What Trends Will Shape Learning & Development in 2023? My 5 Predictions ??????

TL:DR: What trends will shape learning & development in 2023? What areas should teams double down on? Here are my predictions for 2023 learning trends????

1) Leadership Development

2) Skills, specifically learner-led skills

3) IPaaS/low code integration tools

4) Learning in the Flow of Work

5) Social/Collaborative Learning

Prediction 1 - leadership development will be a key area for L&D in 2023:

Leadership training will be a big theme this year for learning teams. To navigate change and uncertainty (current markets), leaders need upskilling and coaching and L&D is key to this.

L&D will offer personalised learning experience for managers, who?require different skill sets ?depending on their level, direct reports, and previous experience. An ideal training program is personalised to a manager’s specific needs, rather than one-size-fits-all. And it should cover different topics that managers can choose from, such as:?

??How to give more candid, caring feedback and performance reviews

??How and when to appropriately recognize and celebrate your team

??How to align coaching styles to employee preferences

??How to create an employee experience that retains workers

??How to have tough conversations that foster personal growth and change?

How can they deliver leadership training more effectively within the organisation?

• Delivery - think blended learning (eLearning, ILT and vILT), mobile-first, bite-sized, personalised and adopted for your audiences --> results in higher adoption rates and engagement.
• Quality content - on-brand, up to date, engaging the audience, same as delivery - need to be adapted to the audience.
• Resource management, use the resources available more effectively and deliver more, with less (if your company is in a tough economic situation).
• Analyse your successes (or lack thereof) (quantitatively and qualitatively) - what works and what doesn't, to incrementally improve your programs with data.

Prediction 2 - Skills become business imperative, moving from a nice to have to business necessity.

Why does skills matter?

1) Increased productivity.?Your employees are the backbone of your organisation, and training them well will positively impact the productivity and success of your company.

2) Competitive advantage -?when your employees possess the skills needed for success now, it creates a competitive advantage over organisations that don’t. The competitive advantage of talent development and retention is a secret sauce to be successful in current economic times.

3) Increased employee engagement.?When you have a disconnect between what skills are available in the employee population and what skills are needed to effectively succeed in their work, it is frustrating and stressful to employees. Employee engagement will suffer and ultimately employee burnout in the organisation can follow.

What "keys" can unlock L&D and HR's ability to solve the skills puzzle?

?? Key No. 1 - Share ownership for skills throughout the organization

?? Key No. 2 - Gather dynamic skills data

?? Key No. 3 - Use skills, not just roles, in talent decisions

?? Key No. 4 - Embed skills in talent management processes

I project skills will be moved from solely HR to learning teams. Hereunder, a bigger focus will be on learner-led skills development where L&D will double down on two types of skills:

Perishable skills?- skills needed to do a specific task now, these are often job-specific and change frequently.?

Durable skills?- the meta-skills, skills in how to build skills.?These are transferable to any job and that builds to your lifelong learning journey. They can include skills in reasoning, strategic thinking, self awareness and more.?

To reach your skills goals, it is important to make sure your workforce are?“skilled in skilling”?themselves by basing your learning strategy on your people and your culture, and if you haven’t already done so, lay the groundwork for embracing the growth mindset and the idea of adaptability quotient (AQ). Then go for it – use your workforce’s AQ to navigate the fast-changing world, and strengthen your adaptability muscle.?

Analyse your skills success (or lack thereof) with data, to communicate the success with the rest of the business. Here, L&D and HR need to work together and tie skills into the wider HR ecosystem and People Analytics landscape (see how in P3 below). Learning teams need to connect learning to wider career/talent development -?as skills mapping is necessary to support internal mobility and create pathways for growth.?Combining learning tech and talent marketplaces (Fuel50/Gloat etc) will be key here.

Prediction 3 - IPaaS/low code/no code automation platforms tools will become more prevalent:

Most learning teams rely on APIs, but the issue with API is that it requires dedicated IT/developer resources that learning teams usually do not have. This makes them reliant on other depts like IT.

Most organisations do not wish to use developer resources on learning tech integrations. They are deemed as less important than customising your CRM, ERP or HRIS systems. An organisation never has too much developer resources, so freeing up the API-reliance is a key step for learning techs to be more autonomous.

IPaaS Platforms can:

? Reduce manual workloads - save admins time and effort?

? Automate platform workflows?

? Automate data streams / integration & APIs

? Automate the creation, delivery and analysis of training.?

This is a big win for L&D, since integrations is a big headache. They are:

?? Time-consuming, complex and hard to maintain.

??They're owned by IT, not learning teams.

?? They require heavy-duty API work and IT skillsets most learning teams don't possess.

Learning teams have an?"integrations migraine"?and this leaves them with stuck with:

? Status quo of integrations that ain't working

? The same repetitive, tedious housekeeping tasks, week after week

? Data isolated from key business systems

IPaaS tools or low-code/no-code alternatives will solve a lot of these issues in 2023.

Prediction 4: Learning in the flow of work will be a key frontier for learning teams in 2023

Flow of work learning is among the most important areas of 2023 for learning teams.

Your learners will not log into an outdated learning system. They want personalised learning, in their flow of work. This makes learning frictionless, accessible and achievable.

In 2018, Bersin coined the phrase learning in the flow of work as "learning undertaken without any disruption to the work activity”.?

In 2023, this will be more important than ever as learners have:

?? System fatigue is real and there are way too many SaaS applications learners need to use

?? Learners have less time for learning than ever before

?? The attention span of learners are higher than ever before

??The bar for what's consider a good learning experience is higher than ever before

Here is a few examples of what learning teams will focus on in 2023 (hint, Docebo can help here ??):

1) Salesforce:?Learner lives in Salesforce does not want to exit Salesforce to access training.

You can embed your learning platform inside of Salesforce, whilst controlling the layout/pages, courses and user management centrally.

The user can take training in their environment, thereby reducing system fatigue, whilst you as a learning team can manage this centrally.

2) Learning within MS Teams?- Embed learning from your learning platform directly inside MS Teams.

For MS Teams users facing system fatigue, this will allow them to get content directly to their familiar surroundings, reduce the barriers to learners, and help boost engagement and reduce the system disparity many users face.?

3) Learning surfaced via a branded mobile application?- For deskless workers, training via mobile or tablet is a game changer. This could allow any iOS or Android users to surface training on the go, online or offline. For deskless workers, this is a key step to making content accessible, anywhere/anytime.?

4) In-app/in-product education:?Surface product training directly from your own product. Embed the learning platform directly inside your own proprietary product. This is a game-changer for SaaS companies training users on your products. Now, they can get their training right from the very product they use everyday.

Prediction 5: Social learning will be table-stakes (mandatory) for learning projects (at least on a global scale):

Last year, Donald H Taylor ?produced his annual Global Sentiment Survey, uncovering "what's hot in L&D in 2022?" Here, collaborative/social learning came in second place with 9.6%, only behind reskilling/upskilling with 12.5%

Clearly, social learning is becoming mainstream for learning vendor and practitioners alike.

? Most learning teams have nailed compliance training (tick)

? Take it, or your job could depend on it. So, you're forced to do it.

?? Beyond this, teams I speak to struggle with learning engagement

?? This comes down to many things, including the marketing of learning (internally or externally), but equally important, depends on the actual learner experience itself.

Systems need to provide functionality to:

• Support social learning, including channels/community creation, FAQs and forums and gamification/rewards.
• The learning system needs to provide tools to provide meaningful and personalised curation of content to go into social learning channels/forums/communities. Usually done via functionality for searchability and discoverability of content, AI, or social learning vehicles built into set system.
• The content here needs to be varied and engaging, to add variation and richness to the social learning experience, comprised of an i) internal content library (list of eLearning courses with different modalities and topics), 2) "wider web", crawling in content from relevant sources and 3) social-learning content created and shared by peers (in the creation tool in the system. Bonus points for auto translation of content and user comments - key for global enterprise grade projects).
• Hierarchies to structure the visibility and access to content, so it's easy to find content from internal, external and peer-based sources. This usually comes from a robust admin side with automation and user management tools for this purpose.
• System need analytics tools to see what content is working and what is not. This includes user feedback, moderation of communities, and learning analytics drilling into engagement of content from all sources (internal/external/social). If your program is popping but you can't prove it, what good does it really do?

Final thoughts:

These are just predictions and educated guesses, and all opinions are my own.

Curious to hear from you, as a practitioner, L&D enthusiast, or as someone with a keen eye on the L&D pulse:

??What do you see as being the most important areas in 2023?

?? What did I miss? Or did I add any new predictions you didn't think of in 2023?

Any thoughts and opinions are welcomed ??