Upskilling 101: 3 things P&G Indonesia’s HR Director learnt from evolving the firm’s learning strategy

When the pandemic hit and his team had to re-look at P&G’s learning strategy, one thing that helped maintain what was being learnt was to ‘make it alive’ by relying on role-play and practice, shares Ilham Maulana, HR Director, Procter & Gamble Indonesia.

Q How has your learning strategy today evolved from what you’d planned out last year?

By the start of last year, we had been keeping our focus to deliver holistic learning across the organisation, with the 70-20-10 concept. In the past one year, we have evolved on 'how' we learn while keeping 'what' we learn. We moved 100% of the classroom training to virtual training. This brought about the challenge on how we can ensure that learning can be well received by the organisation, and not move to one-way learning.

A few learnings that we found successful:

1. Make it alive by relying heavily on role-play and practice;
2. Follow up with mentoring during and post-training, to guide learning; and
3. Create competition on actionable steps post-learning.

Q What are the hottest, function-agnostic skills in your industry today – skills that will never fail you?

Commercial skills are definitely the go-to skills in the FMCG world, and to master this you will need well-rounded skills from sales to brand, finance, and supply chain, just to name a few.

Q How are you building these skills in your workforce? Essentially, how do you help employees accelerate their learning (especially when it comes to soft skills)?

Given the required sub-skillset to develop commercial skills, we set up a college covering most of the sub-skill sets for targeted employees that we want to develop in this skill. Post the training, we provide the role and responsibilities that enable the employees to reapply their learning in their daily job.

Last, we have a checkpoint between the line manager and employee, to understand the progress of their learning and also break any challenges faced in their work.

Q On the HR front - what are the top 3 critical skills for HR to have in and beyond 2021?

1. Organisational sensing: Staying in touch with the organisation during this tough time is a must-have requirement to ensure you can understand the magnitude of how this pandemic is impacting your organisation.
2. Influencing: As HR, we need to help our leaders and our organisation understand the organisation's situation, and make the right decision that balances both business and organisational priorities.
3. Business acumen: HR needs to be able to speak the business language, hence with the fast-changing situation outside, it's natural for us to continue building our skills and knowledge about the business so we can better drive change for our organisation.

Q Lastly, if there was a magic wand and you could do anything within your power to build a future-fit workforce, what action would you take?

I would love to have Artificial Intelligence involved in employees' learning plans, starting from identifying capability gaps, designing learning plans including lists of trainings to complete, qualification of skills, up to predicting future skills needed.

Photo / Provided