Jardine Matheson Finds Silver Lining in Workforce Learning
- By Sheila Lam
- August 03, 2021
Everyone knows that the economic contraction driven by COVID-19 is forcing many businesses to reduce their workforce. But at the same time, it is encouraging companies to adopt technologies to replace job roles.
This so-called “double-disruption” for workers was highlighted in The Future of Jobs Report 2020 released by the World Economic Forum (WEF). While it accelerated ten years of workforce transformation into one, it also closed the window of opportunity for workers to reskill and upskill. Within five years, 50% of employees will need reskilling to remain in their roles, the report warned.
The grim outlook for workers and financial uncertainty for business leaders are shared by many, including Jardine Matheson. But the Asia-based Group that was founded in 1832 with a broad portfolio of businesses across the region took a different route than most.
Searching for the silver lining
“Last year during COVID-19, most businesses probably cut their learning and development budget. We didn’t; in fact, we doubled up,” says Peter Attfield, chief talent & learning officer at Jardine Matheson.
The Group owns a collective of companies in a wide range of businesses, including motor vehicles, property investment and development, food retailing, health and beauty, home furnishings, luxury hotels, and engineering and construction.
Despite profit being down in 2020, Jardine Matheson committed to its philosophy of taking a long term perspective on employee and company growth. So, it invested in a learning initiative, and “we had this initiative called ‘Silver Linings’,” says Attfield.
Silver Linings aims to help employees in lockdown, quarantine, or under travel restrictions to use their time better, improving their core competencies and skills. The first step was to offer a significant amount of learning materials to employees for free or at heavily subsidized prices. In turn, this drove an appetite to learn.
“We want to help them use the extra time they have meaningfully. We had a massive increase of participation in learning because of that,” says Attfield.
Making the learning experience connected
Silver Linings is only one of the initiatives of the Group’s consolidated efforts to broaden learning experiences for its 15,000 knowledge workers in the region.
While Jardine Matheson operates a diversified portfolio of businesses, there is a lot of shared demand for skills, like data analytics, and strategic priorities, like sustainability and diversity. Aiming to consolidate these demands under a Group-wide learning experience, the company introduced “Connect” 18 months ago.
The Connect digital learning experience platform (LXP) offers three kinds of learning material. In addition to the learning curriculum programs, it also provides curated learning pathways. These use a wide variety of learning material, including videos, lectures, articles, and interactive self-assessment, to help employees achieve proficiency in specific skills. The LXP also provides access to digital learning libraries and external publications like Harvard Business Review.
LearnFest to drive business competitiveness
Attfield observes that the WEF findings highlighted an urgency for employees to reskill and the necessity for employers to foster learning to remain competitive.
“The shelf life of professional skills these days is only about five years or 50% of what it used to be. If we don’t continuously reskill and upskill, we all get out of date faster,” he adds.
Connect has also become a platform for Jardine Matheson to deliver a consistent message about upskilling and reskilling through cultivating a lifelong learning and growth mindset. One of the latest initiatives to do this is the first Group-wide annual learning conference, LearnFest.
Designed, planned, and funded during the pandemic and conducted in June 2021, LearnFest was a five-day digital learning conference, consisting of 52 individual sessions. Attfield says it was Jardine Matheson’s most successful learning event, attracting 5,000 participants from 34 countries, with each participant joining eight live learning sessions on average.
Each day had a dedicated topic that was aligned with the Group’s different business strategies. These included learning how to learn, customer centricity in action, accelerating entrepreneurialism, new ways of working, and future skills like AI, data, and robotics.
Attfield adds that all these sessions are now available on Connect, creating 600 hours of learning material for its regional employees. LearnFest also accelerated the total number of learning participants to 10,000 in 2021, a more than 30 times increase from only 300+ in 2018.
Calculating the ROI for learning
Jardine Matheson is not the only business investing in learning during tough times. Research showed those who took the forward-looking step to invest in learning are reaping dividends. A study from Avado saw 63% of the surveyed 1,000 executive leaders in the Asia Pacific reporting a stable revenue or growth over the last year after increasing their training budget.
The returns for Jardine Matheson also appear promising in its latest half-year results. Although business is still behind pre-COVID-19 figures, the Group’s underlying profit was up 65% from 2020.
"There is a definite opportunity for employers to invest more in their people to diversify the workforce and move the conversation beyond skills. The businesses that remain competitive in our recovering economy will be those that embrace a strategic approach to the development of capabilities, not just answer the challenge through recruitment,” says Mark Creighton, the chief executive officer at Avado.
Sheila Lam is the contributing editor of DigitalWorkforceTrends. Covering IT for 20 years as a journalist, she has witnessed the emergence, hype, and maturity of different technologies but is always excited about what's next. You can reach her at [email protected].
Image credit: iStockphoto/Yuliia Kutsaieva