Good morning!
The great upskilling push is here. As AI disrupts work as we know it, and the labor market remains challenging, companies are racing to develop their own training courses and development programs to keep workers sharp and competitive.
Information technology giant Genpact has been ahead of the curve, launching its own internal learning platform Genome in 2019. But the company ramped up its efforts after the COVID pandemic and the rise of remote work through its learning platform Genome, which offers 100 skills and 9,000 hours of content.
“Many employees tell us that this is very game-changing. We find that they want to go and lap up a lot more [knowledge],” Shalini Modi, global leader of employee learning at Genpact, tells Fortune. “Almost every couple of weeks we keep adding features, skills, proficiency, content, new ways of learning.”
There are courses on storytelling, client relations, and people leadership. But the company’s current focus of upskilling attention is Genome’s “AI Guru” course, which rolled out in May of last year. Over 90,000 employees are enrolled in the training, and 65,000 have completed enough classes to reach a foundational understanding of the new tech.
Genpact’s employee upskilling participation can be connected to a few different factors. There are major career and financial incentives, as upskilling is directly tied to the promotion process for staffers ranging from entry-level to executive roles. The platform also is gamified, with a company leadership board that ranks how often employees learn, and how difficult their lessons are. Genome’s built-in peer review function, where coworkers can review and learn about other people’s progress, also promotes a sense of collaborative instruction.
The company deploys an employee engagement AI chatbot named Amber that constantly monitors what courses are being used, and gauges staff feedback on their learning experience. Modi says Genpact is also responsive to employee requests. “Anytime any of these teams feel a need, it comes back to the skill team to say, ‘Hey, we don't have this in our taxonomy today and we need it.’ So we added that,” she says. “This year we just launched ‘critical thinking’ as a new skill, because we realized that in the world of AI, that will become far more important.”
Listening to the needs of employees has paid off. Out of a total of roughly 130,00 workers, about 40,000 to 50,000 Genpact employees learn on Genome for an average of seven to eight hours a month. The upskilling strategy has also been great for retention and engagement—workers who use Genome are five times more likely to stay at Genpact, and three times more engaged, according to the company.
Modi says that’s because Genpact encourages staffers to upskill, but doesn’t force them into it. “This isn't a training person coming and telling me what I can learn versus what I can't learn,” she says. Staffers are able to learn at their own pace, and even have individualized skill profiles that compute workers’ proficiency levels with the duties their roles require. She says by having this information at their fingertips, employees are empowered to learn independently.
But the most important factor in upskilling nearly an entire workforce is tracking employee sentiment, according to Modi. Amber and other pulse surveys inform leaders on how to best tailor the platform to serve employees needs, which positively trickles down into worker engagement and retention.
“These feedback loops we have across learning, hiring, talent, and Amber really make sure that almost all our platforms are relevant,” she says. “The feedback we get is almost [in] real time so we can make adjustments, we can make changes, we can keep evolving.”
Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com
