I was looking through a report which had surveyed 2,100 professionals within the marketing, creative, technology, beauty, fashion, and retail sectors across the US, Canada, and the UK.

Their four main barriers the respondents reported which limited upskilling were:

• Lack of time and resources
• Lack of knowledge about available programmes
• Employee resistance
• Inadequate technology structure

If you work in the learning function creating harder, better, faster, stronger, isn’t necessarily going to solve these issues.

Lack of time and resources is a capacity issue; people want to develop but don’t have the space to learn. That’s a conversation to be had with managers and changing the expectation that everyone will be competent when they leave the learning activity. We need to help managers understand learning takes time and space in work.

Lack of knowledge about available programmes is partly marketing but more that people don’t know what they need to know next. Learning teams need to be all across what’s happening right now and develop hypotheses about the future. How can you be more than an order taker if you can’t describe what people will need next?

Employee resistance is fine. You can offer people help, make support available, coach and mentor, make access and engagement as simple as possible. If they choose not to engage, that’s not your problem if you’ve done everything you can. If an organisation can’t change its people it will change its people.

An inadequate technology structure isn’t necessarily about buying new components of your technology stack. Do you sweat your technology resources in the best way you can? Are you using the data available in the best way? Are you working with the workforce’s preferred channels? If not, you can and should be looking at how you to maximise the value out of your current systems. Speak with your providers, look at their road maps, draw up what’s going to change and when and design to that.

What’s getting in the way of upskilling where you are? And how are you mitigating those hurdles? Let me know in the comments and please get in touch if you want a chat about it.