Skills initiatives are front and centre for many leadership teams today, and some organisations are investing significant time and resources. But beware!

Whatever work you do to get leaders behind skill development, whatever resources you secure for learning, and whatever successes you see with retention or innovation - everything eventually falls apart if your efforts lack skill coaching.

To lean into skill coaching, you’ll need to prioritise skill-building opportunities and lean on the managers who oversee employee learning. Unfortunately, our research shows that 26% of employees say their managers don’t support their professional growth, and nearly half of employees aren’t connected to work that stretches their skills.

“Most managers want to help their employees develop skills, but many managers have not received great coaching themselves,” said Ben Cowan, Director of Skills Strategy at Degreed. “They need training on how best to drive skill success, time and resources to do it right, and recognition that their skill coaching efforts are critical to the success of the business.”

Here’s why - and how - L&D can help managers be better skill coaches to help achieve critical company skill goals.

Why managers should be skill coaches

Ideally, managers have a profound and positive effect on employees in all aspects of their work, especially in learning. In a positive learning culture, people are 92% more likely to say their manager supported their development.

Our research also shows that 18% of employees say one of their favourite ways to learn is directly from their managers. Furthermore, 70% of employees learn from managers frequently, and 28% learn from managers daily.

And can you imagine implementing experiential learning like special projects, mentorships, and internal internship programmes without manager support? We can’t. In fact, we’ve found that the most successful learning happens at companies where managers are excellent skills coaches.

“Managers are critical, not just because they find and connect learning to the members of their teams, but because they also contextualise and reinforce it within the workflow,” said Hali Linn, Learning Strategy Consultant at Degreed.

“By serving as both mentors and coaches, managers help bridge the gap between formal learning and the application of skill development. This is how managers foster an environment where continuous learning is part of the organisational culture.”

Managers are also critical to everything else in your company - operations, productivity, employee engagement, and more. And that’s a problem. Why? Because managers are time-starved, caught between competing priorities, and missing critical guidance. They need support too, and that’s where L&D comes in. Here’s how you can help.

No 1. Save managers time: prioritise critical skills

Research shows the average manager already spends 30 minutes with each direct report every three weeks, and great managers spend even more. If your organisation is anything like those studied, it means managers are some of the busiest people in your company.

So if you ask a manager to add more skills development to their plate, don’t be surprised if you get the corporate equivalent of a shrug.

Also consider that the number of tasks skill coaches could add to their plates - from discussing career goals and giving feedback to finding and assigning stretch projects - can quickly become overwhelming. Now multiply that by the number of direct reports and the number of skills each direct report needs to develop.

It becomes clear that this is going to be a lot of work. This means that, if you want skills coaching to succeed, you’ll need to remove as many multipliers that you can and shorten the list of skills.