Future of Learning & Development (L&D)

 

Learning and Development (L&D) is a pivotal department for organizations in order to constantly future-proof themselves and their employees. L&D teams are responsible for the performance of workers and general workforce readiness to meet business needs. L&D is now increasingly responsible for enabling the workforce to be agile, innovative, healthy, and inclusive.

L&D is a strategic function that enables a company’s near-term results as well as their long-term direction. The focus of L&D is on shaping the desired company culture, fostering new ways of thinking, developing new behaviors, and driving strategic opportunities. The critical importance of L&D cannot be understated as they have a massive responsibility and role to play when it comes to filling skills gaps within an organization and preparing workers for the future.

But what about training within L&D? Equally vital to future proofing workplace learning is upskilling within the L&D function itself. Learning professionals need to be guided in understanding digital learning technologies and principles of instructional design as well as how to use authoring tools, etc. The shift to digital has caught many in the L&D profession off guard and unprepared and they are starting to realize the need for new skills and capabilities.

The New Skills Needed by L&D Can Be Divided Across 05 Areas:

1. Product Management: 

With the move to learning tech ecosystems, L&D needs the skills to oversee the ecosystem, understand the integrations, negotiate contracts, and ensure deduplication across L&D organisations.

2. Data Analysis:

This includes statistics, data cleaning, data visualisation and storytelling, and is often closely tied to people analytics and business intelligence functions. Data is also an important tool to track learning analytics, which helps L&D evaluate where possible knowledge gaps lie.

3. Learning Science:

Learning science combines research and data to help educators teach better and learners learn more. It draws from various disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience, learning analytics, data science, behavioural economics, and educational psychology.

4. Marketing and Communications:

With so much learning content available and so many other things vying for employees’ attention, it can be helpful for L&D to have in-house marketing skills to help employees find learning opportunities and motivate them to engage in learning.

5. Learner-Centred Design Thinking:

This focuses on the end-users and not the process by making the learning developer an “experience architect”.

To keep up with the changing times, there’s a call for L&D teams to regroup and evolve as the workplace changes. Let’s look at 04 skills needed to develop for L&D teams over the next few years,

Data-Driven Analysis: 

Measuring the impact of training in hard data is one of the biggest challenges faced by L&D professionals. There’s a struggle when it comes to showing business leaders their return on investment (ROI) in training.  L&D are being asked to show actual impact of what they’re doing on organisation goals. Therefore, it is important to invest in data-analysis training for L&D teams. Business leaders are becoming ever more reliant on data-driven analytics because this is how they measure performance and ROI. L&D analysts need to build their skills in data science to map data against organisational performance in order to measure impact. This data will inform their decision-making with regards to training in the future.

 

Learning About Learning: 

L&D professionals need to re-examine their approach to “learner-centric” learning solutions. L&D teams can get better at training by getting better at learning. This entails being able to reframe content in a way that empathises with learners’ needs and motivations. Learning about neuroscience in learning is also a big step toward supporting this. It has shown the importance of developing skills in other learning techniques such as visual learning, micro-learning, blended learning, among others. It’s time to stop re-using old learning methods and start putting the focus on methods that drive engagement.

 

Technology Mastery:

It is the job of L&D professionals to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to staying up to date with emerging technologies. Technology is what makes just-in time, in-context learning possible. There are a bunch of emerging technologies taking part in the digital transformation of the workplace. Tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR) are coming to the fore. These technology advancements utilise readily available data to create training programmes that are adaptive, customised, and realistic experiences.

 

Consultancy:

Being a business partner in L&D means knowing how to be a consultant – talking, listening, understanding, thinking, and responding. L&D professionals need excellent communication and engagement skills to perform their jobs at maximum efficacy. This means using critical thinking to make the right decisions. For L&D to align itself with a business it must understand the market that it operates in. L&D professionals need a clear plan of action to tackle each performance need as it arises. This means understanding the goals of employees and the wider organisation and being creative in addressing the learning and performance needs of the organisation.

 

Organisations are investing more in L&D as it becomes evident that one of its functions is to attract and retain the best talent and helping get the workforce future-fit and ready for the many possible variables that will come its way. Accordingly, L&D teams need to develop their own talent to remain relevant in the workplace and keep ahead of the curve. Training and development will always be one of the core pillars supporting the success of an organisation!

Upskilling & Reskilling To Close the L&D Skills Gap

While closing the L&D skills gap won’t be easy, most organisations rec
ognise the need to invest heavily in skills for the future. Largely, this will involve wide-scale upskilling and reskilling efforts. Gloat provides a useful comparison of these terms, explaining, “upskilling is the process of learning new skills or of teaching workers new skills, while reskilling is the process of learning new skills so you can do a different job, or of training people to do a different job.”

Basically, upskilling can help employees excel in their current role, while reskilling trains employees to perform in new roles. Keep that in mind, as they’re terms that you’re likely to hear a lot in the coming years.

In fact, according to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, 51% of L&D professionals plan to launch upskilling programs in 2020, while 43% plan to launch reskilling programs. Further, Deloitte found that 84% of L&D professionals said they would increase their investment in reskilling programs, with 53% adding that they would increase this budget by 6% or more.

Other estimates find that 54% of employees will require extensive upskilling or reskilling by 2022, while McKinsey believes that by 2030 “375 million workers—or roughly 14% of the global workforce—may need to switch occupational categories as digitisation, automation, and advances in artificial intelligence disrupt the world of work.” Whatever number you place on it, digital transformation will fundamentally change the way millions of people work, making upskilling and reskilling indispensable for the future of L&D.

COVID-19 has only accelerated the need for upskilling and reskilling, with 43% of companies increasing their upskilling/reskilling efforts in the wake of COVID-19. The good news is that these efforts have had measurable positive outcomes, with 80% of employees saying upskilling/reskilling has boosted their confidence, and 91% of companies saying upskilling/reskilling has boosted productivity.

Ultimately, Deloitte predicts the future of work will involve ‘superjobs’, making upskilling and reskilling even more critical. They define ‘superjobs’ as, “roles that combine work and responsibilities from multiple traditional jobs, using technology to both augment and broaden the scope of the work performed and involve a more complex set of domains, technical, and human skills.”

In other words, with technological advancements leading to increased automation, as well as changing societal needs, traditional job roles will change — perhaps drastically. As such, workers will need to adapt their skills and knowledge to perform in these emerging roles. 

Top Skills for L&D Professionals

Before we get into the list, it’s worth looking closely at a key area that may shape the future of L&D (and work more broadly):

Soft Skills Vs Hard Skills

A useful definition of soft skills and hard skills, stating, “hard skills are related to specific technical knowledge and training while soft skills are personality traits such as leadership, communication or time management.”

For example, hard skills include things such as speaking another language, SEO expertise, or Salesforce knowledge. In contrast, soft skills include things such as communication, creative problem solving, and leadership.

This is important, as the rise of AI means soft skills are becoming more and more in demand since many hard skills are being automated. According to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, investing in soft skills is smart as “the shelf life of technical skills is relatively short—less than 5 years—while strong leadership, creative, and communication skills are always in demand.” This is a sharp decline, as not long ago, hard skills were estimated to have a shelf life of 10-15 years.

Fortunately, executives have noticed this trend and are acting accordingly. According to IBM, “a shift is occurring; executives’ views regarding the priority of critical skills have taken a turn from digital and technical to behavioural.” In other words, many executives now value soft skills (behavioural skills) above digital or technical skills, recognising such skills will be crucial for success in the future. Workers have also noticed this shift, with 87% now saying they actively seek out opportunities to learn new skills in the workplace.

The Bottom Line…

The rise of global, fast-paced, and complex operations, digital transformations, and the gig economy signal the need for more evolved learning programs that allow businesses to adapt quickly and thrive in this constantly changing workplace ecosystem.

Organizations are starting to invest more in L&D as they view it as an opportunity to attract and retain the best talent and appropriately map out socially responsible approaches to the future of work.

This is a call for L&D roles to evolve and multiply in order to bridge the skills gap and stay ahead of the curve. What we do with this challenge will be a major determinant of our organizations’ success and future.

References:

1) https://www.mcchrystalgroup.com/insights/detail/2023/09/22/the-future-of-learning-and-development

2)https://learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/4-practical-skills-to-develop-the-l-d-team-of-the-future

3)https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/features/what-does-future-ld-leader-look

4)https://www.forbes.com/sites/markcperna/2022/04/12/why-learning–development-is-now-a-competitive-differentiator-and-how-to-get-on-board/?sh=6ede27a930ff

5)https://blog.degreed.com/the-future-of-ld/

6)https://www.myhrfuture.com/blog/2020/10/27/the-role-of-learning-and-development-in-2030-four-emerging-trends