Three Trends in Enterprise Learning

L&D is under tremendous pressure to prepare their workforces to find the opportunities in today’s disruptive business environments. But what approach should L&D professionals take to address this complex problem?

New technologies are just one of the opportunities L&D teams must consider in their evolving strategies. There are also far-reaching decisions about where to focus efforts, and how to align development with the way learners want to learn.

We set out to shed light on these seismic shifts in enterprise learning and identify key trends in upskilling and reskilling. Our research took a three-prong approach. We looked at third-party industry analyst research. We conducted our own survey, asking our partners about their experience and plans. And we looked at how the learning platform market is evolving.

We found three key trends:

1. L&D’s top priority is ensuring the workforce has the right skills

Whether you ask CEOs or L&D teams, it’s all about the skills. With Wainhouse Research, we surveyed 130 L&D professionals on their top five priorities over the next three years.

Ensuring the workforce has the right skills ranked first. The urgent need for skills is being felt at the very top of global organizations and all the way through. And, while digital skills are undeniably important, it’s leadership skills—such as navigating complexity, accelerating talent development, and inspiring engagement—that hold the key to unlocking those skills for real innovation and change. L&D must help leaders learn to apply these capabilities to fast-moving conditions. Rounding out the top five priorities are:

Improve manager effectiveness

Strong, effective managers have an outsized impact on employee engagement and performance. Improving the behaviors of these pivotal employees is a fundamental L&D concern.

Drive business transformation

Transformation has become table stakes, and the workforce must be agile enough to navigate constant shifts. With targeted initiatives, L&D plays a key role in fostering the innovation, speed, and agility their organizations need.

Create a pipeline of leaders

Making sure development opportunities are available at all levels is not just aligning to your learner’s needs, but also better positioning your organization for success. In the future, much of the decision-making in business will happen further down the chain of command. L&D is at the heart of ensuring the organization has the leaders it needs to create an environment that draws everyone’s best thinking and diverse ideas to the table.

Create a culture of learning

L&D must focus on supporting continuous learning. By aligning systems and processes, L&D can reinforce learning-focused behaviors, such as curiosity, as an organization changes and grows.

2. Learning platform approaches are evolving

Organizations are not unified in just one or two approaches to manage and deliver learning. They are deciding between a learning experience platform (LXP) or a learning management system (LMS), and in many cases must navigate existing systems and infrastructure.

Our survey reveals a dynamic, fragmented market for learning platforms. Organizations are fairly split on what platform they use.

46% using an LXP

40% using an LMS

And when we dug a bit deeper, we saw even more variety in learning technology ecosystems. When asked how they are delivering learning experiences, our L&D survey said.

58% are using a single, integrated platform

42% are using multiple platforms

As LMSs continue to add content capabilities to their platform services and work to deliver the most user-friendly experience, L&D leaders will need to make some smart decisions about the right experience for their learners.

3. Serving up the best content remains a key concern

The goal for many L&D teams is finding the right, high-quality content, making it accessible, and tracking its usage and effectiveness. But that goal remains elusive:

• 66% are very to extremely concerned with the challenge of finding, delivering, and tracking content
• 75% have not addressed this challenge

Organizations want to provide the best possible learning experiences to their employees. There is no shortage of learning content from hundreds of content providers, in addition to free content on the Internet. As employees take more control of their own development, they are accessing content on their own. Now more than ever, L&D must be able to provide quality content, in the right ways, to help learners find what’s most relevant.

This research has uncovered some thorny challenges, and we’ll be diving even deeper into these concepts in future blogs. In the meantime, I’d love to hear how you are approaching these issues. Which of these challenges resonates most with you and your team?

Dennis Gullotti is director, solutions marketing, at Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. Email him at [email protected]