Take the plunge - A fresh start for Learning in 2023

As we embark on the new year, and prepare to dive back into work again, I hope you’ve had the opportunity to take a well-earned rest over the festive season.

For me, this time was spent in a phase of deep reflection, contemplating how to achieve a good balance of working and personal goals, and marrying these up with life and its many challenges. Sometimes coming to the right answer means parking everything, taking a pause, and leaving it to your subconscious to deal with it all for a while. This allows your brain and body to relax and rejuvenate. I certainly used the time to swim in the ocean, bask in the sun, and generally get out and about — when Melbourne was able provide decent weather!

Reflecting on last year, which was characterised by many as one of trying to keep afloat, find equilibrium and avoid potential burnout, I personally feel as though the regenerative rest has allowed the growth and some much-needed optimism to resurface.

It’s almost as though we needed some time for the fields of creative productivity to flood and then lie fallow, after the significant challenges of 2021 and the struggle to return to a new normal in 2022. Still, that optimism is tempered by the hard-learnt wisdom from the pandemic - that things can and do change at any time and there is no such thing as certainty. For that reason, the wayfinding skills that we need to navigate learning challenges remain as critical to leaders now as they were last year, just with a slightly different, and for me, more honed-in focus in 2023. (If the Wayfinding concept is new to you, you may like to check out our article from last year).

As we embark upon the year ahead as Learning and Development professionals, it feels as if the time for action is here. We need to dip our toes in the water, taking what we have learned and using it to stimulate change, growth and a shift towards planning, testing and learning together with calculated risk-taking (with or without the data sources we’d love to have) to start bringing our new ideas into fruition. Read on for our thoughts on setting up the new year for success.

Looking up to imagine the Future

One of our favourite wayfinding principles, looking up to the stars is particularly important for your new year’s planning. L&D teams need to ensure that their plans are aligned with corporate strategy and the goals of the organisation. In order to demonstrate value, it’s critical to gather business, learner and learning systems data that tells the story of what is being delivered, and how well outcomes are being achieved. This will inform spending and decision-making around new initiatives. Many L&D teams stop at basic learning evaluations like training completion surveys, but I am often met with surprise when I ask what other organisational data (sales figures, customer or NPS data, incident and compliance reporting) are available to help give us clues to design more effective strategies. When you understand the metrics and how you can influence change, and confirm how you will measure success, sometimes the learning strategy you need floats to the surface and becomes apparent. Often it is a mix of training and workplace/learning support that provides the magic formula.

What might this look like for you?

• Take a look at your organisation’s strategic plans and align your team’s learning goals with achieving the big ticket items, and speak plainly about how new projects and spends will shift the needle on these priorities
• Measure the impact of learning, by evaluating what is delivered against agreed data points
• Understand what mix of modalities, tools and approaches will create the right “learning campaign” giving learners a mix of both fresh and familiar approaches to achieve your goals.
• Keep up-to-date with trends and technologies that are heavily influencing our field, eg. Consolidated learning experience and work-integrated learning platforms such as Microsoft Viva, and new AI systems such as chatGPT have incredible power to disrupt and shift our approach to learning and how it is delivered and created. These will be BSI's top areas of research this year.

What’s worthwhile to bring along for the journey in 2023?

Every piece of learning content in your organisation’s curriculum has a cost associated with it – whether that be in terms of time to complete it, licencing fees, or ongoing maintenance. When’s the last time you gave your learning curriculum a good ‘spring clean’?

Learning worth keeping is both mission critical, and still aligns with your organisational and learning goals. Some of your content may have ‘good bones’ but might need to be built on, scaffolded or re-structured for maximum effectiveness. Another great spring cleaning activity is to assess effectiveness, and consider whether some support or refresher learning is needed, or more targeted and blended approaches can be added to create spaced learning and improve learning retention.

Your employees are one of your greatest assets – and always need to be brought along for the ride, and with a growing need to retain talent, regular communication, training and development opportunities, and learning campaigns supporting a positive and inclusive work culture are just a few ways to keep your valued staff motivated and inspired.

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?…And what should be left behind in the dirt?

To paraphrase tidying queen Marie Kondo, if the courses in your organisation’s curriculum don’t 'spark joy’ for learners and outcomes, then you need to say thank you, and gratefully let them go! Because in a learning sense, they’re unlikely to be influencing the kind of behaviour change and performance that you’re looking for.

What’s not sparking joy for us in 2023?

• Courses that should have been decommissioned years ago. You know the ones… The clunky modules where learners have to click next 50 times and get little value from
• Content that’s irrelevant and not targeted to the needs and interests of learners and doesn't respect their time and existing knowledge
• Modules that are too long and have been cobbled together indiscriminately (we call then Frankenstein's modules) over the years and are no longer structurally coherent

It may also be time to revisit the stop-gap solutions hastily developed during the pandemic… that now might need a more considered approach. What did you learn from that period? Overly long recorded webinars with PowerPoint slides are prime candidates for a revisit. Are these the best way for your learners to absorb and retain learning?

How do you work out what to keep and what to leave behind?

• Evaluate how much time your people are spending completing training and work out the cost to the business of this per learner.
• Perform a curriculum audit (Or we can do one for you!) to pinpoint the opportunities for a more streamlined and impactful approach.
• Spring clean, refresh and update your training catalogue with shorter, sharper and more engaging content, so every item sparks joy with your learners
• Consider chunking learning down, away from long courses, and into a toolkit of learning modalities that can provide flexibility and different ways to support the learning process
• Remember learning is a process, and your tools should reflect and support the process as your learners engage, explore and embed their skills.

From all of us at BSI, we wish you an inspired, transformative, and successful 2023 and would love to talk with you about your L&D plans for the year ahead and how you can use technology to support them.

Let’s make a splash!