Learning and Development Priorities for the Future of Work

Forward-Thinking Organizations Are Increasing Investment in L&D

Is your organization proactively planning for the future of work, or reactively putting out fires in response to change?

We know that effective custom eLearning and training development strategies produce critical organizational wins, including higher employee productivity and retention, and lowered overall costs. Now, we’re seeing increased emphasis on learning and development initiatives designed to meet the demands created by remote work, the labor shortage, and evolving market conditions. So, which custom eLearning initiatives should we prioritize?

Custom eLearning and Training Priorities for 2022

Here’s what we know. The role of learning and development teams is expanding. As a result, we have increased opportunities to build newly revitalized workplaces. We can see this in the results of surveys taken by industry experts.

According to the results of the 2021 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, 66% of L&D professionals globally agree that Learning and Development is focused on building or reshaping their organizations this year. Moreover, 64% agree that L&D has shifted from a “nice to have” option to a “need to have” in 2021.

Additionally, a recent Brandon Hall Group study found that more than 75% of respondents said “business leaders rate learning as highly important to the organization.”

Top learning priorities reported by organizational leaders include:

• upskilling and reskilling employees to bridge skills gaps
• technology training
• providing career development paths
• leadership training
• improving onboarding skills training

A New Direction for L&D

To those priorities, we can make further recommendations to improve organizational performance for the next year – and years to come. Specifically, these areas have a high potential for benefit your organization.

One important recommendation, based on current conditions, is use of learning and development initiatives to re-envision how technology should be used to support on-the-job processes.

For example, this might look like having more organized learning resources, such as a digital library of support materials with a search function, to support on-the-job access to information to ease the flow of work and for times when management isn’t available to answer questions.

Your organization might also choose to improve any legacy technology systems and move to the cloud to support more mobile flexibility. All updates in technology should come with basic training support to empower your team and integrate the new change to get the most out of your investment.

How? Your team could also create blended resources to support improved access for remote employees, with social features to improve communication between in-person and remote teams.

Overall, learning and development teams can contribute with improved content, weigh in on the user experience of your systems and provide recommendations to improve it, and by providing their expertise in needs assessment to develop and organize resources. These are investments in the future success of the organization with a corresponding ROI in terms of talent management and organizational agility.

Recently, AllenComm CEO Ron Zamir offered more helpful advice on this same topic in a recently published Forbes article. You can find the full article here.