Is it time to rethink your learning strategy?

Employee expectations are shifting, and learning is at the forefront. Personalised, L&D that leads to fulfilling career development is what today’s employees want and need.

The working relationship previously centred on financial security and climbing the career ladder, now it is more purpose-driven, about individual belonging and looks at the social impact of an individual’s work.

The World Economic Forum’s Good Work Framework sets out five objectives for employers to focus on to create ‘good work’:

1. Fair pay and social justice
2. Flexibility and protection
3. Health and wellbeing
4. Driving diversity and equity and inclusion
5. Employability and learning culture

Learning plays a role in every part of this so leaders need to understand how it impacts every part of the organisation, from onboarding to compliance-based learning, to succession planning, stretch assignments and progression.

• When they onboard, learning gets them up to speed with their job and company culture, so they can begin producing results more quickly. Furthermore, learning helps them feel embedded and essential to the organisation from the get-go
• Compliance-based learning around anti-corruption, cybersecurity, ethics, anti-bias and more means they meet the minimum requirements to perform well, with integrity and fairness, in your organisation. This links with the first objective in the Good Work Framework
• The next stage ties closely with the Good Work Framework objective for employability and learning culture – fostering a sense of belonging through strengthening existing skills aligning learning with the business (showing someone they’re having an impact) and career planning
• Then you have growing people’s careers in a way that’s purposeful and fulfilling for them. This includes strengthening your leadership team, developing functional expertise (department-specific skills) and transformational skills (which right now centre around digital skills like eCommerce, coding, data analytics and cloud computing)
• The final pieces of the puzzle involve rewarding people for continuous learning, with stretch assignments, badges and credentials, and lateral career opportunities (roles and projects in other departments)

Part of creating a great employee experience is linking learning with talent acquisition and internal mobility – giving employees the reason ‘why’ they are taking the time to do an online course or complete a stretch assignment.

You need to dig into someone’s motivations and potential obstacles to learning. For a deskless worker, that might be a lack of technology (Internet access, tablet computers, mobile devices) and time. For a working parent, time and attention will be a huge consideration. For someone who hasn’t gone to university or college, they may not feel engaged by ‘traditional’ learning.

Knowing what makes people tick can ensure you tailor learning to meet their exact needs, at the right time, to fit their learning style and the time is now. This new learning approach will take time to implement as you work through the old processes, culture and tools that have become so embedded in every organisation.

But it needs to happen because expectations are changing and employees are loudly denouncing any employer who doesn’t meet their needs or goals. The alternative is to have a rotating door of people coming and going due to learning failures you could’ve avoided.

If your looking to find the right L&D platform to support your people, that can be tailored to your business needs with bespoke content, DevelopME has over 8000 e-learning assets.

For a free 4 week trail of our personalised learning and development platform DevelopME click on this link.  https://breathingspacehr.co.uk/developme/