HR Technology Solution Review: Oracle Grow

Oracle Grow advances the capabilities of the industry-leading Oracle Cloud HCM by connecting learning, skills growth, and career mobility in one personalized experience.

With most organizations facing the dual challenges of employee retention as well as the need to remain agile and to keep their employee’s skills up to date and relevant, HR leaders need solutions that can help meet these challenges and meet them in a modern, holistic manner that puts employees at the center.

It’s important to note that these organizational challenges – employee retention and upskilling/reskilling, are intertwined – employees are more likely to remain with their organization (and be excited and engaged with their roles) when they have commitment from the organization and the necessary tools and support to improve their existing skills, develop new skills, and create a confident path forward in their careers. Organizations striving to retain their employees must focus on their personal growth and development – and increasingly are turning to modern HR technologies to meet these objectives.

The latest announcement from Oracle Cloud HCM, the launch of Oracle Grow, speaks directly to these issues. This new collection of capabilities, part of the award-winning Oracle ME employee experience platform, makes employee growth easier by unifying learning, skills development, and career mobility to empower and enable individual growth while simultaneously helping to support business objectives.

There are three principal elements of the Oracle Grow solution – two focused on employee growth and development, and one that enables HR and organizational talent leaders to better understand the skills and capabilities of their teams. Let’s examine each of these three elements.

For Employees: Helping them to excel in their current role

Critical to any organization’s success is the ability for employees to master the skills needed in their current roles, which drives personal and team performance. With Oracle Grow, employees are provided with a clean, easy-to-navigate visualization of their current skills and the skills they potentially need to develop further to achieve maximum performance in their current role. Oracle Grow is flexible in that skills that an employee would like to develop can be self-directed by the employee, be inherited from the design of the employee’s role, or be assigned by the manager, who may want team members to develop new skills in support of specific team goals.

Once an employee indicates or is assigned a new skill to develop or to enhance an existing skill they possess, Oracle Grow surfaces for them personalized growth opportunities and supports the creation of individual learning playlists that the employee can then act upon, cementing personal ownership of their development. These individual learning playlists can incorporate a wide range of assets and activities such as connection with coaches, training classes and content, short-term project assignments or gigs, and more. The power of the full suite of capabilities of the Oracle Cloud HCM platform is leveraged by bringing together all content, activities, and resources the employee needs to develop, and is supported by the capabilities of the Oracle ME employee experience platform.

For Employees: Helping them to grow in their careers

Side by side with development and mastery of the skills needed to excel in their current roles, employees today are eager to acquire the new skills they will need to support their career goals and to help them stay relevant in a dynamic and fast-moving labor market. This is the area where Oracle Grow really shines. With Oracle Grow, employees are empowered to visualize and act on their career growth possibilities by discovering different career paths and exploring the recommended roles that are surfaced by Oracle HCM’s powerful AI.

Of importance to note is that with the AI recommendations, employees can discover opportunities – roles, projects and gigs – for skills growth and development that they previously had not considered or had not had any prior awareness and knowledge. And once an employee discovers a new potential role, Oracle Grow makes it easy for them to take action by bringing together in one employee-friendly user experience, the content, contacts, and resources needed to make progress on skills development and career growth.

This is the key employee value proposition for Oracle Grow. It provides the framework for employees to build and expand their portfolio of experiences and skills with personalized development opportunities that align with their goals. By unifying all the elements needed to grow and develop, and providing users with a simple, intuitive, and natively integrated platform with which to engage, employees will feel more connected to the organization and be better able to envision continuing to grow and advance their careers. And this is a win-win situation for all. Employees are more encouraged to develop new skills that the organization needs to meet their business challenges and are more likely to stay with an organization that is seen as investing in their skills and development – improving retention in the longer term.

For HR and Talent Leaders:  Empowering managers and ladders to drive skill development

One of the enduring challenges for managers and HR leaders has been the lack of insight into the collected knowledge and skills possessed by their teams, and modern technology solutions that can help them see, understand, and manage overall skills development for their teams. Oracle Grow provides the technology platform that can help managers overcome these challenges and help them simultaneously assist team members in their career growth objectives while also ensuring that the team is equipped to meet current business and operational goals.

We know that managers play a critical role in driving skill development in their teams. With Oracle Grow, managers will now have the insights and tools to ensure their team is on the right track and is empowered to continue to develop and enhance the skills they need to move themselves and the business forward. Oracle Grow presents managers with a clear picture of their team’s skills and tools to close skills gaps in the team – filling an important, and often missing gap in their own managerial function. Additionally, managers can use Oracle Grow to adapt and personalize skill requirements for their organization, department, and team members. Finally, Oracle Grow seamlessly operates with the rest of the Oracle ME employee experience platform to facilitate ongoing manager-employee conversations through Oracle Touchpoints.

Conclusion: The Power of a Single HCM Platform for Skills Growth and Career Planning

While the HR technology market is replete with multiple innovative and capable technology solutions for learning, talent mobility, career planning, mentoring, coaching, analytics and more – often organizations fail to realize the value of their investments in these disparate solutions that are difficult to integrate, have different user experiences, and make it hard for the organization to see and report on the full picture of skills, development, gaps, and opportunities. Oracle Cloud HCM’s strength, now augmented by the release of Oracle Grow, is how organizations can leverage a single, natively developed, and integrated platform in which to solve these important challenges.

When learning, career growth, and talent mobility come together in one place and are connected to individual and business goals, the entire organization can thrive and adapt to change with an experience that makes growth easy.

With the average useful and relevant duration of any kind of technical skill only being somewhere around 18 – 24 months, organizations must think more creatively and react more quickly to changes in their environment and to the introductions of new technologies and methods of working. The traditional learning systems and learning approaches, while still important, need to be augmented by more innovative, intelligent, and personalized tools that help the organization and its people continue to develop, foster growth and alignment across the organization, and seamlessly integrate with the full HCM technology platform.

Oracle Grow is a powerful expansion of the Oracle ME employee experience platform and provides organizations with a robust set of capabilities designed to increase employee engagement, allow organizations to quickly adapt to new priorities and business challenges, and ensure employee success and retention. With learning, career growth, and talent mobility working together in a unified HCM platform connected to individual employee preferences and aligned with business goals, the entire organization can grow, thrive, and adapt to change, leading to individual and organizational success.

If your organization has been looking for modern technologies, new platforms, and new capabilities, we recommend you learn more about Oracle Grow and the full Oracle Cloud HCM platform. It’s encouraging to know that HCM technology is adapting to help organizations keep up with the challenges of rapidly changing skills requirements, the need for employee growth and development, the demand for agility, and the expectations of the workforce for modern, user-friendly, and personalized tools that not only help them succeed in their current role\ but also enable them to see and create successful futures in their organizations.

You can learn more about the Oracle Grow solution, as well as the full suite of Oracle Cloud HCM capabilities at www.oracle.com/hcm.