Is L&D A Waste Of Time? C-Suite And Employees Disagree (New Data)

51% of executives surveyed said their company’s existing L&D programs feel like a “waste of time”.

And it’s a problem!

Because 84% of employees expect their employer to provide the training and education they need for a changing world.

So, the C-Suite and employees fundamentally don’t agree on learning and upskilling…

• But how are employees meant to build relevant skills when leadership doesn't see it as the company’s responsibility?
• And how are L&D teams meant to build career paths when the C-Suite doesn’t think their L&D programs are the best way to do it?

edX’s recent survey had us asking these head-scratchers because it showed just how big the leadership-learner disconnect is.

The TL;DR is that they “surveyed 1,600 executives and professionals about their expectations for learning and development on the job” and not only is there a huge gap in perceptions, there are some pretty mind-blowing numbers around learning in general.

Here’s the scoop:

C-Suite can see the skills gap, but don’t agree their company should close them

“C-suite executives surveyed estimated that about half of the skills that exist in the workforce today won’t be relevant in just a few years.”?

When you read the quote above, the image below doesn’t really make sense.

If skills are becoming redundant and you don’t help your team build new skills, you’ll end up with a bunch of employees who aren’t skilled for the future.

So why are only 32% of C-Suite executives agreeing that it's their company's responsibility to train and develop employees for future roles??

With only 26% agreeing that their company's L&D programs were the best way for employees to advance their careers.

If you’re not responsible for upskilling and your L&D program isn’t how employees advance, where’s your company skillset going to be in two to five years??

And how do you think you’ll perform as a business when you reach that point?

Employees don’t think their present L&D offering can future-proof their skills, so they’re taking it into their own hands

80% of employees generally feel they have access to information needed to perform their job now, but they’re less optimistic about the future.

Just a third are confident they’d be able to build the skills needed for the future purely using their company’s L&D programs. A similar number feared they’d have the skills needed to perform their role in as soon as one or two years.

And while there was a sentiment that some didn’t know where to start, others are getting stuck in!

• More than 60% are using content external to their company’s L&D program to learn.
• And 57% of employees paid for external learning content out of their own pocket in the last 12 months.

When you consider the economic and time constraints a lot of people find themselves under, this statistic is pretty shocking.

We asked HowNow CEO, Nelson Sivalingam, for his thoughts on these numbers.

“How can it be that we've got to a situation where employees are spending outside of the organisation to build their skills and go elsewhere?

“McKinsey also found that only 12% of employees reported using any of the skills they got from internal L&D, and that shows a lot of wastage. 88% didn't acquire any relevant skills as a result of what was on offer.?

“So, as L&D teams, we really need to ask ourselves some serious questions about whether what we’re doing helps people build skills and drive impact!”

Finally, in something leaders and learners can agree on, 89% of executives also admitted to sourcing their own content at a personal cost.

Employees meanwhile fear the pace of change, and it’s unlikely these numbers and narratives are helping

We’re in an economic downturn that only adds to financial fears of being made redundant.

And the world around us is changing so fast, we’re at risk of skill redundancy too.

It’s not a pleasant place to be, and more than a quarter of employees agree to feeling overwhelmed, fearing stale skills and struggling to keep up with how fast the world of work is changing.

Can a skills-first approach stop L&D being “a waste of time” that doesn’t build future skills?

Right now, so many L&D teams are taking a content-first approach - creating content and then trying to find problems it solves or skills it could help build.

? But content-first neglects the context of where that content is going to exist and be delivered.

Which means it’s fundamentally disconnected from the role someone does and the skills needed to reach business goals.

? A skills-first approach starts with skills needed for a company to reach its goals - with the mindset that both the skills and goals evolve over time.

We measure the skills we have internally to build a profile of our talents and levels of proficiency, and map those with the ones needed to reach our goals.

Fundamentally, you talking about content completion and time spent learning doesn't answer the questions the business and our people need us to answer.?

Skills, however, allows us to align directly to the business objectives because we can look at those objectives and ask questions like:

• Does the business have the skills required to achieve that business objective??
• Which skills are missing??
• And now how do I align that learning to the skills that we need to bridge that gap?

“Skills is the language that the business understands. The C suite understands that if we don't have these skills, we need to do X, Y or Z to build those skills.?

“Employees understand it when you tell them that, right now, you don't have the skills to be able to progress onto this next step. And as L&D, we understand why the business needs these skills. And so it's a language that everyone understands.” - Nelson Sivalingam.

Shifting to skills-first L&D starts with our step-by-step guide: The Death of the LMS, get your free copy here.