The training and development of employees on new technologies, tools and processes can contribute to building the new landscape of business. It is now a well-established fact that there is no value in building a business around new systems and technologies if the organization cannot nurture the skills needed to extract benefits from them.

And while upskilling and reskilling initiatives are on the rise, it is necessary to set a benchmark against which employee performances can be measured. Training providers are stepping in to deliver digitized training and are helping organizations realize not just the Return on Investment (RoI), but also the Return on Expectation (RoE).

What is Return on Expectation (RoE)?

By clearly defining objectives and expectations and connecting them with tangible business goals, an organization can align a training program to deliver outcomes that resonate with its key stakeholders. Thus, the results achieved can directly correspond to the results expected by the stakeholders, while realistically achieving the objectives of training.

RoE in the Training Domain

RoE is used as a metric in learning and development (L&D) to measure the success of a training program in meeting its objectives. It gauges the accomplishment of objectives on the basis of changes in motivation and performance of the employees once they complete a course. Hence, RoE is an indicator of the effectiveness of a training program and the value it adds to the overall performance and productivity of an organization.

How do eLearning programs fulfil the learning expectations of employees and organizations?

eLearning course methodology zeroes in on the expectations of the employees and organizations to achieve higher RoE. eLearning training programs take into account that employees have expectations from learning and reset these expectations according to the learning requirements of the organizations. Subsequently, the training facilitates the fulfilment of these expectations through custom designed learning content and activities around these expectations.

What learning model is employed to gauge the Return on Expectation for organizations?

The concept of RoE gained importance when Don Kirkpatrick shared his thoughts on training evaluation in November 1959. He emphasized on four parameters to set expectations and measure outcomes of a learning intervention. eLearning initiatives help organizations determine their RoE through the following levels of the Kirkpatrick’s Model.

Level 1 – Reaction

At this level, the eLearning development methodology checks on how much the employees will react favorably to the learning event. For this, a Base Value (BV) is taken from the organization based upon the existing knowledge and skill level of the employees prior to the training. Subsequently, organizations are also asked to provide a Target Value Achieved (TVA) which defines the level of preparation of the employees to efficiently do the job post training. Before employees undergo the e-learning course, the Expected Difference (ED) between where the employees currently are and where they should reach post training is determined by subtracting BV from TVA.

Level 2 – Learning

Here, the e-learning program checks if the participants are acquiring the intended knowledge, skills and attitudes during their participation in the learning event. The employees undergoing the training are checked at regular intervals to find the Actual Value Achieved (AVA) in terms of the skills and knowledge they are acquiring while attending the learning event.

Level 3 – Behavior

Once the employees have completed the eLearning course, organizations can check the degree to which participants are ready to apply what they have learned during the e-learning course when they are back on the job. They can do this by subtracting AVA from BV. This will be the Actual Difference (AD) in their skills, knowledge, behavior and attitude before and after training.

Level 4 – Results

Finally, organizations can gauge the degree to which the targeted outcomes have been achieved as a result of the learning event and subsequent reinforcement. This will be their RoE and can be calculated as the percentage of ED: (AD / ED) * 100 = RoE

Overall, the concept of RoE entails capturing of significant data that allows you to highlight the effectiveness of a training program. Training professionals ask questions pertinent to a training intervention to form expectations of the stakeholders. This provides clarity to the organization regarding the impact of training by transforming general expectations to observable and measurable results that adds value to overall business processes and productivity.

Featured in CXO Today

While on one side corporates have been voicing their concern about a talent crunch or shortage of talent; similarly, candidates have been finding it difficult to get a job. What is it that corporates are looking for and why are candidates not qualifying? When organizations mention the paucity of talent, it often boils down to the shortage of talent that can hit the ground running. But how can one become the talent that corporates are looking for? Turning to educational institutions has been futile due to their dated and sluggish response to enhancing their syllabus offerings with more new-age courses. What’s the alternative? Is there a better solution out there? This search for a solution has resulted in the Hire-Train-Deploy model. Leveraging this model, candidates can become “job ready”. The Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD) solution is a highly customized model that corporates have been adopting wherein hands-on domain-centric experience is offered to candidates, to get them started in their roles.

What makes Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD) impactful?

The Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD) model takes control of the key steps in talent acquisition, i.e., Sourcing, Screening, Hiring, Training, and Deploying. Training in this model creates output similar to apprenticeship programs but at a much faster pace. Having candidates shoulder-surf while others work, goes only so far. However, in well-implemented training, special emphasis is laid on practical training to hone candidates’ skills with related technical instruction (RTI). The model plays a crucial role in accelerating candidates’ journey from campus to corporate. Its “hire first, train later” approach has proven instrumental in motivating candidates and showcasing that the company is willing to invest and nurture them right from Day 1.

Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD)zeroes in on building domain-specific and platform-based skills.

What it means for employees

• Good opportunity for entry-level candidates to accelerate their campus-to-corporate journey
• Helps them reskill and upskill themselves as per the market demands
• Offers equal opportunities to a diverse pool of candidates to spearhead their professional goals

Gains for the employer

• A perfect way to tap into the young minds that come prepared for their jobs
• Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD) relies purely on the outcome, bringing quality candidates to the forefront
• Saves the workforce from becoming proverbial dinosaurs by helping them catch up to the upcoming standards

With the right Hire-Train-Deploy (HTD) partners, candidates can become the sought-after talent and for employers, it comes in handy to co-create a tailor-made talent acquisition strategy that helps bridge the gap by sourcing, screening, training, and onboarding talent for a robust workforce.

Featured in India Today

Here are some challenges faced by businesses seeking to hire top talent and the solutions to face such challenges.

Until a decade ago, the time invested in a job was seen as a vital factor that determined employee loyalty and increased candidates’ appeal to future employers. Long-tenured employees typically worked for the same employer for more than five years and according to the then-prevailing narrative, potential employers would reprove the practice of not sticking to one role, or even disregarded job applicants for not being able to hold down a position for long enough. In such an employer-driven market, corporates were willing to turn down professionals simply because job-hopping signaled a lack of commitment. But, the tables are turning and perspectives are changing in today’s candidate-driven market.

As we begin to see continuous evolution in the work environment, phenomena like job-hopping and offer-shopping are on the rise, and businesses seeking to hire millennials and Generation Z understand that the concept of job permanency will no longer apply to the coming generations of professionals. Instead, the new-age workforce will seek to pick the best work opportunity that offers growth as well as flexibility.

And why shouldn’t they? Several organisations have transitioned from in-person to remote positions, dismissed their employees or have revamped processes to adapt to disruptions like technology change, newer ways of working and the pandemic.

Employers surely recognise that the present-day talent is going to change jobs more often today than in the past, and have come to terms with the rise in frequency of this change. This acceptance allows businesses to remain open to a larger pool of talent in the current candidate-driven market where candidates have the upper hand due to trends such as the Great Resignation and demand-supply mismatch of skilled resources.

And though these trends continue to make recruiters anxious, what makes it worse is being turned down by potential employees who interviewed with you but eventually chose to join hands with a competing business. It is at times like these when the organisations take a step back to devise an alternate plan.

Some may take the extreme measure of blacklisting the drop-out candidates, while some may re-start the entire process of recruitment again. What would you do to attract top talent and ensure their joining? A great way to achieve your goal is to start by understanding and eliminating the obstacles in the way.

The high rate of candidate dropouts during the recruitment process today invariably indicates that finding a good resource is as critical as getting them to join the organisation. Candidates today sit down for multiple job interviews, field offers and select a favorable prospect – one they will leverage to negotiate terms of employment and pay raise with their current or potential employer.

According to research from staffing company Robert Half, nearly 32% of professionals in 2021 wanted to change jobs for higher salary and career advancement.

Candidates are clearly reflecting on what is important to them – a high rank, growth prospects, remuneration, and the opportunity to work with leaders. They use these aspirations to find better offers and evaluate them when the offer is made. Some even shop for offers to sharpen their interview skills and groom themselves for bigger brighter roles, while some may simply skip showing up on the committed day and time.

And while offer shopping is an overall sign of an expanding business horizon and booming job opportunities, it can be a frustrating phase for a company that’s unable to land the best talent.

For business, a candidate who accepts the offer only to pull back at the last stage is not just a massive waste of time but a moral setback too. According to Glassdoor, one in every six candidates (or 17.3% candidates) drops job offers made to them! In the technology sector, this number grows to one in five candidates (or 19.4%)

As a business, you may end up wasting funds, energy and bandwidth of resources, only to find yourself stagnant and now questioning the integrity of future candidates.

Here are some other challenges faced by businesses seeking to hire top talent:

• Weak employer branding in a noisy recruiter market
• Shortage of skilled resources for your business needs
• Failure to quickly, accurately and fairly test candidates’ skills
• Candidate’s choice of another employer over you for higher salary, better profile or location proximity
• Counter-offer and growth opportunity from candidate’s current employer

In the face of such indecisiveness, ghosting and colossal wastage of effort and time, companies must determine ways to engage the candidates and ensure that they join.

Increasing the offer-to-joining ratio

A majority of companies prefer not to divulge their offer decline data because of its unfavorable impact on employer branding. And yet with limited reporting of drop-out cases, the percentage comes close to a substantial 20 percent.

According to industry standards, the offer-to-joining ratio stands somewhere at 68-80 percent for lateral hires and 24-36 percent for campus recruits. However, some companies have identified solutions to address and prevent post-offer dropouts:

1. Empathy-driven Onboarding Process – With Covid-19 compelling employees to work remotely, recruiters must reimagine onboarding to work virtually. Instead of virtualising their existing onboarding programmes, enterprises must reinvent and redesign onboarding to concentrate on empathy and engagement to make new recruits feel connected to the business.

2. Seamless Candidate Experience – Conversations struck with a candidate before selection and onboarding are part of the ‘courtship period’ where the right messaging, consistent behavior and gratitude for the candidate’s time and effort can go a long way. This is where the talent acquisition team can convey the company story and highlight the culture, thereby reflecting transparency and building trust during the hiring process.

3. Non-traditional Value Proposition – It is important for enterprises to align their value proposition with the organisational culture, vision, mission and values. Companies must build and deliver value proposition that prioritizes employee engagement, flexibility, wellness benefits, diversity and inclusion, and different ways of career advancement through professional learning and development.

4. Upskilling and Reskilling – Due to the surge in technology adoption across industries, the new-age workforce prioritises learning new skills and future-proofing their careers by devoting a significant portion of their time to learning and development. According to Harvard Business Review, about 82 percent of employees and 60 percent of HR directors agree that workers must hone current skill sets or acquire new ones once a year to maintain competitive advantage in the job market.

Companies can pique the job applicants’ interest by supporting this aspiration and offering upskilling and reskilling opportunities through advanced training programmes. This innovative move will help businesses position themselves as stronger employers, thereby gaining and retaining the attention of the brightest workers.

Adding transparent and regular communication to the above mix will ensure that you are always able to maintain a candidate pipeline that’s already interested in your company. Convey all updates to potential employees and share accurate results with them so they can align their expectations.

Businesses that wish to source, hire and deploy suitable talent must be able to comprehend the priorities of the future workforce. They should embrace the new work models and develop a workforce that is eager to learn, grow and advance in their domains. This will motivate and engage existing workers, while inspiring and gaining the attention of the best new recruits who can then take your business to the next level.

Why Data Science Matters

Data Science is the field of study that combines domain expertise, programming skills, and knowledge of mathematics and statistics to extract meaningful insights from data. An increasing number of enterprises today are realizing the importance of data science, AI, and machine learning. Regardless of their size or industry, organizations that wish to remain competitive in the age of big data need to efficiently develop and implement data science capabilities.

Starting a tech company, building a good product, and gaining traction have become easier thanks to improved connectivity, declining costs of cloud storage and computing, and easy access to distribution platforms for reaching target audience. As a result, the time taken for a product to reach 100 million monthly active users has reduced drastically.

Higher production of digital devices, internet connectivity and increased time spent online – all have contributed to generating huge amounts of data and consequently sparked interest in mining this data to derive key insights for business intelligence. A company’s ability to compete is now measured by how successfully it applies analytics to vast, unstructured data sets across disparate sources to drive product innovation.

Why Data Scientists Are Needed

Every time a person posts a status update on Facebook, tags a friend on Twitter, searches for something on Google or shares snapshots on Instagram, they add to the vast amount of data. With more and more data being captured across the globe than ever before, the demand for expertise to extract valuable and actionable insights from that data is going to only grow by leaps and bounds. But companies are not content with merely collecting the data. They want to wisely sort and study the growing collections of data and learn the context surrounding it to enjoy a greater understanding of their customers. This is where Data Scientists step in to help them get clarity and direction today.

Data Enables Businesses to Be Proactive in Growing Their Profits

Data Scientists can help business leaders become increasingly proactive in connecting data trends to opportunities for higher profits. It is helpful if the professionals working with the data have intimate understanding of the business they cater to. Companies that constantly overlook the trends emphasized by data not only miss out on chances to boost their profits, they could also lose out on chances to augment their brand.

Let us take a look at the use cases that require Data Science knowledge in each of the following domains:

1. Data Science in Marketing: Data Science in Marketing helps extracts meaningful information giving marketers the right insights. These insights may cover customer intent, experience, behavior, etc. that would help the marketers efficiently optimizing their marketing strategies and derive maximum revenue. Following are some examples of how data science is used in Marketing.

• Marketing Budget Optimization
• Marketing to the Right Audience
• Identifying the Right Channels
• Matching Marketing Strategies with Customers
• Lead Targeting
• Advanced Lead Scoring
• Customer Personas and Profiling
• Content Strategy Creation
• Sentiment Analysis
• Pricing Strategy
• Customer Communication
• Social Media Marketing
• Ad Offerings
• Email Campaigns

2. Data Science in Sales: Data science brings growth, improvements, efficiency, and effectiveness in sales. Thus, the collective dream of all those dealing with sales — to sell more with fewer efforts becomes real with the use of Data Science methods and technologies. Following are some examples of how data science is used in Sales:

• Chatbots instead of salespeople
• Customer Sentiment Analysis
• Maximization of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Future Sales Prediction
• Churn Prevention
• Cross-sell Recommendations
• Price Optimization

3. Data Science in Human Resources (HR): HR departments are met with challenges when integrating intelligent systems into their workflows. They are tasked to manage the organization’s employees — hiring, firing, resolving disputes, payroll, benefits, and more. Many of these tasks seem ripe for automation with data science, however, are often met with subjective and interesting challenges.

Below are some useful ways in which data science can be applied in HR:

• Data-driven Recruitment
• Employee Performance analysis
• Retention Management
• People Analytics
• Organizational Network Analytics
• Chatbots for Recruitment
• Employee Churn Models
• Recommender System for Training Courses

4. Data Science in Finance: Financial institutions are spending huge amounts of money to get exclusive rights to data. By having more information, they can construct better models and get ahead. Thus, the most valuable commodities are no longer the analysts themselves or the quants that help design these algorithms. It’s the data itself. Below are some use cases of Data Science in Banking and Finance:

• Detect and prevent fraud
• Manage customer data more efficiently
• Enable data-driven risk assessment
• Leverage customer analytics and personalization
• Anomaly detection
• Algorithmic trading

Essential Competencies for Data Scientists

To be able to successfully deliver Data Science insights and furthermore support its functions, there are certain skills that a professional must be trained in:

Below are the most essential skills and components of data science:

• Mathematics, probability and statistics
• Programming 
• Machine Learning
• Deep learning
• Feature Engineering
• Natural Language Processing
• Data Visualization
• Big Data and Deployment
• Business Acumen

How to Complete a Data Science Project Successfully

Data Science entails a set of processes that gather, analyze, interpret and present data in meaningful ways. It begins by understanding the business, setting goals, collecting the data and then cleaning it to make revelations and business decisions based on refined findings.

These processes come together to make what can be called the ‘Data Science Way’ of solving problems. It is a full circle, as every problem leads to a new discovery that throws up new problems. Ultimately, it is a continuous process of discovery and re-discovery of new insights and challenges in the wake of the insights presented.

In India, nearly 93,000 jobs in Data Science were vacant towards the end of August 2020. 
70% of these openings were for positions with under five years of experience. According to analysts, India will have over 11 million vacancies by 2026. 

The supply-demand mismatch is costing us thousands of unfilled positions yearly. This gap can be filled with the right corporate training programs to upskill candidates with the specialized skills required. 

To learn more about Data Science and training programs, visit NLL Academy’s Data Science Center of Excellence. 

Salesforce carved a niche for itself in the CRM marketplace by introducing itself as a software-as-a-service or SaaS company and then promoting the concept of a cloud- based platform for software. Founded in 1999 by American internet entrepreneur and former Oracle VP Marc Benioff, Salesforce was launched with the intent of making software purchases easier. It achieved this by offering a platform where businesses could subscribe to CRM products, as needed. Salesforce made it convenient for companies to use its software as the cloud-based platform was secure, easier to scale, faster to run and more economical to host.

As Salesforce continues to add new products, features and third-party apps on its CRM platform, the ecosystem continues to expand and offer some of the best work opportunities in the realm of technology. One such coveted role is that of a Salesforce Developer. Read on to learn why you should opt to build a career in Salesforce Development.

1. Ranked as the world’s #1 CRM provider
Salesforce has been named as the best CRM provider by International Data Corporation for the eighth consecutive year. Over the years, it has grown its market share and amplified its revenue more than any other CRM vendor. Today, it is the market share leader in IDC segments for sales applications, marketing applications, customer service applications, model-driven application platforms, and enterprise community applications. With an average year-on-year growth of 25%, Salesforce gives you the opportunity to be associated with the world’s most prestigious software and elevate you resume.

2. 129% growth in job postings
Did you know that Salesforce Developer has featured amongst Indeed’s top 10 best jobs with a 129% growth in the number of postings? With its consistent popularity amongst enterprises of all sizes, Salesforce development has grown as an in- demand job skill. Industries beyond IT and ITeS are now seeking the design and development expertize of certified Salesforce Developers as they can tailor the tool to meet the distinct requirements of a business. The overall number of job openings in Salesforce is expected to reach 4.2 million by 2024, offering extensive work opportunities in this field.

3. Annual pay package of $1,24,000
The average compensation of a trained Salesforce Developer is about $1,24,000 per annum. Depending on the project exposure of the developer, the pay may increase. According to Indeed, 70% of Salesforce Developers in the US say that they are satisfied with their salaries and are paid adequately as per the cost of living in their area.

4. Multiple career paths to choose from
Salesforce offers a variety of career roadmaps. While the role of a Salesforce developer usually entails developing customized solutions and writing codes, there is always scope for change. You can grow to assume the role of a Salesforce Architect and pursue solution architecture or platform architecture. Employers, too, support Salesforce professionals when they choose to diversify their role as enterprises often require Salesforce specialists who are focused on more than coding. You also have the option of becoming a Salesforce consultant. Your knowledge and experience as a Salesforce Developer never goes waste, it only broadens your perspective and helps add value if you opt for another role.

5. Engagement with a growth-oriented community
Ohana, the Salesforce community is a highly collaborative and welcoming ecosystem comprising employees, customers, partners and developers. Being part of this group facilitates professional advancement as you will be constantly growing, innovating and receiving ample support and guidance from a vast network of professionals. Today, Ohana is a deep-seated support system that may be nurtured within Salesforce but is extended to everyone connected to it, encouraging engagement and collaboration.

With businesses in dire need for skilled Salesforce Developers, it is vital for professionals to take training and acquire a certification in Salesforce Development. This will guarantee that you not only get the right knowledge and hands-on experience with the platform, but will also ensure a bright lucrative career in Salesforce.

Have a question? Reach out to us to improve how your employees learn, upgrade their skills and adapt to your exclusive transformation needs.