How Learning & Development Must Change: Three Challenges

“The three points of change have always been part of the L&D function, but today’s greater speed of technological change, combined with the increased importance of learning to the modern organization, means these three facets of the modern L&D department are crucial to its success.”

The three challenges we face today

The result is that L&D must change the way it operates in today’s world, in three ways. In particular:

1. We must develop content collaboratively. The L&D department can no longer work at a remove from the rest of the organization. While trainers in the past could develop deep expertise in a given subject matter, today’s urgent need for information makes that impossible. More than ever, L&D needs to establish strong ways to develop learning content in collaboration with workplace subject matter experts (SMEs).
2. We must support current practice. A great deal of learning takes place in the workplace without L&D’s intervention. However, the department has a role to play in supporting this learning, whether managers deliberately organize it, or whether colleagues informally arrange it among themselves.
3. We must maintain and build our department. It is no longer possible to support the wider demands of workplace L&D with a generalist skill set. Instead, it is essential for L&D staff to have both a good general grounding in L&D and specialist skills in particular areas.

This table shows some of the ways that the new approach to L&D differs from the old:

Table 1.

Old L&D	New L&D
Centralized	Involved with the organization
Classroom and/or face-to-face delivery mechanism	Multiple media, including the classroom where appropriate; both synchronous and asynchronous; online and offline
Content experts	Experts in how people learn and in working with SMEs to get the best from them
“Push” delivery style	Multiple styles: “Push” delivery where appropriate (e.g., for compliance training), plus “pull” for performance support information
Minimal technical expertise	Technical expertise in e-Learning
Course writing expertise	Expertise in writing for courses, blogs, and wikis
Design and set up courses requested by management	Curriculum design expertise as well as performance consultancy expertise to determine whether courses are actually required

These are just some of the practical ways L&D must change to meet the challenge of today. The three points of change have always been part of the L&D function, but today’s greater speed of technological change, combined with the increased importance of learning to the modern organization, means these three facets of the modern L&D department are crucial to its success.

In this respect, the L&D department is a microcosm of the modern working environment in which individuals are becoming increasingly focused specialists in their field. In this L&D microcosm, specialists in certain areas of learning practice staff the department. They add value to the enterprise in collaboration with fellow workers and use technology to ensure that they focus on high-value work as often as possible.

The world of work is changing and the L&D department must change with it. L&D can not only survive, it can flourish if it bears in mind the benefits of working with SMEs and employee managers and if it places a deliberate focus on L&D team members by both developing them in a structured way and by supporting them with the right systems.