HR is now turning to L&D for solutions - and in order to deliver, L&D is in dire need of automation and AI

The need for businesses to adapt has arguably never been more pressing, as the current momentum of change seen across all sectors and industries globally, is probably unparalleled in magnitude and speed.

The digital revolution has not only arrived. We are right in the middle of it - and it is continuing to pick up the pace further, too.

The HR Exchange Network’s ‘State of HR Report 2021’, released in December, shows that HR leaders are facing two major, compounding issues. Battling a labor shortage is a huge challenge on its own, but doing so while struggling to retain talent is really taking this challenge to the next level.?

What are employees looking for?

Employees want and demand more from employers, and right now they are voting with their feet in the Great Resignation. High on the priority list for individuals and therefor also HR teams are an improved offering of development opportunities for personal growth and career trajectory. The same demand is also driven by a second force - in addition to the employees themselves, internal digital transformation efforts towards the future of work also demand better and more quickly deployable solutions for learning and training. And these demands need to be met by Learning & Development.

This is a tall order, to say the least, and we haven’t even mentioned the ever-widening skills-gap that is looming as a challenge as well.

Predictions tend to agree that the time we will spend on learning and up-skilling will have tripled by the year 2050. In response, the corporate training market as a whole is set to grow by $52.7 billion from 2020 to 2024. The demand for learning and training could not be more evident. And it is also clear that the rate of change is already too much for traditional approaches and traditional learning systems to bear.

Remote working has had an impact, too, as almost 400 million people enrolled in online learning courses last year. With a view towards the future, organizations will obviously aim for, and expect, more and more of their formal learning structure to be delivered digitally and virtually. And learners are demanding more personalized and customized programs, and especially content!

More than ever, organizations and HR are now looking to L&D to deliver. The strategy is to empower employees to thrive in their current roles, and to prepare them for future ones. Not only will this positively impact performance and business outcomes, but it will also attract and retain talent.

The Challenge for L&D

In order to tackle this challenge successfully, L&D needs to prioritize automation, especially for building, managing, and curating programs of learning and training. Without increasing the deployment of automation and utilizing technology such as AI, traditional catalog learning systems will eventually collapse, and many have already started to buckle under the sheer amount of content and digital assets. And to add to this, the amount of learning assets continues to grow, ever faster.

The key demands for 2022 are quite simply impossible for L&D teams to meet without automation and the deployment of state-of-the-art AI technology.

Managing growing content libraries and growing numbers of learning programs is not only extremely inefficient a job to do by hand, but it will also soon be impossible as the amount of information to learn increases. Learners requesting more personalized and customized learning experiences is a demand that needs to be met, too, as this will attract talent and build loyalty through investing in people's growth - and courses that are fully adaptive, at a granular level, will very soon be the norm.

In addition, the demand for more digital and asynchronous learning and development opportunities will continue to grow, as organizations adjust to new ways of hybrid working, which includes learning and training. This will also be a key driver for talent acquisition and retention, and another reason to invest in improved digital capability and automation.

Some will now argue that their LMSs, LXPs, and content libraries are already ‘automating’ the curation of content, but we need to be very clear in our answer here: this is not a personalized offering at all. The fact that ‘you can always find what you want/need’ is no longer seen as enough. And social or group recommendations for content are no longer fulfilling anyone’s need - even if the recommendation is spot on.

The reason is simple: what remains unsolved with traditional approaches is that even when someone is recommended the right course, they will still need to go through it in a predefined order, and often end up dropping out because the old click-through one-size-fits-all course is extremely disenfranchising.

Sound familiar? How many books, movies or TV shows have we started but not finished? Choice overload is a cognitive impairment in which people have a difficult time making a decision when faced with too many options. And yet, the ‘Netflix of learning’ is the best employees are often offered, while they are becoming more and more aware that better solutions are available, and the competition is deploying them already.

Automation and AI are essential for L&D to deliver

To attract talent and to retain talent is obviously going to be a huge challenge, and the competition will be fierce as organizations each adjust for the future and ramp up their respective efforts to become the most attractive employers out there - people-centered.

As a result, the labor market will judge organizations on a number of metrics, and it is already clear that one of the crucial ones will be a high-quality offering of development and growth opportunities for the employees.?

Such opportunities and offerings will, of course, include high-quality mentoring, coaching, training, workshops, webinars, and external courses.

But at the heart of it all, the only solution that is fully scalable and affordable is a digital one. And the only way to scale is with automation and AI.