Online learning has been a key lever for engaging employees and driving companies forward in a world upturned by economic disruption and a workforce adjusting to the challenges of productive remote work. To maximize the outcomes of E-learning investments, it’s essential to ensure initiatives are both aligned with business objectives and designed for a frictionless user experience.

edX For Business’s new subscriptions offering was crafted to do just that, giving employees the flexibility to discover and learn new skills with immediate access to essential, in-demand courses and programs. In this post, edX Chief Commercial Officer and Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Johannes Heinlein shares more about how this offering was built to benefit both the employee and the company, and create accessible pathways to business-critical skills.

How do subscriptions align with the edX For Business mission?

Our goal with subscriptions really goes to the heart of edX’s mission, which is to provide access to world-leading educational content, to improve learners’ lives, and to achieve positive outcomes for learners and organizations. This requires solutions that help companies and employees grow and thrive.

Subscriptions is a cornerstone of edX’s For Business offering as it presents pathways and options to both employers and employees. The world’s preeminent universities, companies, and organizations work with edX to provide access to a breadth and depth of learning experiences via our leading educational platform. The engaging, interactive educational content on our platform is designed with active learning at its core, and provides the opportunity to participate in a global learning community.

How are subscriptions designed to offer both breadth and depth?

With subscriptions, you’re providing employees with a catalogue that has the breadth and depth they need to further their career and keep them engaged.

As an employer you’re able to build pathways that will help employees be successful within your organization as the content offers the opportunity to go deep in particular subject areas and be responsive as the demands on your business and employees evolve. For example, you may build a pathway for advancement in a particular team such as information technology, to re-skill employees into specific critical roles such as in data science, or to move from individual contributor to management positions.

As an employee, you gain the ability to easily enroll in as many courses as you want throughout the year. Subscriptions offer the freedom to earn unlimited professional and verified certificates while exploring new skills and journeying through pathways that help employees accelerate their careers within the company.

What are some of the outcomes a subscription model enables?

One of the key aspects of enabling subscriptions for businesses was to remove friction and barriers. Enabling learners to engage with a variety of different content offerings at scale and with instantaneous feedback mechanisms removes barriers, as do—on a more operational side—our single-sign-on integrations with leading LMS platforms and company IT systems.

It is also important to highlight the aspect of community, even more crucial today as many of us are still working remotely. Subscriptions facilitate a collective learning experience, one which benefits both the employee and company. Large-scale corporations we work with in the finance sector or in manufacturing, for example, are looking to provide an experience for their employees where they can come together through online learning pathways, so that those who are interested and invested in the same outcome can be successful.

Last but not least, very critically for businesses, subscriptions create the ability to offer employees compelling, customized learning programs at a predictable, affordable price point.

How does the edX For Business team help companies make the most of subscriptions and skills pathways?

In today’s world, signing up for a subscription service can be overwhelming. Choice can be overwhelming, and while employers are looking for choice this cannot be at the expense of efficiency and effectiveness. So they are looking for a guide, and the edX team is here to provide that guidance to organizations.

Any organization can take advantage of our experience, be it a government entity, a multinational, or an NGO, to name just a few examples. The edX For Business team is your partner in enabling growth within your organization and to support change. We will identify pathways that are industry- or subject-area specific, solutions that offer the breadth and depth that businesses and employees are expecting and deserve from their learning experience.

In today’s ever more complex world, edX provides market know-how gained by delivering learning experiences to almost 40 million learners worldwide. It is this experience that helps us identify global, regional, and industry trends, which helps us serve your organization as a whole and your employees specifically.

Get Started With edX Subscriptions

Subscriptions give your team immediate access to hundreds of courses and programs, with the flexibility to discover and learn new, business-essential skills. Connect with the edX For Business team to learn more about how subscriptions and custom skills pathways can benefit your business.

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Despite the flood of eLearning initiatives in corporate learning and development, leaders still cite a failure to build a strong learning culture as a top organizational challenge.

In this post, learn three ways to harness the unique potential of eLearning to create an organizational culture of learning and develop the dynamic new skills and capabilities that drive business results and workforces of the future. For a deeper dive, download our white paper, Three Key Steps Towards a Transformational Culture of Learning: Shifting From Investment to Scalability, co-authored by Daniel Mark Adsit, Principal Consultant at Mergence Systems, specializing in helping seasoned leaders use systems to scale remote and global teams.

Download the White Paper

Instill a Learning-While-Working Mindset

While traditional training programs often focuses on task instruction, eLearning focuses on work that equips people and organizations to thrive. eLearning has the power to facilitate a learning-while-working mindset that is an antidote to stagnant culture, fundamentally changing the relationship between learning and the workplace.

Practical logistics make eLearning compatible with schedules and integratable into organizations. Organizations can facilitate this learning-while-working mindset through example. In one approach, higher level leaders demonstrate commitment to learning, support unified understanding of new subjects, and serve as role-models by enrolling in eLearning courses themselves. For example, as reported in an MIT case study, Shell leverages MIT Architecture and Systems Engineering eLearning courses on the edX platform to build common vocabulary and understanding between technical experts and senior executives about bigger picture energy technologies of the future.

Facilitate Connections and Interactions

eLearning enables hundreds or thousands of learners to interact with each other simultaneously. They consume information collaboratively because the subjects themselves are works in progress. The content is a living organism. Pioneers discover different approaches. Interactive content includes stories, case studies, lessons from the front lines, or collaborative course assignments. Everyone has a unique learning experience. The highest value employee learning occurs when the course serves as a community hub around the content.

To build connections, it’s essential to leverage eLearning infrastructure— typically discussion forums— that bring together learners in different roles, companies, and industries. Ideally, conversations are unscripted. However, sharing through these learning platforms sometimes feels unnatural. Learners might be more inclined to flip through course videos or be hesitant to reveal confidential information. Full engagement can be difficult to achieve. For that reason, it’s important to facilitate some discussion and knowledge sharing. It’s also essential to recognize at a strategic level in the organization how new eLearning platforms open the door wide to opportunities, similar to the way that new scalable workflows facilitate remote workforces of the future.

Build Organizational Flexibility for the Future of Work

The future of work demands that organizations become more flexible in order to better adapt to change. The urgency is perhaps no more evident than through the global workplace disruptions during COVID-19. In a presentation at the MIT Systems Thinking Conference in 2015, Michael A M Davies proposed that organizations and teams across all industries “who learn the quickest, win” in innovation. This refers to how quickly organizations pivot and apply new approaches, such as 3D printing, rather than the speed that learners consume content.

While not a complete remedy, eLearning supports quicker pivots and change within an organization. Through eLearning, it’s possible to invest in many different skills and technologies of tomorrow. This flexibility is a critical success factor, especially during growing times of uncertainty. It’s about constantly reassessing where everything is moving. A knowledge portfolio from eLearning lowers risk by providing a set of real options that can be deployed efficiently and acquired and applied quickly for the benefit of the organization. In other words, it’s a toolbox of possibilities for the future.

Flexibility presents itself through eLearning in different ways. Some organizations, such as global automakers, have developed new cross-functional roles around subjects that started with employees enrolled in eLearning courses. Others strategically deploy eLearning to rally team members around a specific goal. For example, according to an MIT case study, the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) is enrolling its third group of learners since 2017 into the MIT Architecture and Systems Engineering eLearning program on the edX platform that is an integral component in an organization-wide model based systems engineering (MBSE) transformation. Enrolling groups in stages also helps to build a base to mentor new learners.

Three Key Approaches to Creating a Culture of Learning

While eLearning supports scalability when deployed effectively, this requires intentional effort, focus, and continuous investment. In our white paper, we explore the three key approaches that leaders implementing eLearning for scalability are taking.

Download the white paper to learn more about how to create effective learning goals, learning strategies, and learning programs that encourage continuous learning, increase employee engagement and retention, and develop new knowledge that will prepare your business for the future of work.

Download the White Paper

EDX BUSINESS INSIGHTS

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Whether by design or circumstance, more and more organizations have at least some portion of their workforces working remotely.

Especially for those who have suddenly found themselves in this uncharted territory, we’ve put together a collection of key considerations and tips for navigating the shift to remote work and delivering learning that keeps remote employees productive, engaged, and moving forward.

A Moment for Learning Leaders

As a learning and development professional, how can you help steer your company through a shift to remote work and learning, especially when changes must be rapidly implemented?

While challenging, L&D leaders have the unique opportunity to adopt an adaptive mindset to support organizations in using this moment as a tipping point for digital learning, communication, and engagement. Clear and thoughtful leadership and action now will help you build lasting resiliency and agility that will set you and your programs up for success down the road.

Consider opportunities to leverage and implement learning strategies in every corner of your workforce, including but not limited to:

• Supporting and reinforcing critical ongoing learning for professionals working in disciplines that require constant refreshment and exposure to the latest knowledge and technologies
• Building pathways to skill sets relevant to navigating, safeguarding, and innovating during economic shifts, from soft, “power” skills like communication and teamwork to the workforce wellbeing and cybersecurity
• Arming leaders with skills in organizational communication, managing disruption, and emotional intelligence
• Considering solutions for roles don’t translate well to at-home work and are at risk
• And more

Keeping Learners Supported, Engaged, and Motivated

Supporting employee engagement and wellbeing in times of disruption and uncertainty is paramount. Arm learners with the tools and support they need to continue progressing and sharpening the skills that matter most in their jobs, while remaining empathetic to their own challenges with shifting to remote work.

Be thoughtful in transitioning any in-person learning to online: For some employees, this may be their first time engaging in online learning and training. Make a good first impression: Without significantly delaying progress, take some time to be sure you’re going virtual in an effective, engaging way, whether prepping your speakers for virtual presentations or augmenting your edX course catalog with additional helpful resources.

Be mindful of at-home challenges: Be mindful that workers may have children at home and be considerate of workers who may not be able to attend every online meeting or training.

Share tips and celebrate success: Encourage and facilitate the natural sharing of learning. Collect and share tips and success stories in internal channels like Slack or an email digest, and celebrate wins. Recognition and motivation go hand-in-hand. Even the smallest acknowledgements help to support learner engagement.

Consider creating designated learning time: We see a positive relationship between workday learning and course completion rates, but working from home means hours are different than a day in the office. Think about ways to message or establish when your employees can make time for learning.

Keeping Teams Connected

Foster communications and avenues to keep teams connected and on task.

Host video learning office hours: Make space for questions and “face-to-face” social mentorship and support.

Encourage and facilitate social learning: Establish internal chat rooms in programs like Slack where learners can share their experiences in courses. Identify successful learners who are motivated to present on how the course has informed their work through meaningful lunch-and-learns.

Lead by example: Arm managers with ways to support and encourage their teams and highlight how leaders in the companies are using learning to develop and sharpen their own skill sets.

Open For Business and Here to Help

We know no two organizations are the same. We’re ready to listen to your unique challenges and develop a flexible, customized solution for your team. Learn more about working with edX to ensure your remote teams continue to learn, progress, and contribute in the ways that are most impactful for your company.

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Digitization and automation continue to rapidly transform the needs of today’s workforce. Your employees feel pressure to keep up, but continuously updating, diversifying, and building new skill sets is daunting and counters the traditional mental model of education.

The pace of change is faster than ever while the skill sets that set companies and workers apart increasingly cannot be obtained through a traditional degree or career path. Instead, today’s fastest-growing, most automation-resistant, and in-demand roles feature combinations of skills that never used to be found in the same job; they’re hybrid.

According to the Hybrid Job Economy Report from Burning Glass Technologies, fully one-quarter of all occupations in the U.S. economy show strong signs of hybridization.

“The most profound—and under-appreciated—trend in today’s labor market is how technology is mutating jobs into new, unexpected hybrid jobs… roles are being transformed by skills from unrelated functions workers aren’t likely to have picked up on the job. The marketing manager who now needs to build a customer database will need to be purposeful about learning SQL,” the report reads.

Since these future-ready hybrid skills are not gained through traditional degree programs or learning paths, a new model is required to meet the needs of today’s worker. Companies across industries are turning to modular learning approaches as a solution in delivering this purposeful, nonlinear education.

What is Modular Learning?

Modular learning breaks apart traditional degrees and rebuilds them as non-linear, modular career and education pathways. Without the constraints of a full degree, professionals are able to gain tangible skills and credentials much faster and can easily combine courses and programs across disciplines that provide the skills most impactful for their path and organization.

Partnering with organizations like edX, higher education institutions are using massive open online courses (MOOCs) as one a vehicle through which to deliver modular credentials and degrees. Employees can work through completely online Lego-like building blocks of learning, each with their own credentials and skills outcomes, that are designed to develop skills in a way that’s retainable, transferable, and ultimately transformational for the organization.

“The latest teaching and learning research shows that learning online often results in similar or better outcomes than the traditional classroom setting because of its flexibility, personalized pacing and instant feedback, all based on the latest in cognitive science learning,” said edX founder and CEO Anant Agarwal in an article for Forbes.

The Value of Modular Learning

Built for the Modern Worker and Workplace

This style of learning is built to fit into the modern worker’s day, and edX For Business data demonstrates that there is a statistically significant positive relationship between workday learning and course completion rates.

But learning doesn’t have to consume a lot of time and eat away at worker productivity. In fact, allowing and encouraging your employees to take just a few minutes to engage, apply, and discuss goes a long way in cementing learning. It also provides an immediate application and learning in context.

Learn more about how you can support workday learning opportunities.

Immediate and Incremental Value

Modular education reduces the cycle time of learning, making it easier to gain tangible skills and value faster than through a full traditional degree. Working professionals are able to learn new skills in shorter amounts of time, while they work, and those seeking a degree are able to do so in a much more attainable way.

For example, edX’s MicroBachelors® programs are the only path to a bachelor’s degree that makes learners job-ready today and credentialed along the way. Each program comes with real, transferable college credit from one of edX’s university credit partners. Learners can combine previous credit they may have already collected or plan to get in the future with the MicroBachelors credential and put themselves on a path to earning a full bachelor’s degree.

Customized, Hybrid Skill Sets

The fastest-growing fields often lie at the intersection of two seemingly unrelated professions— for example, while data science skills are increasingly valuable, a data scientist often also needs a strong working background in the industry in which they are embedded. This requires a unique hybrid skill set that can be a challenge to teach in a traditional education setting.

Modular learning content allows employees to tailor education to the skills your organization needs to grow and compete. Augment education with a specialized credential or portion of a degree in data science, or more easily combine humanities skills with tech skills, communication skills with coding skills, analytical skills with design skills, and so on.

Driving a Culture of Learning

Modular learning enables workers to keep up with the specific skills they need without disrupting their work or lives. Approaching learning in smaller chunks fits and fuels the mindset that learning doesn’t end after traditional schooling; it’s integral to supporting a modern workforce. More and more, employers are offering holistic, continuous routes for employees to learn in technical skill areas as well as power skill areas like writing, public speaking, and teamwork.

“Lifelong learning [goes] beyond traditional degree structures in order to offer more targeted non-degreed certificates that enable tens of millions of workers the ability to acquire on the fly the skills that are hybridizing their jobs,” the Hybrid Jobs Report reads.

“The theme of “lifelong learning” is perhaps the biggest finding of the study. If you aren’t spending a few hours a week “sharpening the saw” in your career toolbox, you are likely falling behind. I just completed a study with LinkedIn, and we found the No. 1 thing that would make a professional look for a new job is “inability to learn and grow.” We as employers and as employees must make sure continuous learning is part of the work environment.”

Build a Culture of Modular Learning

Modular learning is the foundation of all the programs available on edX. Learn more about how you can leverage edX’s modular learning programs to skill your workforce in today’s most future ready, fastest-growing subject areas.

“Modular and stackable education is foundational to achieving our mission of increasing access to high-quality education for everyone, everywhere,” Agarwal said. “We envision a world where universities and corporations work together with us to reimagine education in a way that transforms the lives of global citizens and positively impacts the generations to come.”

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In a surprising study, Google discovered that its highest performing teams aren’t those stacked with scientists, but interdisciplinary groups heavily benefitting from employees bringing strong soft skills to the collaborative process. Further, additional research found that it’s these soft skills, like good communication and empathetic leadership, not hard skills, that comprise the top predictors of success within the company.

Research from MIT Sloan echoed Google’s findings, showing that soft skills training, even in more hands-on, technical roles in a factory setting, can improve work productivity. Initiated at five Bangalore factories, a controlled, twelve-month trial revealed that training in problem solving, communication, and decision-making yielded a 250 percent ROI in eight months.

Time and time again, industry data, market trends, and insights from top business leaders highlight soft skills as important, and yet they’re still often overlooked.

The Opportunity for Investing in Soft Skills

“Many believe that the term “soft skills” is a misnomer,” said edX founder and CEO Anant Agarwal in an article for Forbes. “Critical thinking, persuasive writing, communications, and teamwork are not fluffy, nice-to-have value-adds. They’re hard-won and rigorously maintained abilities that are better referred to as “power skills.” A term favored (and perhaps pioneered) by Philip J. Hanlon, President of Dartmouth College, who is an avid advocate for use of the word power over soft.”

In a rapidly changing digital economy and labor market where hard skills present the challenge of a moving target, soft skills are a universal, addressable, and impactful area that more and more businesses are building into corporate learning and training programs, and identifying as must-haves for job applicants.

“The next generation of workers, executives, and leadership will need to have a hybrid skill set balancing an understanding of hard skills, like programming and analytics, with power skills,” Agarwal said.

What Are Soft Skills? Shifting Your Perspective to Power Skills

Soft skills are the interpersonal skills or “people skills” that, while often overlooked and under resourced in terms of training and learning, have the potential to be game changers for professional growth and business impact. Google’s study of its employees’ most impactful skills resulted in a list of the seven most important skills the company looks for in prospective employees, all of which are soft skills:

1. Being a good coach
2. Communicating and listening well
3. Possessing insights into others (social awareness)
4. Empathy and support toward colleagues
5. Critical thinking
6. Problem solving
7. Connecting complex ideas

Essentially, Google’s list of important soft skills translates into the categories of communication skills, collaboration and teamwork skills, critical thinking and problem solving skills, and leadership skills.

Learn more about key soft skills companies are looking for as they develop and hire their leaders of tomorrow in our article Soft Skills: What Every Manager Needs to Know.

It’s clear soft skills are no longer a “nice to have,” and in fact are power skills that can drive organizations forward.

Teaching and Learning Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills

It can be a challenge for workers to gain soft skills in today’s traditional higher education or corporate learning environments.

Soft skills are not typically taught as a hybrid skill set with hard technical skills. Learners often find themselves on one segmented track or another; e.g., computer science disciplines tend to focus solely on programming and hard skills, while liberal arts curricula fosters critical thinking and creativity, but often leaves graduates with non-linear career-paths.

“There is a misconception that technical studies offer more employment options,” Agarwal said. “Combined with the misconception that employees naturally pick up soft skills, this has led to a general overemphasis on STEM-related concentrations. We are now realizing that this is not necessarily effective, but some people still question: can technical people develop soft skills?”

Soft Skills Can — and Should — be Taught

“It will take two fundamental changes in mindset to help workers at large achieve this hybrid skill set: 1) unified recognition of the value that strong soft skills bring to a team and 2) the will and resources to foster this valuable skill set in employees,” Agarwal said.

Companies, like Google and beyond, are discovering the value of soft skills, and turning that insight into action. In addition to hiring managers looking for these skills in applicants, corporate learning leaders are taking note of Agarwal’s second point: identifying and building resources and pathways for employees at all levels to learn and use these important skills across work environments.

Soft skills present an enormous opportunity for corporate learning and development programs. Learn more about how you can empower your employees to develop these power skills sets: Visit our Professional Skills Corporate eLearning Course Page for more information on critical soft skills courses for employees.

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