By Kyle Clark, Enterprise Content Strategist

Coursera’s Essential Skills Map identifies the skills of tomorrow for key functions, future-proofing your workforce while helping your business keep pace with digital transformation.

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Technology is rapidly transforming the nature of jobs and skills. Partnering with over 1,900 companies globally through Coursera for Business takes us deep into the evolving skills landscape, where the increasing rate of digital change is reducing the half-life of skills. An ongoing challenge for companies is to reliably identify the future skills they will need. The World Economic Forum points to a ‘growing skills instability’ and estimates that the core skills required to perform most roles will change by 42% (on average) by 2022. More than ever, employees must walk a tightrope between improving current skills and acquiring new skills. Companies need to anticipate and invest in developing future skills that will matter while also steering investment away from skills that will become obsolete. Those who linger will increasingly be disrupted by agile, digitally transformed players vying for a piece of their market share.

To address the skills transformation problem, we have developed an Essential Skills Map for Digital Transformation – our recommendations of the critical skills you need to compete and succeed in your industry. Our Essential Skills Map is based on an exhaustive analysis of data from millions of Coursera learners on trending and future skills, from AI to design thinking, that key functions in your organization need. In other words, these are the skills employees in critical teams should be learning to help you stay ahead of the competition.

Essential skills by function (no one size fit all)
Coursera’s Essential Skills Map is based on learner enrollments, performance data, and insights from over 40 million learners globally combined with our experience partnering with over 1,900 enterprise customers from around the world. Our algorithms determine the top skills learners in specific roles are pursuing. We then add insights from our content experts and enterprise partners to distill the data into recommendations by skill and function. The final result is the Essential Skills Map, which displays the top three recommended skills in business, technology, and data that learners need across specific business functions.

Competency mapping made easy
We hear time and time again from our customers that creating competency and skill maps for multiple functions is expensive and time-intensive. Even worse, many of our customers’ competency maps become out of date soon after launch. But companies need some way to understand skills across functions in order to achieve their goals, especially since digital transformation requires organization-wide changes. The Essential Skills Map solves for the initial heavy lifting of competency mapping by helping you pinpoint future skills across your most critical business functions. It also stays up-to-date because the Map itself is based on dynamic data from our platform that automatically updates over time. In short, we provide the latest skills map so you can continuously identify where you need to focus.

Matching trending skills to courses from the world’s leading institutions
Besides identifying the top skills for major functions, the Essential Skills Map also matches the corresponding courses that your employees can take on Coursera to acquire those skills. For example, the top skills for Engineering include Leadership, Agile Management, and Machine Learning, so we recommend the following courses: Foundations of Everyday Leadership, Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals, and Neural Networks and Deep Learning. We provide similar recommendations across functions including Data Science, Finance, and Marketing, as well as Management.

To get started and access the Essential Skills Map for your organization, reach out to our Essential Skills Specialists. Customers, contact your Customer Success Manager for more details.

Coursera’s Essential Skills Map builds on Coursera’s rich database of talent insights and is used by organizations worldwide to design winning workforce transformation strategies. Learn more about how your industry stacks up in the skills of tomorrow in the Coursera Global Skills Index 2019.

The post It’s a Match: Essential Skills Mapped to Critical Business Functions appeared first on Coursera Blog.