The pace of change and the requirement for learning and development teams to be agile and adaptive is not going to go away.

We have to ask ourselves three key questions:

- Do we have the skills and mindsets we need in our learning and development teams?

- Have we got the learning ecosystem and supporting technologies we need?  

- Do we have the data and analytical capability we need?

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There is a tight labor market currently and for the foreseeable future for just about every level of role. This is forcing us to rethink what skills we buy and those we grow. It also requires us to home in on retention strategies and our employee experience.

Those of you with Learning Management Systems will know that generally you are lucky if you get 20% engagement in current digital learning experiences. There’s a need to think differently and reimagine the digital learning experiences you create for your employees.

Most organisations don’t know the skills they have today, let alone what skills they are going to need moving forward. We need to support our workforces to build skills that are going to support them to stay relevant and up to date, as well as supporting our organisations to perform and flourish.

Just about every organisation we talk to today, no matter what country they are in are talking about how to design for mindset shift, capability lift and behaviour change at scale, across all employees and at pace.  You are all looking for your employees to be more customer focused, outward looking, adaptable and flexible, use data to inform decision making, be more analytical, have a growth mindset, the list goes on. Tackling these capability lifts requires a lot more than one-off workshops or e-learning modules.

Finally, the data and analytical capabilities of our learning teams is not where it needs to be.  In some cases we have the data, but we just don’t use it in the design of learning experiences.  In other cases, we don’t yet have the data we need or we don’t know where to find it.  The digital transformation of learning requires investment so L&D will continue to need to be able to demonstrate value and impact on the bottom line.

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What we believe every employee needs?

JD Dillon, Axonify’s Chief Learning Architect, has developed the following statement to capture the intention of the corporate L&D function following the pandemic:

“[To] Provide an equitable workplace experience by ensuring every employee has access to the training and support they need to do their best work every day”

We love this because the focus is on equity and day to day performance on the job.  It also allows for the development of future skills to ensure your employees skillsets remain relevant.

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Providing equitable workplace learning experiences

We can provide these experiences by focusing on 6 key things:

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The challenge

The challenge is that while what you learn (the skills you develop) is based on the work that you do, how you learn, where learning fits in your job, is based on the way you work. Sales teams who are constantly on the road …. manufacturing teams who don’t necessarily have access to technology on the floor vs call centre teams who’s every moment on their day job is scheduled, tracked and monitored.

We need to take into account how people work when we are designing our learning experiences to support our employees to learn through change. This goes some of the way to closing the engagement gap mentioned earlier and meet people where they need help.

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Want to learn more about the Changing Landscape of Learning of 2021? Check out our next blog for a deep dive into why digitalisation is more important than ever before.

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