IT enterprises are facing a problem they’ve never faced before at scale—how to balance automation with retaining talent and fostering innovation, according to Stefaan Van Hooydonk, Chief Learning Officer at Cognizant.”There is the need for a complete makeover of how businesses view their talent pool and approach employee learning and development,” he said. In an email interview, he outlined the key changes the learning process at IT firm has undergone and how they are upskilling employees. Edited excerpts:
How have the learning and development (L&D) initiatives at Cognizant evolved in the last few years- both for new joinees and senior management?
Over the years, the ecosystem, and consequently the business and the company has changed significantly. We have made a very conscious effort to ensure our corporate learning strategy has evolved to keep pace with these changes.
We have put the employee at the core of our strategy and offer programs that can be tailored around their choices, needs, and work/time constraints. Today, classroom sessions account for just 15% of our L&D catalogue; the other 85% comprises virtual modules.
Our proprietary platform, “CognizantLearn” is a learning ecosystem built upon a learning management platform, curation tools, learning plans, hands-on labs, and content repository. It empowers our associates to learn from any source and fulfill the digital learning strategy.
The platform also incorporates the Massive Open Online Curriculum (MOOC) model and strives to deliver learning in a self-paced mode backed with asynchronous channels of facilitation, engagement, and reinforcements. This platform offers more than 300 courses on digital technologies across DevOps, automation, chatbots, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, among other areas.
Our learning process is based on the creation of a customized role development plan for each associate, based on their role and the technology they are working on. Our approach equips the associates to choose and customize their learning path based on their skill levels.
As part of their learning goals, we encourage each associate to pick a battery of new technologies every year. The training is offered not just through Cognizant, but also through our vendors and product alliance partners.
Our approach to gamification comes from the fact that we apply Design Thinking to our learning program design too, in order to design intuitive and immersive learning programs. Millennials, today, constitute the biggest demographic in our workforce and it is a known fact that they tend to assimilate concepts that are ‘gamified’ faster and better.
When properly implemented, gamification has the potential to make learning interesting, improve retention of learning content, and enable faster application of acquired skills, translating into better employee productivity. In 2017, more than 30,000 learners learnt through the gamification platform.
What are the emerging technologies you are focusing on upskilling your employees in and how is this being done?
We work closely with the business teams to ensure that we incorporate the relevant training modules into our curriculum. Continuous learning and the ability to rapidly translate that learning into business outcomes, known as learning agility, has become a source of sustained competitive advantage for Cognizant.
Given the market dynamics, this is a constantly evolving list; however, broadly, we focus on new technologies such as digital engineering, digital experience/ interactive, automation, industry platform solutions, artificial intelligence, analytics, and cloud transformation.
How much does the company invest in these initiatives and has this figure changed in recent times?
While we cannot reveal the investment numbers, we view skills and learning agility as a crucial competitive advantage and have been making deep investments into our L&D programs to ensure that we have a readily deployable talent pool for all business and technology requirements.
Our investment does not just focus on training but also the entire ecosystem to enable robust workforce development. It is also important to note that our reskilling activities are also closely linked to Annual Operating Plans (AOPs) of the business units (BU) we focus on.
There are skilling champions in every BU reporting to the BU leader and responsible for the talent transformation charter working with Cognizant Academy.