Learning and development (L&D) teams need to evolve to match the quality of learning material available outside of work. Here’s what HR can do to help organisations get there.
Between 2020-2022, people and culture (P&C) departments went through a huge shift. These teams were at the forefront of organisations’ pandemic response, and the new ‘how’ and ‘where’ of work. Enter 2023, and we’re regularly hearing new examples of workplace flexibility and updated benefit options that reflect what people actually need.
Amid this whirlwind of change, it feels like the learning function of P&C has been left behind.
Many organisations either put their learning on ice completely for a couple of years, and/or moved what they could online.
These online offerings were quickly assembled as temporary measures. But today, slide-heavy lectures continue to be rolled out to faceless MS Teams and Zoom screens around the country.
In-person development has restarted in many places, but with more flexible work options, this feels harder to do than it did three years ago. Curriculums and courses from 2019 suddenly feel very outdated.
In short, workplace learning is a bit stuck. But in the meantime, the learning industry outside of work has been busy rapidly evolving and innovating.
So how can we keep up?
The need for change
In January, KPMG asked 400 business leaders in Australia what was on their mind. Talent acquisition, retention and re/upskilling staff to meet a more digitised future were their top challenges for 2023.
According to the 2022 Workplace Intelligence Upskilling Study, 74 per cent of millennial and Gen Z employees report they’d be likely to quit within the next year due to a lack of skills development opportunities.
Similarly, in Deloitte’s 2022 Global Millennial and Gen Z survey, 29 per cent of both Millennials and Gen Z said that L&D opportunities were the top reason they chose their job.
By 2025, Millennials will make up the largest percentage of the global workforce. Figures estimate that in Australia alone they will comprise almost 75 per cent. This means that appropriate learning and development will be a retention imperative affecting the majority of your people.
Read HRM’s article on how to set up remote learning programs.
Every week I speak to clients experiencing attrition as a result of reality not living up to the promises made in employee value propositions.
These challenges will not be solved the way learning is happening in the majority of organisations right now. If you’re one of the many organisations having a re-think and a reset of the way you develop your people, here are some places to start.
Redesign your learning team
Most internal learning teams are made up of the following folk: people with an education or instructional design background, subject matter experts and administrators.
However, if you go behind the scenes of the teams creating compelling learning experiences outside of work, you’ll find a rather different, and more varied, group of professionals. This is one of the reasons I believe a gap continues to exist between the learning experiences outside and inside workplaces. If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we always get.
Rethinking your learning team to include modern learning design skills of human-centred design/service design, marketing, graphic design, video and audio creation, copywriting, community building, curation, analytics and data visualisation, etc., will elevate your learning experience to something closer to what people experience outside of work.
You may not need all of these skills in your team all of the time. This is a perfect opportunity to strengthen your bench of partnerships with specialists and flexible talent.
Check your assumptions
If you haven’t been through a good discovery process in your organisation since before 2020, now is a good time to do so. People’s expectations have changed, and it’s good to avoid the trap of building new ideas on old assumptions.
Ask your people about how they’ve been learning, what their favourite recent learning experiences have been, what skills they want to build, what they’re excited and nervous about in the future of work, and changes in their mindset about work. You might be surprised about what’s changed (and what hasn’t).
“If everyone is working at 120 per cent capacity and rewarded on their billable hours, they’re probably not going to magically find the time to join your day-long presentation skills workshop.”
If your organisation has been through a high-attrition period, this is especially important, as new people bring new expectations and have likely joined with particular career development goals in mind.
This information will help you ‘meet people where they are’, and design learning that uses the methods and formats that people are already familiar with and have a habit of using.
Evolve your L&D format
What platform did you learn your most recent lesson on? YouTube? Podcasts? A friend? TikTok? Accidentally trying something new?
Courses are not always the answer. On a daily basis we’re picking up new pieces of information and putting them into practice, and so are your people. As people are now more distributed, and more discerning about how they use their time, this is the perfect chance to challenge the format of your learning.
With the technology and tools required for digital experiences being even more accessible now, you could start your own internal podcast or video series, or go all out and turn your learning programs into a three-day online festival, or TV show.
Curation is also a perfectly acceptable approach to an L&D strategy. You don’t need to start everything from scratch.
We have immediate access to almost any expert who’s been alive in the last 20+ years through podcasts and YouTube videos, and books give us access to centuries of thinking.
Read HRM’s list of work-related content recommendations here.
Curating the myriad of available content is an important skill for learning teams, but will likely be quicker and better-quality than creating all-new content in your business. Using platforms such as GetAbstract or Blinkist are good opportunities for quick-win learning opportunities.
Embed this curated content into your learning pathways, pre-/post-course work, or start book clubs/podcast clubs for people to share lessons from what they’ve been reading or listening to.
Check your tech
If there’s a broad digital upskilling challenge right now, how are your learning teams developing their own skills and awareness of emerging technologies?
We take people off-site to gain a fresh perspective and create a different environment for learning and connection. That same principle is relevant for online learning. Is another session on MS Teams really the most inspiring place for a learning experience?
Platforms such as Butter, Kumospace, Storytail, or even Meta Horizon Workrooms will open up more immersive, slicker possibilities, and even whole new worlds for learning.
VR technology is still developing, but is being used in creative ways to allow people to practise certain skills in a safer environment, or develop empathy by virtually seeing the world from another person’s perspective. If you’ve previously written some of these tools off as fads, it’s time to check those assumptions.
Read about how Accenture is using the metaverse to onboard new staff.
AI opens up a lot of questions and opportunities in the learning space. Will teaching certain skills remain relevant? Do your systems integrate powerful AI to truly personalise learning? Will AI be stable enough to develop whole curriculums, session plans, personalised coaching, or course content over the next 3-5 years? (Probably).
Start a culture shift
The best, most modern learning design in the world won’t save you if your ecosystem doesn’t recognise the value of learning.
If everyone is working at 120 per cent capacity and rewarded on their billable hours, they’re probably not going to magically find the time to join your day-long presentation skills workshop.
A shift in learning takes senior stakeholder buy-in, investment and a longer-term view than the next financial year.
Experiments and pilots are great approaches. The smaller the better. Find little pockets of the organisation that are already doing something great. Nurture these teams and find ways to track their progress to provide you the evidence others might need to make broader changes.
Steph Clarke helps workplaces reimagine their learning and development through her company 28 Thursdays. She’s also the host of ‘Steph’s Business Bookshelf’ podcast. She has worked in professional services for 17 years for, and with, organisations such as EY, Hollard, Findex and Perpetual.
Tap into the full potential of team members and develop the necessary skills to build and sustain a high-performing team with this short course from AHRI.