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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