Learning and development professionals know all about developing the capabilities of others, but must now update their own skills – or watch from the sidelines while tech-savvy colleagues take learning into their own hands.
The warning was just one of several key points to emerge from a roundtable hosted by the CIPD and workplace learning researchers Towards Maturity, which called on leaders to make L&D “part of the everyday” as it examined the skills required in an L&D professional.
Drawing on the CIPD’s 2014 Learning and development survey and Towards Maturity’s annual benchmark study, practitioners from private, public and not-for-profit sectors called on colleagues to bring L&D goals into step with business priorities and use social learning and technology to speed up knowledge sharing.
The group agreed L&D professionals needed to better talk the language of business. Evaluating L&D activity in terms of business outcomes − rather than hours of training provided or participant feedback from “happy sheets” − is crucial for winning commercial credibility, said Jason Pitfield, training manager at LV=, the insurance provider. Across the sector, 60 per cent of organisations struggle to measure the effectiveness of L&D activity, according to CIPD data.
Providing strong compliance training remains essential. But the most effective L&D professionals are carving out wider roles, by partnering with commercial colleagues to reduce employee turnover, boost productivity, manage talent and improve succession planning, said Laura Overton, founder of Towards Maturity. Others should follow suit. McDonald’s corporate training manager Mark Reilly said his team had traditionally focused on processes and the tactical side of training. Now they were starting to “lift their heads above the weeds” and, in collaboration with business colleagues, pin down the ingredients of high performance. L&D skills can help diagnose gaps between organisational goals and what is actually achieved, said Reilly.
Rather than applying training as a sticking plaster when initiatives go wrong, attendees urged business leaders to involve L&D at the planning stage. But what if they decline to offer L&D a chair at the table? Displaying an understanding of the business’s risks and showing how L&D skills can help to resolve operational dilemmas were felt to be ways to build trust. But to achieve genuine heft, practitioners must be prepared to experiment, “kill some sacred cows” and build up from small-scale pilots to bigger successes. “Doing a victory lap” when activities go well helps to market L&D, said Kris Swanson, vice president CIB technology and operations at JP Morgan − as does getting business partners to talk about the difference learning interventions have made.
A number of attendees said business school-educated executives are often reluctant to participate in internal leadership programmes. Suggestions for winning nay-sayers round included engaging with their personal enthusiasms and reframing the principle of requiring everyone to take part as a chance for senior staff to lead by example by “talking about their own learning”.
The death of jobs for life and the growth of flexible working plus information sharing through social media, has left practitioners straining to bend traditional L&D practices to contemporary needs. Donald Taylor, of the Learning and Performance Institute, said that at the start of his career, learning took place in classrooms; today, people “have the sum total of human knowledge available in their pocket through mobile phones.” Yet the basic L&D model remains virtually unchanged, he warned: “If you think learning belongs in the classroom, enjoy the view as your competitors overtake you.”
On the upside, new avenues are emerging for those prepared to adapt their skills, even while others are closing, observed Kandy Woodfield of the National Centre for Social Research. She cited the outpouring of online resources: the knowledge free-for-all encourages people to access learning independently through search engines and social media but also creates a demand for “content curators,” able to sift the wheat from the chaff, and for facilitators with the skills to support collaborative learning through online communities of interest. L&D, it seems, is on the brink of major change.
Read the Learning and Development 2014 survey and report bit.ly/LnD2014survey To receive a full report on the roundtable as soon as it is available, please email r.stuart@cipd.co.uk