While COVID-19 led to drastic changes in the way organisations work, it also impacted the way in which employees learn and grow. Enterprise learners are now digitally dispersed and have an increased appetite for leveraging collaboration platforms to engage, learn and grow. In response to this, Skillsoft Corp. is releasing the new Skillsoft
Percipio for Microsoft Teams App, intended to empower organisations
to foster a sense of community by enabling employees to access assignments, discuss important takeaways, and share courses they’ve discovered and found helpful – all within the flow of work.
This announcement is the newest milestone in a partnership transforming workplace education between Microsoft and Skillsoft. Skillsoft customers can now access the full Percipio learning platform in the social, collaborative environment that Microsoft Teams provides. Bringing Percipio into the Microsoft Teams universe has benefits for learning and development (L&D) professionals, and for learners themselves. For example, L&D professionals can create team- and cohort-based learning experiences around Percipio’s role- and skill-based learning paths, called Aspire Journeys.
Pandemic-era employees who are satisfied with their social connectivity are two-to-three times more likely to maintain or improve productivity, according to the Boston Consulting Group. It’s no wonder that more than one-third of chief human resource officers told PwC they are investing in new tools to support virtual teams, with a focus on collaboration. Microsoft Teams and the 145 million worldwide users it connects daily are a key example of how workers can learn together – even when “together” has a new meaning.
Apratim Purakayastha, chief technology officer at Skillsoft, believes Percipio for Teams is a solution to a long-standing problem, saying: “A skills gap existed long before the pandemic and digital learning is more crucial than ever to building operating-model resilience. As organisations work to bridge this skills gap, providing easy access to valuable learning tools should be a top priority. Percipio for Teams provides easy access to collaborative learning tools without having to leave the flow of work.”
With more than 97 per cent of RELX’s global workforce of 33,000 operating remotely since the onset of the pandemic, the provider of information-based analytics and decision tools had to be intentional about developing collaborative learning experiences that can reunite learners in the flow of work. “In piloting Percipio for Teams, we aimed to recreate the organic interaction one would experience when sitting with peers in a classroom, while also cultivating an environment where learners could build skills, apply them in real-time and share insights with one another – all without ever leaving Microsoft Teams,” said Mary Glowacka, global lead, digital learning, RELX. “Within weeks of launching our pilot, we saw learners from across RELX’s four businesses interacting as we’d hoped – fully in line with our objective to enable communities of practice where colleagues from around the world collaborate to learn, share ideas, and solve challenges together.”
