3 Workplace Trends to Watch for in 2018

Posted by Penn Foster on December 14, 2017

The recruitment and employee development landscape is rapidly changing, due to a new focus on skills and learning credentials. The reliance on a traditional job description and looking for certain college degrees to judge candidate quality is an outdated procedure. Likewise, employee development has evolved significantly. As we head into 2018, here are the top three recruiting and employee development trends to watch out for:

You have a new world of tools available to improve the recruitment process and discover high-quality candidates for your organization. You can find people with the right combination of capabilities and learning skills, rather than looking at technical and cognitive abilities alone. Additionally, video assessment and culture assessment tools have matured tremendously in the past year, and you can only expect these tools to evolve further.

Learning credentials are also experiencing a profound shift. Students are opting to learn specific skills and competencies over getting four-year degrees. This move is motivated by several factors, such as avoiding student loan debt caused by growing tuition costs and looking for programs that are more flexible than a traditional degree program.

The worker skill gap is significant in many industries, such as the Skilled Trades or Information Technology. Your organization may have more positions than you can find qualified candidates for, causing your cost of recruiting to skyrocket. Instead of seeking out external applicants to fill many of these specialized positions, you can focus on upskilling and retraining your existing workforce.

Upskilling through professional development opportunities brings in-demand skills into your organization without the overhead of looking for recruits. You invest in your current employees, which improves retention rates and engagement, and get exactly what you need to boost productivity.

When you keep an eye on recruiting and HR trends, you can start upskilling employees on the must-have skills long before your competition. This future-proofing move improves agility and gives you a competitive advantage in your part of the market.

Retraining workers is another area that many organizations need to focus on. Technology changes the way business processes get handled, due to automation and other improvements. When you revisit training for employees, they learn more efficient ways of doing things and ultimately save your company money.

Corporate learning tools are getting enhanced by new LMS technology. Rather than a one-size-fits-all training portal that all employees work with, machine learning and other artificial intelligence tools can surface the content that best matches each worker's needs. The systems guide the training with personalization that makes it easier to retain the information and get it delivered in the format that they prefer.

Smart technology turns the learning experience from a slow-moving slog to an engaging session that empowers each employee. You can also adopt a self-service resource through these tools, which allows your employees to seek out professional development and training opportunities through the content you have available. These cross-trained employees can improve cross-department collaboration and make it possible to expand their team's capabilities.