These are the skills L&D teams need in today's?world

In the learning industry, I find we always talk about the modern learning philosophies, skills and experience our people need, but rarely do I see or hear anyone talk about the skills and experience modern learning professionals need to navigate today’s world.

I want to shine a spotlight on the skills and expertise I feel all learning teams should focus on.

As the purveyors of change and educating the masses, it’s important for all of us to be up to date with what’s current, to allow us to truly be of service to our people.

This article has close links to a previous insight of mine on L&D teams practising what they preach when it comes to developing their own skills and expertise or a word that I have fondness for recently — talent stack.

Firstly to understand what we need today, we should take a look at where we’ve come from.

The Past

Traditionally most members of learning teams have been those that operated in roles of a classroom facilitator, trainer (a word I despise!), elearning consultant and a whole host more.

Most commonly if you said to someone you work in L&D, they would generally consider you to be delivering some form of classroom experience which generally involves reading from a script and not a hell of a lot of innovation to the rigid corporate led structure.

The same goes for the people in your business, you say L&D and they think, those damn people that make the horrible compliance elearning I have to do every 6 months.

Although this was the norm, times have most certainly changed.

Today

Fast forward to now and the digital disruption has flipped the world and L&D on it’s head.

Phones, tablets and the silent voice enabled assassin known as Alexa have changed the game and with this, the way people consume content. Information is everywhere, it’s generally free, available across multiple device and it’s on demand.

We can easily identify some of the issues that arise with old guard learning professional’s suite of skills. Let’s be frank, why is anyone going to come to your 3 day excel classroom course, when they can jump on Youtube or Microsoft’s free learning page to consume some very polished videos and interactive user guides which they can utilise whenever they want and more specifically, when they actually need them to solve a problem they have in the flow of work.

Obviously times have changed. I’m not saying that the skills and experience of facilitators or trainers aren’t useful, because they still very much are, yet we also need more, much more in addition to this.

Today L&D teams are more than just classroom facilitators, we are enablers, partners and guides in a world of change. We need to be at the forefront of navigating our people through the changing world by providing the tools, resources and philosophies that will enable them to be setup for success in this world.

We need to be leaders in areas of critical thinking, communicating, collaborating, creativity.

We should be looking at supporting people with the real challenges they face in the flow of work and using the opportunities with technology to enable people to grow.

To do all of this, we need an upgrade, L&D teams need an upgrade.

If videos, communications, micro-learning, data driven performance models and cloud platforms are foreign words to you, then read on my friend.

So what do we need in today’s world?

A bloody good question and while I don’t have all the answers, I certainly do have an opinion.

To talk through my own insights I’ll be using some data from this blog written by the great Josh Bersin to articulate exactly what I believe we need to set ourselves up for success and enable the same for the people we support.

Old vs New

As we can see from the lovely image above, times have most certainly changed.

The wave of evolving technology and workplace changes have brought with it a new demand for the skill set of a modern learning team. Just being a trainer or facilitator will not get you far in really connecting with people and enabling change.

We can see that a lot of the new capabilities for learning teams revolve around technology, so becoming an ally with this will be key in developing your current skill set.

For me, I have been developing and continual using, most if not all of the capabilities required for today’s world and I wanted to highlight where I see the most critical areas for learning teams to develop:

Branding and Communications — I find many people need to understand a mantra I repeat often, “If you build it, they won’t come”.

I feel like a broken record sometimes and apologies if you know me or have read any of my insights before because I beat this drum often. But if you build the most amazing learning experience in the world and don’t tell anyone about it, then guess what? No one’s going to use and benefit from it.

I see so many teams pour over building resources for months or even years in some cases to then throw them on some clunky LMS or a website with the worst user experience in existence and just expect the masses to arrive.

It always ends the same way, the resource deemed a failure 6 months later because no one has used it and why has no one used it? Because nobody knows it even existed.

You need a plan, plain and simple. Learning teams need to embrace the tactics of colleagues in marketing, you effectively need to bring a marketer’s approach to engage people with your content.

You need to be the voice of learning, tell your people what you’ve made, why it’s important and most importantly, why is it important to them.

Look to understand how you can build marketing and engagement campaigns around your work that will make sure people can benefit from it for a long time.

Data analysis — just to be clear here, I’m not talking about happy sheets — screw happy sheets.

Data is the most underutilised resource in L&D today and why is this you might say? Well it’s simple, hardly anyone understands how to use it and neither are they investing in the skills to do this.

You could be sitting on a goldmine of learning performance data right now from a host of tools that can demonstrate the impact your programmes are having on people and their performance.

Yet most of this is untouched as L&D teams think they need an analyst or some data guru to interpret this, but this is just not true and until more professionals look to really understand how to use data, there is no way you can measure and showcase true ROI to your business.

Content curation and Multimedia development

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but videos are all the rage right now and guess what? You too can wield the power of the 60 sec visual entertainment tool.

The ability to create different forms of content to connect with different people is absolutely crucial to any high performing learning eco-system. This can be anything from digital publications, blog posts, surveys, games, videos and more. The capabilities to unleash content in a variety of forms is a powerful weapon and the best bit is that technology today has made it even easier to do all of these things.

The internet is littered with an abundance of quick and simple tools to help you build lots of cool solutions.

Resources for you

Now that my impassioned rant is coming to a close, how about I set you up with some resources to help you in the exploration to build some of these skills? I thought you’d like that.

Why you need a communications and engagement strategy for L&D

How to tell stories with data

Data and L&D — understanding your people and what they want

Resources not courses

Learn how to harness the power of neuroscience to connect people with your learning offer

Lessons from Apple on building a learning ecosystem

I hope these help, enjoy and as always I’d love to hear your thoughts so we can learn more from each other.

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