How to achieve digital transformation: Upskilling tips from top orgs

Whether you’re preparing your workforce for AI implementation or a cloud migration, your teams need tech skills to achieve any form of digital transformation. 

But how do you build those skills in your organization and make sure they stick? We spoke with our Best in Tech Awards winners to learn more about the strategies they use to upskill their teams and drive their organization forward.

Read on to hear from Jorge Zambrano, IT VMO & Tech Academy Director at Coppel; Sandi Linden, Senior Manager of Design & Portfolio Management at Workday; and Russell Corrie, Senior Learning Experience Designer at Capital Group, as they share their playbooks for tech skill success.

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Whether you’re upskilling your entire workforce or just your IT teams, your upskilling program should accommodate diverse learning styles and skill levels. Don’t make assumptions about someone’s experience. Instead, use skill assessments to gauge expertise and deliver learning experiences that match their current abilities.

“You'd be surprised how many people have skill sets that you don't know about,” says Sandi. “And so to assume that they're at a beginner level, for example, when they're not, could feel really bad for them. 

“We've leveraged Pluralsight in a lot of ways to create [learning opportunities for] varying levels of skill sets. We've done learning paths that are beginning, intermediate, [and] advanced, so that people can jump in where they're ready.

“And they might be able to take some of those Skill IQs to say, ‘Hey, I'm actually at a different place than even I think I am.’”

Learn more about Pluralsight’s skill assessments.

Another crucial way to understand the skills your teams need to achieve digital transformation? Talk to their managers and make sure they’re involved in skill development. 

“What we have learned is that it's crucial for managers to be involved in defining the roles first and then the skills that their teams require,” says Jorge. “It's also crucial that they’re highly engaged in monitoring the progress of the learning paths that we have defined and customizing those plans according to the skills levels specific to each team member.”

Managers are also key to learning and development in Capital Group. “We really try to take a choose your own adventure approach with L&D,” says Russell. “It's really up to what makes sense for the associate based on their personal aspirations, based on the projects that they're working on, [or] based on their role. They work with their manager to determine what training makes sense for them.”

When you’re investing time and money into tech skill development, you want your employees to retain what they’ve learned so your programs have lasting impact. Russell advises being open to experimentation, creating learning cohorts, and leveraging just-in-time learning to make skills stick.

Experimentation is a form of learning. And it’s one you can apply to the actual learning process to help teams learn more effectively.

“What worked 20 years ago might not work today for some learners. We have social media now. We have micro learning videos. People learn how to clean their homes from TikTok. Things have just evolved in the past several years,” explains Russell.

Learning cohorts give teammates the opportunity to learn together, ask each other questions, and lean on each other for support.

“They can discuss concepts in the hallway and at lunch with each other,” says Russell. “There's a lot more conversation around the content when they're learning it together. And that's [had] a huge impact on how sticky the content is.”

A key element of retaining new tech skills is making sure the right people are in the right training at the right time.

Russell gives the example of aligning skill development with a big cloud migration, but it applies to any form of digital transformation.

“We have a very specific schedule on when apps will be migrated to the cloud. And there's some associates that definitely need to be trained in the cloud to be able to implement those migrations successfully.

“We try to time the training as close as possible to when those migrations happen. And we've seen great success with that. If your migration is happening in September, we're not going to train you in January. If we do that, you're going to lose all the information that you've learned.

“Instead, we'd train you in the July or August timeframe so that you can immediately practice those skills and put them to use in the applications that you're migrating.”

One of the biggest challenges of upskilling is employee engagement. Aligning upskilling with employees’ professional development goals can help. But how do you strike the balance between those individual goals and broader business objectives?

Jorge explains how Coppel tackled this with their Tech Academy. “We implemented a process for detecting the roles and skills that we need within the IT organization at Coppel. Then we complement that information with the business strategy and also with industry trends.

"And then we finally validate all this information with our internal technology architecture team so we can ensure that everything is aligned with Coppel's IT ecosystem.”

By doing this process annually, Coppel is able to align team members’ long-term career goals with shifting business needs and priorities.

Ready to learn more about how Coppel, Workday, and Capital Group drive digital transformation through upskilling? Watch the on-demand webinar now.