Endless Reinvention

The Four Keys to Reskilling for Digital Transformation

What do you do when you can’t hire the people you need? Lockheed Martin sees learning as a competitive advantage for the company and prides itself on employees being kept up to date on skills and capabilities. With a mature learning program in place, they had the foundation they needed to help out when they found themselves firmly in a global war on talent.

Scarcity in available talent in engineering and technology meant that Lockheed was unable to hire their way into the future. While standing at the doorstep of digital transformation, they needed a plan.

And plan they did. Lockheed Martin knew their workforce had plenty of people who have adjacent skills. What they needed to do was make it easy for them to transform their skills to meet the new reality.

But gaining alignment and activating a program of that scale was complicated for a company comprised of multiple business areas that are each the size of a Fortune 500 company and over 110,000 employees. This was especially true when they took into account the security–related challenges their employees experience.

• One unique aspect is the need to allow for education in classified environments. Some of the team can’t access public websites to learn due to security protocols.
• They also have to adapt, knowing that many of their manufacturing staff don’t have a computer as part of their work, requiring kiosks or other access points for learning in the context of work in progress.
• Others work in very remote work areas that have virtually no bandwidth, so compliance courses and other learning must be downloaded and worked offline.

It may not have been straight-forward, but they successfully orchestrated many people, drove lockstep alignment, and leveraged best-in–class communication approaches to launch an integrated talent development program that will continuously reinvent their workforce.