litigation, public shaming, and investor backlash.  Today’s employee will also gravitate to those companies that are heavily invested in their wellbeing.

Lack of training & development opportunities

Today’s employees are hungry for personal and professional growth and they’re looking for an employer that can also provide them with development opportunities to enhance their careers.

Organizations without a means of providing these tailored learning and development opportunities may find themselves victims of an employee-driven market and unable to retain and even attract talent. Further exasperating the load on existing staff and processes.

Lack of ‘just-in-time’ access

Many organizations complex and primary operations exist in in the field – whether that be in a factory setting, mine site, up in the air, on trucks, trains or multiple remote sites. Delivering training, certifying and assessing employees or monitoring progress has proven difficult for many organizations especially without the ability to automate delivery via mobile devices (including when disconnected from the internet), synched to a centralized training/certification data repository.

This has negatively impacted compliance rates, time to competency, process consistency, missed on the job development opportunities.  Not to mention increased costs and quality risks associated with manual record management.

Miscommunication and education during crises

As organizations grow, they find that without automated and embedded communication and training systems that operate at scale, they’re unable to reach their employees easily and consistently.

Businesses risk their workforces and extended enterprise audience following outdated practices, missing opportunities, and losing confidence in their employer or from their customers.

Lack of proof

For any regulated industry, the ability to easily prove your regulatory compliance is paramount to business continuance and efficiency. Audit compliance is a key factor in investor and customer confidence, as it speaks directly to effective organization governance – which itself is a key factor in determining both investment and purchase prioritization.

Failure to take advantage of strategic opportunities

Scalable and embedded processes allow companies to sustainably and incrementally improve operations as well as quickly pivoting to take advantage of strategic opportunities.

For example, the CHIPS Act is set to release $52bn in federal funds to assist the rapid development of semi-conductor manufacturing in the US as a strategic asset. Semi-conductor manufacturing is a highly specialized industry and requires highly specialized and automated production.

If a semi-conductor business is unable to quickly and cost-effectively scale a consistent, safe, and productive workforce to take advantage of these investment funds, it will fall behind its competitors and impact the business’s value and investor confidence.

What kind of solutions are organizations applying to address these challenges?

When it comes to finding ways to overcome these challenges and allow employees to do their jobs without disruption, organizations across all industries are looking into single-sourced, highly integrated, flexible and scalable solutions that can address most if not all of their needs.

Businesses are looking for providers that have:

  • An understanding of their business-critical needs
  • Flexible software that can be easily configured to your needs
  • A highly accessible and easy to use platform across multiple sites and locations
  • Support for existing and emerging learning modalities
  • A strong integration and automation capability
  • Able to establish a lasting framework for success

With all of these considerations and objectives in mind, astute businesses are looking for workforce enablement solutions to get ahead of the employee development, training and certification curve.

So, what exactly is workforce enablement, and what are some effective solutions that consistently deliver on the workforce enablement promise?

An effective learning management system can be the perfect workforce enablement solution

In The Matrix, the character of Trinity is urgently required to fly a helicopter to save Neo, but she doesn’t know how. Luckily, Trinity has a connection jacked into the back of her head to instantly download the knowledge, skills, and muscle memory she needs to immediately fly the helicopter and save Neo in the nick of time.

This is theWorkforce Enablementsystem of the future. Today we must rely on embedded systems and processes to effectively achieve the same goal.

Workforce enablement is an umbrella term that refers to:

  1. Give people the training, tools, policies, and processes to be effective and safe in the areas where they work in, and
  2. Being able to audit and certify their level of skills, competency, safety, and productivity against tasks required to support business-critical deliverables.

An innovative Learning Management System (LMS) like Seertech Learning has proven to be one of the most invaluable tools in providing a mission critical, single source application that manages training, workplace assessment, certification, reporting, and integrations.

Interested in finding out how the right LMS is also the perfect workforce enablement solution?

If you feel that these challenges resonated with you, or that you’d like to learn more about enabling your people to work at their best, you’ll want to stick around for the next part in this series – ‘How do workforce enablement solutions boost productivity and investor confidence.’

In our upcoming blog, we’ll address the essential and often missing capabilities of a learning management system and how they can benefit your business. This will help you choose the right system for your needs.

In the meantime, if you would like to ask any questions or discuss improving your workforce enablement capabilities, you can reach out via the contact us page here.