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Congrats! Your company has invested in an upskilling program, and you’ve opted to give employees a stipend that puts your people in the driver’s seat with full control over their learning.
All your hard work has finally paid off! Now, it’s time to sit back and watch your inbox start flooding with testimonials from happy employees delighted with their newfound freedom and opportunities for learning, right?
The unfortunate reality is that a majority of employee continuous education budgets go underutilized – as much as 90% by our own OneRange surveys. Why? Let’s use a story to illustrate some of the common challenges facing even the most well-intentioned upskilling programs. Then, after this total buzz kill, we’ll bring you back from the ledge with some ideas on what to do about it.
Inequity at Initex
Initex launched its new upskilling program in January 2024. Then the company had several new product launches, so no one even thought about it until Q4.
“Use it this year or lose it,” management said. Suddenly, everyone went searching back through their email to find the information about the education program – What was it called again? And how much money did they get?
Eduardo Andrade found the email and sent it to the rest of his team, whose next challenge was to choose a program. The following week, manager Kate Szapiro got a series of emails from the team:
Eduardo, always the brazen account executive, requested a $2,000 conference in Boca Raton, figuring he’d get some sun while he learned. He knew he’d have to front the $2K on his personal credit card, but he was used to getting reimbursed for his sales travel and did well enough in commissions last year to have a healthy financial buffer.
Raj, the customer success manager, was off his renewal targets last year and worried that appearing greedy with his professional development request might negatively impact his annual performance review. He eventually requested a $200 online course on change management, figuring it was a safe bet – but it wasn’t what he really wanted to do.
Michael, the customer service representative, had just had a baby and was dealing with a lot of new personal expenses (e.g., child care, diapers), plus sleepless nights making him less productive at work. He worried about getting reimbursed in a timely manner and finding the time for any upskilling outside of his normal job responsibilities, so he ended up just requesting a $20 book (which he probably wouldn’t have time to read, anyway).
After Kate validated that her team hadn’t already used their education stipends (she couldn’t remember and had to look back through her email), she approved all the requests quickly. She didn’t pause to consider the fact that Eduardo, her most bold and financially secure employee, seemed to be getting the most value out of the program.
Nor was she thinking about it when Imani, the HR lead who launched the program, reached out asking for feedback on how it was going. Not wanting to dig back through her emails yet again to find details about which program each employee had selected, she just confirmed that she was certain all three of her direct reports had used their budget and went on to other tasks.
Imani, passionate about investing in upskilling, was hoping to make the case to her manager to increase the stipend for the program the following year. But, armed with only a few tepid responses to her emails and no further data on how many employees were using the benefit or what they were getting out of it, she had to settle for hoping finance would continue to fund the program at current levels – a long shot given the new era of cost-cutting following lower-than-anticipated product sales.
The challenge with typical upskilling programs
The Initex story demonstrates some of the 5 most common challenges with continuous education and upskilling programs.
1: Poor communication: Programs are not promoted widely and continuous education is not considered a core company value. As a result, upskilling is treated as an afterthought. Information is buried in emails or arcane policy documents instead of centrally located. Workers wonder whether the program is “legit” and if employers even want them to use the upskilling stipends – cynically assuming it’s just a feel-good, lip-service benefit to bolster recruiting efforts.
2: Difficulty selecting the right program: On one side of the upskilling spectrum, corporate training delivered through an internal LMS is often one-size-fits-all, inconvenient, or designed only for certain groups of people (e.g., managers). On the other side of the of the spectrum, the overwhelming melange of options available on many open course platforms (e.g., 23,000+ on LinkedIn Learning and 250,000+ on Udemy) — many of them low quality — presents a paradox of choice. Without better tools to target content to individuals, tie learning to the acquisition of specific skills, or benefit from knowing what colleagues and managers are doing, employees may find themselves having real difficulty selecting the right program for their needs.
3: Unclear payoff and not enough time: Only 12% of employees report applying skills learned through typical corporate training programs to their jobs (source: 24x& Learning, Inc.). If the learning content is not directly relevant, or if the connection to a promotion, pay increase, lateral promotion, or other resume booster is unclear, employees may be less likely to engage. In a world of competing priorities and limited time, people may choose to focus on other activities if it’s not clear how upskilling is valued by their company.
4. Administrative headaches: Employee requests and manager approvals are managed over email, which makes tracking nearly impossible. Employees and managers often lack clarity on what types of programs “count,” and employees worry whether their choice will be approved for cost, relevance, or other reasons. Anxiety over approvals may even impact the types of programs employees request and reinforce inequities in resource-seeking behavior among different genders, job functions, personality types, etc. Employees typically have to cover expenses using a personal credit card through third party systems, and they may worry about receiving timely reimbursements. These administrative headaches waste hours of time and create unnecessary friction for employees trying to engage in the program.
5. Clunky or nonexistent data: There is no central record of participation and engagement. This makes it difficult for managers to track who has used what portion of their budget, and it makes it nearly impossible for People Operations leaders to monitor company-wide participation or discern which professional development and upskilling programs are most popular. As a result, they struggle to demonstrate impact and grow the program – and may even risk losing budget year to year.
The solution: a dynamic upskilling marketplace
As a leader in your organization, your role is to remove barriers to participation in your continuous education program to drive engagement and impact. One of the simplest ways you can do this is by investing in a dynamic upskilling marketplace.
An upskilling marketplace is a one-stop-shop for all your professional development needs. It combines the simplicity and control of a corporate LMS with the choice and variety of a learning experience platform (LXP). It’s an open ecosystem of vetted, high-quality content, combined with powerful process management and analytics to streamline administration and reporting.
Here are some key features and benefits of the OneRange upskilling marketplace solution. Some, but not all, of these may apply to similar platforms.
Multiple types of content: OneRange offers courses, books, conferences, publications, audiobooks, podcasts, executive education, technology subscriptions, and more resources from over 300+ trusted providers.
Open content ecosystem: We curate content based on quality and demand, but we also provide the option for users to request and add any resource they may find anywhere on the internet, once approved by a manager. This means we’re constantly benefitting from the wisdom of our collective audience of lifelong learners.
Designed for a global workforce: OneRange provides flexible learning options that can be accessed conveniently from any device in any time zone. Bite-sized or long-format, synchronous or on-demand, we’ve designed our upskilling marketplace to be employee-centric and appropriate for a global workforce with unique learning styles and cultural values.
AI-powered recommendations: It doesn’t matter how much content an upskilling marketplace has if you can’t find the resource that’s right for you. That’s why the best providers use AI to to power their discovery engine. We continually tag and index all our resources according to skills and other relevant metadata. This enables us to offer personalized recommendations based on role, goals, interests, and the activities of peers and managers.
All-in-one-platform: When we envisioned OneRange, our goal was create a platform that would harness the best features of an LMS and an LXP, and ideally overcome some of their limitations. We didn’t want technology that was narrow in scope, prescriptive, top-down, and compliance-driven or full of so much low quality content that it was difficult to navigate. Instead, OneRange provides the control of an LMS and the option to add as many internal resources as you’d like, along the choice and variety of an LXP. It effectively integrates personalized learning with company-wide training, plus we’ve made manager approvals and payment processing as simple as possible to remove barriers to participation. And our analytics layer is the final key component to help you get the most out of the platform.
Data & insights for growth: Many traditional upskilling platforms offer very limited data focused on participation rates: did someone complete a training or not? And if you’re trying to track upskilling engagement across a range of learning providers, metrics can get pretty complicated pretty quickly. We enable People Operations leaders to get a clearer picture of the upskilling activities happening across their entire organization, including which individuals and teams are engaging with which resources. Combined with the option to create targeted surveys and assessments, along with future partnerships that will enable us to tie learning to performance, we’re helping companies better demonstrate impact and prove the ROI of their upskilling programs.
Pay-per-use model: We are the first — and still likely the only — upskilling marketplace to offer an innovative pay-per-use model. Aside from a small implementation fee to support our engineering team, our clients never pay an annual subscription or platform fee. Instead, they only pay when a resource is requested and delivered. By putting learning at the center of everything we do so that we only earn when our clients learn, we’re shouldering the risk, aligning our incentives with client success, and betting on our technology and the collective power of our community of learners. When considering an upskilling provider, you should ask yourself: Are you paying for meaningful learning, or just access to learning?
Built for busy HR teams: Most of our clients are small-to-medium sized businesses with fewer than 5,000 employees. Many do not have a dedicated Learning & Development team; instead, they rely on HR and People Operations leaders who wear many hats, including recruiting, benefits, upskilling, and other responsibilities. OneRange is purpose-built for these organizations to help them scale their upskilling efforts, and our expert consultants act as an extension of your internal team.
So what does all this look like for our team at Initex? It means that Eduardo, Raj, and Michael can feel more confident choosing programs with supports like manager picks and peer recommendations. Manager Kate can easily track requests and approvals, while getting a holistic picture of her team’s progress through high-level dashboards. Loretta from accounting can efficiently manage payment and expense tracking with simplified payment processing. And Imani from HR can track performance company-wide.
Don’t just manage – grow and evolve
If you care about continuous education the way we do, we hope you use an upskilling marketplace to grow and evolve your professional development program over time. Remember, metrics serve only as a flag post to drive action. It’s up to you what you do with those insights and how you use them to achieve your goals, whether that’s driving PD participation rates across the board, creating a culture of lifelong learning, or leveling the playing field to reduce inequities in continuous education and upskilling across target groups (and we hope it’s all three).
For example, after seeing that large numbers of managers are choosing online courses about having difficult conversations with employees, perhaps you’ll decide to host a live seminar on this topic with an in-person practice component to further hone this skill. Or maybe you’ll elect to increase your upskilling stipend amount in response to strong ROI and interest in PD activities with higher price points, like one-on-one coaching.
And you’re not in this alone. Part of the value of choosing an upskilling marketplace to manage your continuous education program is that, in addition to the technology, you also get a team of dedicated specialists. These expert consultants think about upskilling all day, talk to dozens of companies managing similar programs, and have a vested interest in your success. We encourage you to take advantage of quarterly success meetings and other touchpoints to leverage their expertise in driving utilization and growth in your program.
Self-assessment: Is your upskilling program set up for success?
Are you one of the many companies out there at risk of underutilizing your upskilling budget and not getting the full value out of your program? To find out, we challenge you to do a mini self-assessment and ask yourself the following questions:
- Do you know how many employees are currently participating in upskilling activities?
- Do you know what types of upskilling activities your employees are completing?
- Do you have a wide variety of content and formats to accommodate different learning styles and interests?
- Is learning flexible, convenient, and designed to meet the needs of a global workforce?
- Are payments and approvals for upskilling streamlined and simple, or could administrative burdens be causing friction for your employees?
- Are you able to effectively offer and manage both internal training content and external upskilling resources?
- Are you able to leverage the power of your people through peer and manager recommendations?
- Can employees easily find what they’re looking for through personalized, AI-powered discovery?
- Is the ROI on your learning investments clear? Are you paying for actual learning, or are you paying for access to learning?
- Do you have the data you need to grow your budget and continually improve your program? Can employees at every level track their upskilling progress?
If the answer to any of the above questions is no, it may be time to reevaluate your continuous education programs and consider whether an upskilling marketplace is right for you.
If you’re serious about investing in your employees, an upskilling marketplace is key to driving equitable participation, boosting engagement, supporting employee growth and happiness, and getting the full return out of your investment in your people.
