“In today’s rapidly changing and increasingly complex world, the winners will be those who can keep their rate of learning greater than the rate of change, or L>C.”

Yet, as a profession, we have focused so much on compliance and CPE for licensing, have we lost sight of learning?

We are seeing three mega-trends across all sectors:

1. Top talent is demanding to “see” their career path in organizations.
2. Top talent wants to know how your organization will help them progress in their careers.
3. “Soft skills” (we prefer the term “success skills”) like strategic thinking, leadership, and collaboration are in high demand.

Our research has shown that the right approach is to systematically and strategically approach learning with the 5 Cs:

1. Career ladder / paths: A way to communicate how careers progress at your organization (example: The Bounce).
2. Competency: A competency model customized for your organization and linked to strategy. (What are the critical competencies you need now?)
3. Curriculum: A curriculum that is based on career paths and competencies and linked to your organization’s strategy.
4. Compliance: A system that can track regulatory and licensing compliance with today’s multiple jurisdictions.
5. Content: Proven learning and development programs in multipe formats. 

This BLI Guide to Learning as a Competitive Advantage covers these 5 Cs and shows how the Business Learning Institute can help you keep your L>C. It starts with our research on critical CPA / finance competencies, our Bounce learning framework, and our world-class content being provided to the many of the best CPA firms and corporate finance / accounting teams in the world. 

We have also worked with the AICPA to partner on a learning management system (LMS) that can automate this in a customized learning center for your organization or firm. It involves a full-featured LMS on top of a compliance engine, which tracks CPE in multiple jurisdictions. This is called the Navigator, and can be bundled with a library of on-demand learning covering both sides of The Bounce — technical and leadership. We also can work with your LMS to load the framework and learning programs. 

We are seeing organizations begin to differentiate themselves competitively around learning, especially from talent development, recruitment, and retention perspectives. The need to systemitize and make this approach explicit are key to using it proactively for talent management.

What do you think? Are you using your learning investment as a competitive advantage, if so, how? If not, why not?

More resources:

• The top 5 skills CPAs need now
• How to deal with the top 5 learning trends
• The top two questions top talent wants to know now 
• Companies invest in employee training to reduce global skills gap’s effect