Digitization is changing every part of today's enterprise. To take advantage of new business opportunities, organizations are moving quickly to design and deploy new technologies like cloud, mobility, analytics, the IoT and next-generation security.

The challenge is finding the workforce skilled in these new, rapidly-evolving technologies.

I recently wrote an article on these industry shifts that you can read here, if you're interested in taking a look.

Here, I wanted to talk a little bit about what Cisco is doing to help its customers and partners have a successful journey on the road to digitization.

As digitization drives industry evolution, talent has become a critical barrier for enterprises as they attempt to evolve their business, drive better business outcomes, and create new internal employee and end user experiences.

Learning@Cisco will play a major role in helping Cisco's customers, channel partners and ecosystem with this industry evolution.

To meet the changing education landscape and stay ahead of growing learner expectations, we too, are embracing digitization.  With new tools, platforms, innovative approaches and technologies, we are transforming our business models, portfolio of offerings, our industry partnerships, go-to-market approaches and policies.

Specifically, we are focused on addressing these key trends that are defining today's workforce and their skilling needs.

1. A need forcontinuous learningdue to rapid shifts in technology.

2. Evolving job roles that requirecross-functional and business-related skillsto drive to business outcomes

3. Employers need acredentialing system that validates these new, evolving job-related skills. This system needs to be flexible and adaptive to specific skills, and not to job roles. This is because job roles are continuing to diverge across verticals, regions, and systems. As a result, competency-based education is a possible direction. We are exploring every option that could deliver greater convenience to our learners.

4. With a workforce growing in diversity,learning consumption modelsare quickly evolving to keep pace with customer needs. We are seeing that multimedia learning approaches that fold in video-based, gaming and flexible learning options, that are available on an as-needed basis, and accessible via any smart device is the direction that we need to go.

5. Internet Protocol(IP) continues to grow as the underlying vehicle that connects all digital businesses. As such, new audiences are being exposed to IP constantly and will need to leverage it to run their business operations. Line of business (LOBs) leaders within enterprises, control engineers in the operations space and developers are examples of populations that will need to have a working understanding of IP in their job roles.

We continue to transform our credentialing system, creating the benchmarks employers need to validate the job-related skills required of the digital enterprise. Our portfolio continues to address new learning consumption models, and encompass the skills required remain of tomorrow's workforce.

We are committed to delivering learning and skilling offerings that meet the real-world consumption demands of our customers.

For more information about Learning@Cisco and how we're helping learners adapt to a digitized workplace, click here.