Accelerating Skills Transformation for the Future of Work

January 27, 2021
5 minutes
Accelerating Skills Transformation for the Future of Work with Sonia Malik

As global markets tighten and unemployment rates rise rapidly, new skills requirements emerge while other skills are becoming obsolete. The half-life of skills continues to shrink, while the time it takes to close a skills gap has ballooned.

In this episode of Instructional Designers in Offices Drinking Coffee (#IDIODC) we talked with Sonia Malik about IBM's strategies and how your organization can translate these into tactics.

We also discussed closing skills gaps, personalization at scale, and how companies can foster a culture of continuous learning and personalize parts of the employee life cycle to build and reward continual skill growth.

We also explored the importance of increasing transparency through advanced analytics, AI, machine learning, and market-based skill data. With these tools we can transparently signal to employees the roles and skills that are growing in market demand.

Sonia also shared some tips on how to leverage open technology architecture to share talent across internal boundaries and remain competitive.

Sonia credits a large part of their success to micro-credentials. These are the “badges” employees, customers, and partners earn as they successfully complete training objectives.  

The badges serve as motivation for learners to not drop off halfway through the learning content. They can also share their badges and internal and external social media sites to promote their efforts.  

Check out the replay and prepare yourself for the future of work in a post-COVID world.

To see all the comments from the chat check out the full session right here.  

You can also sign up for our next episode with Dr. David Merrill!

And if you're interested in the future of work, here are some other dominKnow resources you might find helpful:

About Sonia Malik

Sonia Malik is a Workforce Strategist at IBM. She has more than twenty years of experience, spanning both the US and international markets in the technology industry encompassing recruiting and talent management, education and training, strategic alliances, technical and operational roles, team management, skills development and account management.

Sonia’s specialties include Business Development, Relationship management, People management, Channel management, Sales Enablement, Talent Management, Staffing, Attrition Analysis, Workforce Diversity


About IDIODC

Instructional Designers in Offices Drinking Coffee (affectionately known as IDIODC) is a weekly live videocast and podcast that helps instructional designers with pain points and provides best practices and industry insight.  

Every Wednesday morning at 10am ET hosts Brent Schlenker and Chris Van Wingerden guide us through an upbeat and candid conversation with their guests from the elearning and training world. The live cast session encourages peers to participate in the chat and share their own personal insight! After airing live, you can catch the learning podcast on all major streams such as Spotify, Apple and Google Play podcasts, as well as on YouTube.