2021 Workplace Learning Report What's going on in L&D?

According to the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs will disappear and 97 million new jobs will appear by 2025. It grows the need for re/upskilling. Companies around the world are investing huge sums of money to equip their employees with the skills they need in the new reality. Amazon will allocate $ 700 million for this purpose, and PwC announced the "New World, New Skills" program, which will cost 3 BILLION $$$.

LinkedIn Learning has been monitoring the L&D market for 5 years and provides reports that summarize the changes and trends taking place in it. It also shares the best practices, tested by the largest companies in the world. This year's edition is especially interesting for people involved in online education. It describes the transformation of the training area that happened last year and the long-term changes that it initiated.

What are the highlights of this year?

• because of isolation and working from home, 31% of employees feel less connected with their leaders, 37% with team members, 40% with friends
• Unexpectedly, at the top of the training teams' priorities is… .re / upskilling, before leadership / managerial training and virtual onboarding.
• The role and rank of L&D in organizations has changed - 2/3 of the teams responsible for employee development participate in management meetings and activities aimed at transforming the company. (Finally, they noticed us and we are not treated only as a cost;) Moreover, the bosses and managers in most cases became development ambassadors.
• After last year's fluctuations, training budgets are rising again (33% of companies are increasing their development spending, 19% expect a decline). The vast majority of companies (79%) increase expenditure on e-learning at the expense of classroom training (a decrease in investment in this area is declared by 73% of companies vs. 38% last year).
• The possibility of development, acquiring new competences, changing the area and position within the organization, becomes more important for employees (and thus for employers) than in the pre-covid times and determines staying in a given company even twice as long.
• Unfortunately, the problem of measuring the effectiveness of development activities remains unresolved. It's still mostly based on post-training feedback, satisfaction surveys, the number of trained people and other low-value indicators. What's worse, the number of companies using these "indicators" is growing.
• The most important competences on the market are: Ability to adapt and change, technological/digital skills, communication in dispersed teams and emotional intelligence. The current, undisputed leader - "creativity" sits quietly at the end of the list.
• What development programs are training teams working on in 2021? Leading through change, diversity and inclusion, digital transformation
• We're all learning more, but Generation Z has broken the bank. People born in 1997-2012 spent 50% more time studying in 2020 than in the previous year (and their number increased 2.5 times). They choose topics that help them better fulfill their current role at work (83%) and interest them personally (73%).
• As in previous years, managers are the key element in the employee development strategy. Every second employee declared that their supervisor motivates them to acquire new competences and supports them in achieving their professional goals.
• The second key element is the analytics of training activities, which allows you to identify areas for development (unfortunately it does not show whether the training had any measurable effect;)
• The element building the greatest training commitment among employees turned out to be social activities - learning and discussions in groups, Q&A. Apart from the educational benefits, the participants indicated an increase in the sense of belonging.

I encourage you to read the full report: 2021 Workplace Learning Report