Moving L&D to systemic and strategic impact: the technology infrastructure needed
Explore the key learning and development trends, challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for L&D practitioners, organisations, policymakers and founders
The ‘skills crisis’ is rocketing up the agenda. Skills shortages are the biggest blockers to recruitment. As the nature of work changes rapidly due to automation, the rise of remote working, Brexit and generational shifts, an estimated $8.5tn global skills gap demands urgent action.
Learning and development (L&D) is vital to overcome this. The ability to upskill and reskill employees will fast determine whether organisations succeed or fail.
In collaboration with Coursera and Donald H Taylor, chair of the Learning Technologies Conference, we’ve created a report examining the changing role of L&D within organisations, and the crucial shift from measuring learning engagement to demonstrating business impact and driving performance.
Download here to read the full report: Moving L&D to systemic and strategic impact: the technology infrastructure needed (.pdf ). Note you register your email and name with Coursera to get access.
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Moving L&D to systemic and strategic impact: the technology infrastructure needed is based on extensive research interviews with 30+ CEOs, heads of learning and development, and policymakers, alongside a survey of almost 100 learning and development practitioners from around the world.
- If you are an L&D leader or organisation, you will find out how your peers are responding to this fast-moving situation
- If you are a policymaker, you will appreciate our group’s actionable recommendations
- If you are a founder, you can review insider insights into current trends and understand how to position your product to meet rapidly changing industry needs
What is the role of L&D now?
Learning is at the centre of any organisation. Yet, in practice, L&D too often becomes a silo of learning, hidden away in HR and seen as “other” to day-to-day business operations.
Skills have never been more important for organisations — does L&D have the systems and processes it needs to play a strategic role?
Our survey of 100 L&D practitioners reveals:
- 81% feel familiar with what matters strategically to their organisation.
But
- Only 55% feel able to strongly or very strongly link L&D activity to their organisation’s business goals or KPIs.
- 40% feel that L&D has substantial input/responsibility for their organisation’s talent strategy.
- Just 17% use specific metrics or objectives to trace learning’s impact on D&I in their organisation, despite evidence that organisations with a diverse talent pool are more innovative and productive.
- 10% are not aware of any long-term measurement of learning impact.
- 51% feel that their current technology ecosystem does not help them to gather meaningful data about learning impact.
All this means that L&D is currently struggling to play the strategic role it should.
How can L&D get closer to the business?
Based on interviews, research and case studies, the report highlights three key areas where L&D can ensure it makes a strategic contribution by driving business performance through learning.
- Attitude
L&D must become a business partner for business leaders, in order to understand performance and track the impact of learning effectively. This means going out into the business to engage executives, managers and learners with the case for learning, both as one solution to the wider skills agenda and as a vital part of every individual’s long-term career plans.
2. Culture
L&D must lead on creating a shared understanding across an organisation of what learning is, how learning happens, and why it matters. A learning culture is more than just a commitment to employee development and training. It is also a way of working which creates opportunities to learn in the flow of work and which underpins strategic priorities such as agility and adaptability.
3. Processes
L&D is increasingly talking about learning within skills ecosystems, which brings learning and day-to-day business operations closer together. Technology is transforming our ability to bring learning and work together so that skills are updated and developed in real-time as people do their work.
How can L&D show impact?
In the context of the dire skills and talent shortage, it isn’t enough to simply demonstrate that learning is effective. It must show tangible value by moving from a system of measuring engagement to demonstrating impact — from assessing learning to evaluating performance and behavioural change.
L&D is already tracking applied learning, such as on-the-job skills assessments and line manager feedback. But strategic thinking requires strategic metrics.
This requires a mindset shift away from learning methodologies and towards diagnosing on-site performance gaps, away from learning metrics towards understanding what business impact should be at the outset.
Learning impact should be visible in metrics that a business area needs to improve, such as sales or customer service scores, which are already measured continuously because they are what matter to the organisation’s performance and survival.
The end goal is learning that is predictive, proactive and performance-oriented.
In conclusion
Rather than see L&D as something external to the organisation, L&D must get closer to the business, centring the importance of learning as part of daily operations.
When learning is central to an organisation, it does not prove its worth in occasional retrospective studies. It demonstrates it every day by being an essential business process, improving both short-term performance and long-term capability.
This shift is only possible with the technology to support the learning and the right data to guide its use, but while necessary, these alone are not sufficient for success.
The successful integration of learning into organisations requires not only technology but also a change in culture and mindset.
In our next post, we explore in more detail the perspectives of CEOs and L&D practitioners as they confront the challenges and opportunities of the rapidly-changing L&D context, and we make a range of practical recommendations that will help key stakeholders put learning at the heart of organisational success.
To explore key trends and opportunities in learning and development in more detail and see recommendations for learning and development practitioners, organisations, policymakers and founders, download the full report here.
Emerge Education welcomes inquiries from new investors and startup founders. For more information, visit emerge.education or email hello@emerge.education.
Thank you for reading… I would hugely appreciate some claps 👏 and shares 🙌 so that others can find it!
Nic
Nic Newman
