Over its ten-year journey, Simplilearn has helped over 1 million learners, and we have learned many lessons ourselves along the way. We believe these lessons have a lot of value to other enterprises, regardless of what businesses they are in. We’ve offered actionable advice for your business with each of these lessons.
Here are ten lessons about learners and e-learning.
Lesson 1: You Are the Key to Your Company’s Success
Simplilearn has built-in success in hiring capable people, giving them the tools to succeed, and holding them accountable for results. We believe that our success depends on the contributions of its employees and that their success determines how well the firm as a whole performs.
You should remember that your employer hired you because they needed you to do a particular job. It’s a two-sided relationship: as much as you need your job, your employer needs you in that job to fulfill a function. Your contribution is essential to your company, and it’s a big responsibility.
Lesson 2: Align Your Skills to the Needs of the Moment
Many years ago, a college education could carry a graduate through a lifelong career. But over the last decade, the business community has come to understand that IT skills have a short “shelf life.” IT professionals and their managers have to keep up with a growing stream of new programming languages, computing paradigms, and technologies.
As the pace of change accelerates, you need to be agile and adaptable so that you can keep up with it. By aiming to stay one step ahead of the change around you, you will remain in a position to meet your employer’s current needs as they also change.
Lesson 3: Make Yourself into an Asset worth Investing In
When your employer hired you, they had a particular position in mind. If they are wise, they also had an idea of where your career in the company could take you. They want to see you succeed because your success helps them succeed, and they want you to grow in your career because that will help them grow the business.
To help your employer decide to invest in your career growth, you need to show that you are a good investment. Showing that you are committed to keeping your skill set current is a great indicator that you’re a valuable asset to the firm. Showing that you are committed to upskilling to a higher skill level is a great indicator that your employer should invest in your long-term career growth.
Lesson 4: Draw on Resources That Have Proven Track Records
Over our ten-year history, Simplilearn has helped more than one million learners upskill. We have kept our technology, methods, and programs up to date as technology has evolved in the past decade. We’ve developed partnerships with leading technology providers and prestigious educational institutions to back the certifications our learners earn.
When you seek out a partner to help you upskill, look for one that has a track record of helping learners like you. You will also want a partner who offers programs with a high completion rate and with certifications that your employer will respect.
Lesson 5: Certifications Are Milestones, Not Destinations
Speaking of certifications, Simplilearn offers individual courses for specific digital economy skills. Building on those, we also have developed full master’s programs that combine courses in a given area with practical implementation projects to bring our learners to a higher level of professional expertise.
Sometimes a work project or assignment calls for a particular skill that you need to acquire quickly. As valuable as that may be, you should plan ahead for the skills you will need for the projects and assignments you haven’t yet been given. Anticipating those needs will let you demonstrate your new skills before your next assignment or your next job appraisal.
Lesson 6: Tech Skills Have an Expiration Date, but Tech Talent Does Not
Simplilearn understands that technology practitioners who demonstrate proficiency today may not be able to demonstrate it a few years down the road. That’s not because they become less capable, but because the pace of technological change makes some of their skills increasingly obsolete.
You got your current job because you demonstrated competence in the tasks you were hired for. Have your employer’s needs changed? Do they expect you to do different tasks now? Invest in upskilling, so your skill sets remain current and aligned to your employer’s present (and future) needs.
Lesson 7: Disrupt Your Business Model Before Others Do It for You
In 2015, Simplilearn took a bold step to disrupt its own business model. We realized that physical classroom instruction placed limits on what we could offer our learners. Therefore, we took our blended learning ecosystem completely online: we eliminated in-person classroom training as an option in our courses, but we preserved the person-to-person aspect of learner-instructor and group interactions in our live virtual classrooms.
In the era of digitization and digital transformation, you need to look at how your personal business model can be disrupted. It’s almost a sure bet that if you don’t plan to adapt your skills to changing technology, other candidates will. Whether you seek to be better at the job you’re doing or want to enter a new career area, be sure that you get the skills you need to take you where you need to go.
Lesson 8: Keep Learning to Keep Moving Forward
Simplilearn evolved a completely scalable business model. This allowed us to expand our business to support learners and enterprises worldwide. We’ve been able to leverage our growth in scale to enable growth in the scope of our offerings.
People that grow their skills create their futures. They have a greater ability to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves and more options to weather downturns when times become difficult. Having the right digital economy skills (such as cloud computing) is a crucial part of that strategy.
Lesson 9: Look for Ways to Make Your New Skills Known
Since its start, Simplilearn has been active in its industry associations. We’ve made sure to have a visible public profile and have participated in public-sector programs in EdTech. Our view is that the more people who know what we do and how we can serve them, the more people we can help.
When you improve and increase your digital economy skills, be sure to tell everyone. Your employer needs to know the skills you offer to make them more successful, and they may want to tell the other firms and people in your business’s ecosystem what new capabilities you have created for them. You might even look at gaining new digital marketing skills to help get your word out!
Lesson 10: Make Sure Your Employer Sees That They Need You as Much as You Need Them
Simplilearn has formed many partnerships with technology companies, educational institutions, thought leaders, and others. We also treat our relationships with our learners as partnerships. We know that when we provide a benefit to our partners, we will earn benefits in return. We also know that as our partnerships continue over time, each side will be better able to anticipate the other’s needs and be less likely to end the partnership.
When you enter into an employer-employee relationship, remember that how long that relationship lasts and how much it benefits your business will depend in large part on the benefit you offer your employer. You should make sure they recognize that you are working to help them succeed and then behave in your work and career, so they always feel they made the right decision in hiring you.
Learning from Our Lessons
In our ten years, Simplilearn has learned a lot about upskilling, e-learning, and blended learning. We’ve applied these lessons to how we structure and deliver our courses, to make them the most effective for helping learners in their own career journeys through upskilling.
We hope that you can take your own lessons from what we have learned and apply them to your career. You can learn skills in data science, AI and machine learning, digital marketing, and other areas. Simplilearn stands ready to assist you with upskilling through our blended learning programs.
