Today’s ever-changing work environment requires skills-focused technology that helps organizations align talent management and L&D priorities with long-term business goals. In a recent study, PwC found that 62% of workers have experienced more change in the last year than in the 12 months prior. While most workers are taking these changes in stride—the same study found that 77% of employees feel ready to embrace workplace changes—embracing change means being willing to hone new and emerging skills.

Ensuring employees’ skills stay current means investing in their development. According to another recent survey, 45% of financial decision-makers say their companies intend to increase their investment in resources meant to reskill and upskill employees.

However, an investment in L&D resources will only be as effective as the tools you choose to implement. A traditional learning management system (LMS) has an important role to play—storing content and delivering essential compliance training comes to mind—but an LMS alone can only take you so far. That’s where skills enablement platforms come in.

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What Is Skills Enablement Software?

Skills enablement software helps empower your workforce to develop and apply critical competencies in their daily roles. Also known as skills management or competency management software, this technology helps your business ensure that workers have the knowledge, tools, and development opportunities necessary to grow professionally while achieving organizational goals.

With skills enablement software, you can connect skills from a centralized library to job profiles and individual employees. Managers and organizational leaders can quickly analyze the competencies that exist within various teams, establish which skills are essential for specific roles, and identify existing gaps. This data can help you provide targeted upskilling courses to improve workforce performance and identify employees who need additional support. You can also use the software to search your employee database for individuals with specific skills, helping you tackle unique projects that require subject matter expertise.

In addition to your training and development programs, insights gained from skills enablement software can help inform other aspects of your talent management strategy, including succession planning. Skills enablement software integrates continuous competency assessments with personalized learning paths to help you support employee growth and development as organizational needs change and job responsibilities evolve. You can map an individual’s professional skills and certifications to possible roles within your organization and identify potential successors for high-value positions across your business. Investing in skills enablement software helps enterprises future-proof their talent strategy, drive productivity, and ensure employees are prepared to take on future challenges.

How Does Skills Enablement Technology Support Learning and Talent Development?

Skills enablement technology, such as PeopleFluent’s own Stories platform, provides intelligent, personalized, and scalable solutions for workforce growth. Stories, in particular, is highly configurable, allowing you to adapt the system’s layout and branding to deliver a skills development experience based on your unique business needs.

By harnessing the power of AI, skills enablement technology recommends tailored learning paths that align with individual career goals as well as your business objectives. By integrating with your LMS, content library, and real-time performance data, skills enablement software ensures your workers get relevant, on-demand learning experiences that serve your organization’s needs while driving continuous improvement.

Additionally, skills enablement software helps you:

• Increase productivity: Optimize skill utilization across your organization and align your talent with the right roles and projects to enhance productivity. Increased productivity can translate to greater output and increased revenue.
• Reduce hiring and training costs: Develop your existing talent with highly personalized growth opportunities. Leveraging existing workers’ skills lets you minimize the need for external hiring and costly onboarding programs, allowing you to reduce recruiting and training costs.
• Improve operational efficiency: Invest in a skilled and agile workforce to respond quickly to changing market conditions, reduce downtime, and maximize operational efficiency.
• Accelerate innovation: Personalize learning for every employee with targeted content and skills practice recommendations. Foster a culture of continuous learning and skills development conducive to innovation, enabling your organization to stay ahead of the curve and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
• Improve the ROI on talent development: Establish a single source of truth for tracking and managing employee skills. View critical insights and reports for all of your connected platforms to easily assess skills gaps, content effectiveness, and workforce agility.

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What Makes Skills Enablement Technology Different From an LMS or LXP?

Although skills enablement software shares some similarities with an LMS or learning experience platform (LXP), this technology takes your L&D and talent management initiatives a step further. LMSs are primarily designed to deliver content and handle structured learning activities like compliance training, and LXPs offer user-driven, personalized learning experiences focused on individual growth. Skills enablement software, however, manages structured learning courses and offers personalized development experiences—all while using AI-powered tools to connect your workers’ learning to their job performance metrics and career progression.

The table below shows the different features that are common in these three technologies:

An LMS or LXP is an important software tool for storing and delivering workforce training. Pairing these solutions with skills enablement technology can take enterprise organizations beyond one-off learning programs to maximize workforce performance and alignment with business goals.