Reinventing Learning For Hybrid Work: Salesforce Raises Its Game

“People are reimagining learning and connecting in this new hybrid world because learning the skills isn’t quite enough. You need the coaching, you need the mentorship, and you need the community to take you to that next level.”

Kristine Lande, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Community at Salesforce

Many companies plan to continue remote or hybrid work into the future, but this raises new challenges for employee learning and development. Today, employees report fewer opportunities to develop their skills in remote work. Salesforce cites new research that shows 59% of employees say they’ve had less access to workplace learning since the pandemic.

In remote or hybrid work, old ways of learning will become obsolete – employees can no longer have impromptu hallway conversations with their colleagues, swivel around in their chair to get help from their managers, or grab coffee with a mentor at their company. This means companies need to rethink how they accelerate employee learning and career development. And the stakes are high – investing in employee learning helps companies retain top talent, improve productivity, and increase employee engagement.

For readers previously unfamiliar with Salesforce’s training efforts, a brief review may be helpful. Salesforce has traditionally offered its free training programs to mixed groups of its own and its customers’ employees.  As a result, people looking for work in the Salesforce “ecosystem” could make useful contacts across both its own and its customers’ workforces. It was also anticipated that potentially useful relationships could spring up among trainees at different experience levels.

Salesforce subsequently saw an opportunity to bring a more strategic focus to its training efforts, and established a separate “Trailhead” unit to do that. Career owners were called “trailblazers,” and Salesforce customers were offered a product to help them see the full picture of an employee’s training progression. The product also allowed a company’s employees to see their own Salesforce training record in a software platform called myTrailhead, and allowed companies to add their own proprietary training to that platform.

Trailhead subsequently expanded the free training it offered, not only to keep up with Salesforce’s evolving software systems, but also to provide additional training opportunities, most notably in what are commonly called “soft skills” in empathy, listening, leadership, and the like. It also sought to promote a sense of community among trailblazers through regional (or more recently virtual) meetings, encouraging mentoring relationships between established and less experienced community members, and making potential job candidates visible to both Salesforce and its customers. That expansion has been the subject of two earlier articles, on the training and the surrounding ecosystem.

Now, Salesforce has raised its game through two recent announcements aimed at responding to the remote or hybrid work arrangements described earlier. Both are built on the observation that employees moved quickly to work, learn and collaborate from their kitchens and living rooms, but that legacy technology wasn’t designed to facilitate remote learning and connection with colleagues. Taken together, the two announcements serve to reconnect the previously separate Trailhead and Salesforce development efforts.

Salesforce Learning Paths, announced on April 28, 2021, empowers employees to access on-the-job learning directly in the flow of work. It builds on evidence that 80% of employees find it easier to retain information they learn on the job instead of through formal training. In turn, companies now need to find ways to provide on-the-job learning remotely. Through Salesforce Learning Paths, those companies can now transform what once required a full week of in-person training into small, almost seamless, moments of learning throughout the day.

As Heather Conklin, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Trailhead elaborated, the challenge is to bring three major trends together: individuals working from home, and wanting to succeed in a work-from-anywhere world; managers looking out for their teams, and the overall contribution their teams can make; and companies looking for digital transformation and greater agility. She described the new challenge as responding to people’s expressed preference for on-the-job learning and “bringing the magic of Trailhead to Salesforce and its customers.”

I was referred to two success stories that pointed to the full potential of Conklin’s “magic.”

Tony Nguyen was invited to join his first Salesforce meeting by a friend. He reports on what happened next:

“I met people who would later become my coaches,…