Move with the times – or risk losing it all
David Perring, FLPI
Chief Insights Officer @ Fosway Group | People Experience Innovator
David Perring, September 2023
Fosway Group’s Chief Insights Officer David Perring concludes his dive into the Digital Learning Realities research for 2023 with a look at the shifting tech landscape.
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With so few happy with their learning platforms, buyers are ready for change
Shockingly, only 45% think that their learning platforms are fit for the modern workforce. Less than half.? So, why don't most organisations have the right learning tech in place?
Sometimes it's poor choices. And for the people who have to use it every day, they’re given the choice rather than making the choice themselves. That often inhibits the sense of having the right tech.
Some of this is a lack of expertise, but sometimes people have just made the wrong choice at the wrong time with the wrong strategy in mind. There's also a lack of innovation, maybe even from their provider, which doesn’t enable them to keep up. But one of the most significant, as we've seen through the research, is where people get forced to use a solution that isn't optimal that probably creates the biggest dissonance, the biggest noise.
Organisations using best of breed learning platforms are almost twice as likely to say their solution is fit for the modern workforce than those using a learning module from an HR suite. So, would L&D teams choose to use the HR suite? Probably not. Would the IT director and the HR team tell them to? Probably, yes. So that gap between what I want to be able to do and what I'm allowed to do can create some of the biggest challenges.
People make choices based around an expectation what their business is like ‘today’. Four years on and the business has changed so significantly that the solution they have no longer fits. Sometimes you're stuck at the end of a five-year contract, and you can't wait to leave because that provider hasn't kept pace; sometimes we're also a victim of timing, but that's also an opportunity as that time to change gets closer.
Success only comes from taking a joined up view of skills across the entire employee experience
In terms of skills, one of the fundamental things we've heard, and this comes through in the Realities research, and from other conversations with practitioners on Fosway roundtables, is that you do need to take a holistic view around skills to be successful with it.
Standardising skills development is about seeing skills not just as being a learning issue, but as an employee experience issue, as a hiring issue, a career issue, and a resourcing issue. And when you tie those things together and create that continuity of skill, label and expectation across the entire lifecycle of the employee, then you start to be able to harness the insights you get about strategic workforce planning, for example.
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The key thing is to try and join up skills across every part of the employee lifecycle and work in strong partnership with other HR silos.
Change is coming – and with it, workforce success
Between 40% to 45% expect to change their solutions within the next two years. So, if you are in a position of not having a solution that you think is fit for the modern workforce, you're likely to be in that countdown to be able to transition out of your current relationship and start to do something new.
The good thing about that two-year timeline is you probably need two years to think about what you're going to change to and to also make a transition if you're going to ditch your existing solution or introduce a new one. So that's the silver lining to the cloud of lack of success.
That 45% of organisations without a fit-for-purpose solution are going to be able to make changes in the next couple of years and that will become part of a more significant wave of innovation. People looked at LXPs as being the panacea for learning. Before that, apparently the LMS is dead. But we are on the cusp of
even better learning platforms, which are bringing new levels of personalisation to the employee experience, which will have some significant impact on our ability to provide the sort of quality learning experiences that our businesses need and our people are crying out for.
To download the infographic
The latest Digital Learning Realities research infographics are free to download from our website.
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