Ramesh Ramani, CEO and President at ExpertusONE chats about the gaps in learning and development that modern organizations face while taking us through ExpertusONE’s latest integrated skills platform:
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Hi Ramesh, tell us more about ExpertusONE and your role.
I am the CEO and co-founder of ExpertusOne, a modern learning management system (LMS) provider. A lifelong entrepreneur, I’ve led several early-stage companies through successful growth before dedicating the last 20+ years to developing and growing the ExpertusOne offering. My mission at ExpertusOne is to bring fully integrated, organization-led learning to enterprises, allowing them to intentionally shape their workforce by identifying and delivering training needs.
As organizations adapt to the rapid digitization of products and practices, workplace skills and learning requirements are shifting significantly and at speed. As ExpertusOne’s CEO my goal is to drive the overall strategic direction of the company to provide superior support and value to our customers in shaping a skills landscape that aligns with business needs today and in the future. I do this by ensuring our products, services, operational practices, and guiding principles work together to make corporate learning more accessible, appealing, and relevant.
We’d love to hear about your new integrated skills platform and how it’s set to be an enabler for HR teams and businesses looking to upskill their teams?
The new integrated skills platform is a milestone in learning management that allows organizations to strategically upskill their employees and shape their future workforce.
Skills development is a daunting initiative for most HR teams. The process involves auditing skills across the organization, assessing what skills are lacking, identifying learners to upskill and then matching them up with appropriate courses.
The new platform automates these processes using AI in several valuable ways. Firstly, we have a library of more than 25,000 skills that span all industries with the ability to tag courses and training modules seamlessly using AI. Next, we help leaders understand the skills in their organization and infer which skills to develop and find courses to that by automatically generating skills assessments for leaders. Additionally, the new platform supports organizations intentionally shaping their workforce. As well as helping leaders identify core skills requirements using skill-based recommendations, the platform enables them to create skill cohorts to manage the upskilling or reskilling of identified learners. Finally, it supports HR teams and learners throughout the learning journey using sophisticated skills verification metrics to ensure skills are bedded in and used in practice.
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What are some of the main gaps in training today that businesses need to actively fix?
The pressure on organizations to constantly up their productivity could actually be holding them back. Prioritizing training means enabling employees to take the time to train, and, by extension, to flex their new skills. For learners this takes time, courage, and some trial and error. For that to happen, a culture shift that values training needs to take place and be felt by employees.
How can AI powered learning engines help businesses with their training and upskilling goals more effectively?
The first thing to note is that although AI is known for its ability to automate tasks, we don’t want to take people out of the loop. Even when we ask AI to look forwards – predicting skill gaps, for example – it can only do so with past data. We still need people to ultimately decide the direction and shape of skills and training.
That said, AI can help do a lot of the heavy lifting. For example, at the start of the process, helping organizations identify the skills they have, those they need, and then mapping required skills to employees and jobs before matching skill gaps with relevant courses. It’s an unbelievably complex process and given the pace of change, one that keeps shifting. AI is valuable in crunching data fast and spotting patterns to maximize training opportunities. AI can also help organizations accelerate the content or modes of learning to ramp up learning fast and in a way that meets the needs of a new generation of learners.
These are the main ways AI helps us untangle the different strands of learning and development and supercharge the skills revolution, enabling HR leaders to proactively transform their workforce to fit the organization’s strategic goals.
What are the five thoughts you’d like to highlight around building robust upskilling programs?
Upskilling is a multidisciplinary initiative. It requires backing and input from the leadership and other areas of the business to enable learning and development (L&D) leaders to focus efforts where they are most needed and will have the greatest impact.
Training is one side of the coin, the other is talent acquisition (TA). When should you hire and when should you upskill? Leaders need to involve the TA team as part of their L&D strategic thinking. There’s a balance to be struck between the benefits of hiring versus building those skills in-house.
Carefully consider the scope of any upskilling program. Don’t try to boil the ocean. Better to select a group intentionally and focus on specific outcomes for that part of the business than attempt an organization-wide initiative with a sub-par brief.
Drilling down further, cherry picking the right people is also pivotal to success. A platform like ours can help provide insights into which employees are the most promising candidates for upskilling based on their existing hard and soft skills.
Ensure accountability with the learners, managers, and leaders. One part of this is taking advantage of integrated reporting and monitoring tools to ensure that key learning milestones are being hit, but what’s more important is the ongoing human-led verification of knowledge and skills, which can then be fed back into the system to ensure that every employee’s capabilities are accurately reflected.
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As CEO, Ramesh sets the overall strategic direction for the company − ensuring that products, organizational structure, operational practices and guiding principles work together to deliver superior value. A skilled entrepreneur, Ramesh has led many early-stage companies through successful growth. He’s adept at evaluating business opportunities and structuring companies to profitably address market needs. In particular, he excels at forming teams, developing talent and leveraging global alliances. Ramesh is a graduate of Oklahoma State University.
ExpertusONE, is an award-winning learning technology company based in Silicon Valley. The company’s flagship offering, ExpertusONE, is a dynamic cloud-based learning management system (LMS) that seamlessly supports continuous learning across all modes – formal, informal, social and collaborative.