Where do employees turn to for skill development? Are they confident that their employers can help them develop their skills? Those are two questions Cornerstone OnDemand, an HR solutions provider, posed to 815 senior leaders and more than 1,800 employees worldwide, grouped by region (North America; Europe, Middle East, and Africa; and Asia Pacific).

Employee responses show that workers look for skill development from a variety of sources. According to the report, Thriving in the Global Skills Shortage: Your Path Through the Wilderness, "Our study found that while employees rely highly on independent internet research for career development information, they balance that through significant use of internal resources, relying on these resources far more than organizations may often think." Across the three regions, independent internet research, the employer's skills and development platform, the employee's immediate manager, and internal company mentors are the leading sources workers turn to for development. Internal career guides round out the top five.

Breaking it down further, employees in the Asia-Pacific region rely most heavily on their employer's skills and development platform and internet research. Those in North America go to the internet first, but then equally value their managers and the internal skill development platform. And the leading resource for staff in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa is their immediate manager. "Our research indicates that organizations need to offer a wide range of resources to effectively support employee growth and development," Cornerstone notes.

Researchers found that high-performing organizations are more aware of the need to provide learning opportunities to staff, and they also have a much smaller skills confidence gap—that is the difference between employers that believe they are providing skill development and employees' confidence in employers to develop those skills. Further, the report data reveals that when learners are satisfied with their employer's offerings, they want more. For example, satisfied and very satisfied employees want more new solutions and more coaching and mentoring opportunities compared to dissatisfied and very dissatisfied employees.

"Breaking it down regionally, we do see a few differences in what employees in different regions prefer," the report states. "In North America, employees valued coaching and mentoring 11 points more than respondents from EMEA. Asia-Pacific employees, on the other hand, preferred increases in the types of educational allowances over their North America and EMEA colleagues."