How to build a Learning and Development Action Plan ft Katie Greenwood
Does your company’s Learning and Development (L&D) strategy feel like more “guessing” than “winning”? You’re not the only one! In today’s fast-changing world, taking a random approach to L&D is like starting a road trip without a map – you might end up somewhere, but it probably won’t be where you actually need to go.
On our RiseUp Radio podcast, Katie Greenwood shared some game-changing insights on how to create an L&D strategy that gets actual results. We’re talking about more than just filling out a checklist of training – it’s about making a Learning and Development Action Plan and aligning learning with your company’s big-picture goals.
Want to stop wasting time and start seeing tangible growth? Keep reading to discover how to turn your L&D from a cost into a key driver of success!
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Meet the Speaker
Katie Greenwood is an award-winning HR leader with over 20 years of experience in talent management and leadership development. She is passionate about unlocking potential and building future-ready leaders. Greenwood started working in Learning and Development in college at the Gillette company. Greenwood helps individuals grow while shaping strong, future-focused cultures that drive lasting results.
How to Create a Learning and Development Strategy?
According to Katie Greenwood, translating organizational goals into learning goals is the cornerstone of an impactful Learning and Development Action Plan. To achieve this, a practical approach involves starting with the end in mind by defining what success looks like for the organization and working backward. Engaging stakeholders early, including leaders, managers, and employees, helps identify skill gaps and align learning goals with business needs .
Components of this approach include:
Set Clear, Focused Goals: For training to truly make an impact, you need specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. This keeps everyone on the same page, ensuring transparency and accountability. When your objectives are clear, it’s easier to track progress and see real results that align with your company’s needs.
Evaluate Your Budget Early: Before diving into a training program, take a step back and look at the budget. Is it realistic? Cost-effective? Will it deliver real impact? A careful budget review helps you allocate resources wisely, making sure your training efforts stay within financial limits while still achieving the desired outcomes.
Engage Stakeholders from the Start: Training shouldn’t be a top-down initiative—it should be a shared effort. Involve leaders, managers, and employees early on to identify skill gaps and ensure the program meets real needs. Managers can highlight bottlenecks, while employees can share the challenges they face daily. When everyone has a voice, the program feels more like a collective effort rather than just another corporate mandate.
Embrace Continuous Improvement: Your business evolves, and so should your training programs. Regularly assess and adjust your training goals to keep them relevant with your Learning and Development Action Plan. What worked last year might not work now, so staying flexible ensures your learning initiatives remain aligned with business priorities.
Pinpoint Skill Gaps: Understanding what skills your employees have versus what they need is essential. Use performance reviews, benchmarking, and competency frameworks to get a clear picture of the gaps. This way, your Learning and Development Action Plan directly targets the areas that will make the biggest impact.
Offer Targeted Learning Solutions: Not everyone learns the same way, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t cut it. Mix different methods—on-the-job training, e-learning, workshops, certifications—to create a program that fits both individual learning styles and business needs. When employees learn in ways that suit them, they’re more likely to apply their skills effectively.
Track Feedback and Measure Success– Training doesn’t end when the session is over. Gather feedback from employees and managers to understand what’s working and what’s not. Track key metrics like productivity improvements and employee retention to measure the program’s effectiveness. These insights will help you refine future training efforts, ensuring they continue to support your company’s growth.
A Practical Guide to Setting SMART L&D Goals
To create SMART Learning and Development (L&D) goals, the podcast emphasizes using a straightforward approach that provides clear direction, accountability, and measurable outcomes. This helps you align the goals with business priorities and deliver tangible results . Also, you should clearly understand what you are doing and how you are expected to create a Learning and Development Action Plan.
Here’s how to apply the SMART framework to create effective learning goals :
Specific: You should clearly define what needs to happen, who is involved, and why it is important
Measurable: Determine how success will be tracked using metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to show movement. Use quantifiable indicators to track progress.
Achievable: You must confirm that the goal is realistic and that have the necessary resources and time to execute it.
Relevant: Connect the goal to broader organizational priorities. If it’s not a priority, you can consider pivoting to another goal. Ensure the training supports company priorities such as improving customer retention and loyalty.
Time-bound: Set a clear completion deadline can help you ensure a definite endpoint.
For example, if your goal is to boost customer satisfaction by 15% by the end of 2025, a SMART goal could include training all customer service representatives in advanced communication and conflict resolution techniques. This would involve measuring current customer satisfaction scores, such as increasing from 70% to 85%.
The Learning and Development Action Plan would include a 12-week training program incorporating role-playing, real-time feedback, and coaching sessions. To ensure the training aligns with company priorities, it should be clearly communicated that this initiative aims to improve customer retention and loyalty. The program would be launched in Q1, with satisfaction scores tracked quarterly, working towards a 15% increase by year-end. Additionally, it’s essential to adjust the goal as needed to ensure it continues to meet evolving priorities.
Bridging the Gap: How Skill Gap Analysis Drives Business Success?
A skill gap analysis aligns your team’s skills with business goals by identifying the difference between an employee’s current skills and the skills needed to achieve their objectives. It helps focus on critical skills, save costs, and boost engagement, ensuring employees can deliver a measurable return on investment (ROI)1.
To perform a skills gap analysis, follow these steps :
Define organizational goals and needs: Align the skill gap analysis with strategic objectives by identifying upcoming projects, technologies, or market demands that require specific skills. For example, if a mid-sized organization plans a massive digital transformation, skills in data analytics, automation, or AI may be needed.
Identify key roles: Determine the roles required to achieve these goals. You can use job descriptions, performance reviews, benchmarks, and competency frameworks to pinpoint necessary skills. For instance, a marketing manager may need data-driven skills, AI for content creation, and analytics for decision-making and reporting.
Assess current skill levels: Evaluate your team’s existing skills using self-assessments such as Risely provides for leadership skills, 360-degree feedback, or surveys. Use a simple scale, such as 1 to 5, to rate proficiency levels. Honest performance reviews and project results can also help you to serve as benchmarks.
Identify gaps: Compare the required skills for each role with the current skill levels to pinpoint areas needing improvement. For example, if only 20% of the product engineering team knows advanced AI modeling, but the objective requires 50% proficiency, it becomes a clear priority for investment.
Create targeted solutions: Design Learning and Development Action Plans using methods like on-the-job training, e-learning, workshops, and certifications. For instance, if customer satisfaction is a key objective, managers and leaders should be trained in conflict resolution.
Key Takeaways
Align Learning with Business Goals: Effective training starts with clear objectives that support your company’s growth. Define what skills your employees need to meet business goals and create Learning and Development Action Plans that drive real results.
Identify Skill Gaps and Focus on Impact: A strong L&D strategy begins with understanding where your employees are and where they need to be. Conduct skill gap analyses to pinpoint key areas for improvement, ensuring training is relevant and effective.
Engage Stakeholders for Alignment and Support: You should involve leaders, managers, and employees from the start. Their insights help shape meaningful training programs, ensuring buy-in and making learning a shared priority, not just an HR initiative.
Adapt and Evolve with Changing Needs: L&D isn’t a one-time effort—it’s an ongoing process. You must regularly gather feedback, measure effectiveness, and adjust programs to stay aligned with business needs and industry shifts. This helps you to create an effective learning and development action plan.
Meet the Host
Ashish is an entrepreneur tackling workplace development challenges through Risely, an AI copilot that helps managers and leaders build essential people skills.
Drawing on his experience in technology and organizational behavior, he’s passionate about creating scalable solutions that transform how companies develop their talent. His mission is to empower leaders to build thriving teams and sustainable organizational success.
Sneha is a management graduate with a strong passion for leadership development and workplace growth. As a writer for Risely, she brings fresh insights into leadership strategies, team dynamics, and professional development. With a keen interest in marketing, she blends analytical thinking with storytelling to create engaging and actionable content.
Grab free resources to take your team’s development to the next level!
Use our Skills Gap Analysis Template to identify key areas for improvement and align your training with business goals
How to create training objectives for business success?
Why are we conducting training?
That’s where the story starts for all our training and development initiatives, which take the form of training regimens. These answers are summed up in the form of “training objectives.”
Having good training goals is not a nice-to-have; it is a must. These goals form the base of successful training programs. They help guide employee growth and lead to business success. This blog post will help you create strong training objectives that get real results. By knowing why training objectives matter, what they include, and how to match them with your business strategy, you can tap into the full power of your team.
Training objectives are clear goals you can measure. They are specific, achievable, relevant, and time-bound statements that show what workers should accomplish after a training program. These objectives help both trainers and trainees understand the purpose of the training and what to expect as results.
For example, your training objectives for a leadership development program could include:
Lead 3 cross-functional project teams over 6 months
Successfully mentor 2 junior team members to promotion readiness
Improve team satisfaction scores by 15% through better communication
Develop and execute 2 strategic initiatives from planning to completion
Reduce team turnover by 20% through improved engagement strategies
What do good training objectives look like?
The training objectives we just saw are clear and concise. But action often requires them to be more detailed and set the context accurately. Good training objectives share common features that make them effective guides for training programs:
Specificity: Objectives should clearly outline what participants are expected to learn or achieve by the end of the training.
Measurability: They should be quantifiable so that progress and success can be easily assessed.
Relevance: Objectives must align with organizational goals and the skills needed for job performance.
Realistic: Setting achievable objectives ensures motivation and success among participants.
Adaptability: Training objectives should be flexible enough to accommodate changes in the business environment or individual learner needs. This ensures that the training remains relevant and effective over time.
Let’s explore this further with another example. We have a training objective for our leadership development program as follows:
“Within 6 months, develop and implement an organizational change initiative that improves team efficiency by 20%, demonstrated through successfully leading a cross-functional team of 5-7 members, documenting progress through bi-weekly metrics, and presenting results to senior leadership.”
Does it adhere to the guidelines of good training objectives that we saw above?
First, there is a specific time frame for the task, i.e. “within 6 months.” The deliverable, “organizational change initiative,” as well as the other actions (leading, documenting, presenting) are also defined. We have also mentioned who else will work on the program (5-7 members.)
Second, the objective is measurable right from the start because we have taken care to define what success looks like in terms of milestones like 20% efficiency improvement target, bi-weekly metric tracking, and final presentation.
Third, the training objective is relevant to the multiple stakeholders involved as it addresses real business need (team efficiency) and develops crucial leadership skills (change management, team leadership).
Fourth, the training objective provides a reasonable timeframe for implementation and achievable improvement percentage. Thus, it is realistic.
Last, with a flexible implementation approach the training objective becomes scalable to different department needs. It allows for adaptability.
Why should you set training objectives?
The benefits of writing good training objectives are two-fold.
First, for the business themselves:
Ensure focus on right business priorities: When training programs focus on the specific skills people lack, they help the business move forward. By clearly outlining the skills and behaviors needed to meet the company’s vision, you ensure their training money is well spent.
Make ROI and impact easier to prove: Clear goals help you understand outcomes better by benchmarking against them. As a result, you can begin initiatives with set milestones to hit, in business terms using ROI, and later on harp on the tangible impact created to showcase L&D success.
Then, the employees:
Engage employees better with training: One big benefit of setting clear training objectives is how it helps employee performance and productivity. When employees know what is expected of them and see how their training relates to their jobs, they are more engaged and committed.
Create ownership over learning goals: Also, training that is connected to specific performance goals helps team members take charge of their growth and push for continuous improvement. It creates a culture of learning in the company. Employees are encouraged to grow their skill sets and look for chances to improve.
A lack of training objectives might manifest in training that makes people wonder, “Why is this happening?” ” What am I supposed to learn here?” and managers wonder, “Why is my team wasting time here?”
Without setting clear training objectives, you might fall into the pitfall of constantly running training and development programs that lead nowhere. Ultimately, as more money and time continue to go in without much impact to note for it, the fingers are pointed at L&D as a resource sink.
But here’s the deal: we know that L&D strategies have significant effect on ensuring business success. It impacts important areas like talent management, retention of people, and team’s effectiveness. The gap between your effort and the results that should be ideally yours to claim lies in training objectives. Connecting them directly is the key.
In the next couple of sections, we will understand all about alignment of training and business objectives.
What does alignment of training and business objectives mean?
Training goals should never stand alone. They should be closely connected to the business strategy of the organization. When training efforts match the company’s main goals, businesses see real results from their training spending. Training then serves as a key tool to reach business aims instead of just being an expense. This connection makes sure that the skills and knowledge learned in training are used to tackle the issues and chances your organization faces, boosting the overall success of the training.
This process has two key aspects:
Identifying business needs and skills gaps
The first step to match training goals with business strategy is to find out what the organization needs and what skills are lacking. This means doing a detailed needs analysis to spot the main challenges and chances the business has now and in the future. It also requires checking the skills and strengths of the current staff and finding gaps between where they are now and where they want to be.
For example, if your company wants to enter a new market, the training needs analysis may show a need for language training or training about cultural differences for team members who will deal with customers in that market. If your company starts using a new software system, it is important to find out what skills are needed to use that software among the staff and so on.
Integrating business vision and employee development
Integrating the business vision and employee growth is key for creating training goals that lead to success. When training matches the long-term goals of the company, it helps prepare employees for future challenges. This way, training is not only focused on the present but also on what comes next. When your people see how their jobs fit into the bigger picture, they feel more engaged and motivated. They know their growth is connected to the company’s success.
Also, getting employees involved in setting training goals helps them feel a sense of ownership. When team members have a say in their learning paths, they are more likely to engage with the training and pursue the goals. They know their opinions matter, which makes them more committed to their professional development.
How to write good training objectives?
Once you know what your business needs are and how they fit with your overall plan, it’s time to turn those needs into clear training goals. Let’s understand how we can do this the right way:
#1 Determining the scope and focus of training
The first step in writing effective training objectives is to decide the scope and focus of the training. This means clearly stating the knowledge, skills, or behaviors that participants should gain or improve through the training. A clear scope keeps the training focused and relevant for both learners and the organization. It helps to avoid scope creep, which happens when the training tries to cover too much, leading to a limited understanding of the topic.
Also, setting the focus helps in choosing the right teaching methods, materials, and assessments that match the specific learning objectives. For instance, a training program that aims to develop leadership skills might use case studies, role-playing tasks, and group discussions. This approach can create a more engaging and interactive learning experience.
#2 Using action verbs for clear, achievable goals
Using action verbs is important when writing clear training objectives. These verbs help show the specific actions that participants should be able to do after finishing the training. They change vague ideas into clear and measurable objectives. This makes it easier to check if the goals of learning have been met.
For example, instead of saying that trainees will “understand” a concept, a better way to state it is that they will be able to “explain” or “apply” that concept in a situation.
For instance, while writing your training objectives, try using these words:
Training objectives rely on clarity. That’s why it’s important to make the results measurable with the help of metrics. The first set is quantitative metrics, which will help you measure tangible changes tracked with data. Hence, if we are running a leadership development program, the objective should be:
✔️ Improve team productivity by completing 25% more tasks per sprint.
And not:
❌ Improve team productivity.
The second set is of qualitative metrics which tracks improvements in intangible areas. For a leadership development program, these objectives can include:
Demonstrate confident leadership in team meetings
Show improved strategic thinking in project planning
This way, you will create training objectives that help understand what success looks like, rather than point to vague outcomes.
#4 Document and refine
The last step: Clearly document the training objectives so that they are available to whoever needs them.
Similar to other processes, you should keep track of what’s working and what’s not. After writing your training objectives, the first step should be testing them against the SMART goal-setting framework. We have summed it up as five questions that you should be able to answer:
Test for SMART Criteria
Specific: Is the objective clearly defined?
Measurable: Can progress be tracked?
Achievable: Is it realistic given resources?
Relevant: Does it matter to the business?
Time-bound: When should it be completed?
Further, keep engaging with the stakeholders (the senior leadership, managers, and participating employees) to get their thoughts on these aspects. For instance, employees can inform you about the training content’s relevance to their jobs, and managers can offer insights on how achievable the objectives are with other workload in sight. Also, check for clarity and understanding at their end.
Further reading: How To Align Goals? Understand With The effective Goal Alignment Strategies
Wrapping up
In conclusion, creating effective training objectives is very important. It helps improve employee performance and links individual growth to the goals of the company. By setting clear objectives that follow the SMART criteria and consider business needs and skills gaps, you can make sure your training fits the overall business plan. It’s also important to regularly check and change objectives based on feedback and results to see how successful you are.
Use a strategic method for setting training goals that supports your business vision and promotes employee development for lasting success.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Setting the right goals defines the accuracy of your path to success!
Take this FREE goal-setting self-assessment by Risely now to test the efficacy of your goal-setting.
The traditional way of learning at work is changing fast because of AI. This change allows companies to improve how they teach and develop their staff. By using AI, you can make learning experiences more effective, personal, and engaging for your employees. But exactly how? In this blog, we will look into several ways to integrate AI into your L&D processes and initiatives so that 2025 turns into an AI-mazing year of learning at work.
But before we begin, let’s set some context. AI in learning and development at work is not simply about adding an LLM to your workflow. There are more comprehensive solutions that can unlock massive value for your team. Since several organizations are turning into early adopters, there’s a lot of enthusiasm and expectations about what AI brings. As the change leader in this scenario, it becomes imperative for you to understand what AI can and cannot do and communicate these ideas effectively to the stakeholders around you, like the C-suite and the employees involved in learning programs.
AI is changing how we help employees grow. It provides helpful data, automates tasks, and offers tailored learning experiences. This technology helps HR and L&D leaders and employees make better choices for their career paths. It connects personal goals with what the organization needs. But that’s not the end of the story.
AI’s effect on employee development goes beyond just learning new skills. It’s also about building a culture of ongoing growth. It gives employees the tools they need to reach their full potential, which they might not have been able to access earlier. As a result, this leads to more job satisfaction, higher productivity, and a more engaged and motivated workforce.
Is AI going to replace people at work? What can L&D do about this anxiety?
A big worry about AI is that it might eliminate jobs. But we can reduce this worry by actively helping employees learn new skills. As Steve Hunt mentioned in a recent podcast episode with Risely, every technology that eliminates some jobs creates many more. We are undergoing a fundamental shift in the purpose and meaning of work for society at large.
AI shouldn’t be seen as a danger, but as a way to gain new skills and improve the skills you already have. Primarily, L&D teams should focus on:
Finding skill gaps and offering specific learning opportunities
Motivating employees to take on new technologies and grow their skills
By investing in employee development and making clear paths for career growth, organizations help their workers adapt to changes in the job market. This way, they can use AI to improve their careers and reach their career goals.
That’s about the employees, what about the learning and development teams – how should you use AI?
5 Ways to add AI to learning at work in 2025
Learning at work has changed a lot. We no longer stick to one-time training events. Instead, we are moving toward a continuous learning approach. When you embrace continuous learning, you can:
Encourage innovation and speed by creating a culture of constant improvement
Build a workforce ready for the future that can handle rapid tech changes
Improve employee engagement and keep them by investing in their growth
This change is needed so employees can keep their skills and knowledge up-to-date. They have to adapt to new technologies and changing business needs. Switching to continuous learning brings both challenges and opportunities for L&D teams. It asks for a cultural change that supports lifelong learning and encourages employees to take charge of their growth. AI technologies are important in this change. They offer personalized, easy-to-access, and interesting learning experiences for employees at a fraction of the cost.
A few ways to effectively add AI to your L&D strategy are:
#1 Build personalized learning experiences
AI creates personalized learning paths for employees. It makes them feel more confident and addresses their different learning needs, which cookie-cutter programs offered so far may overlook. For example, Risely, the AI co-pilot for people managers, offers a dynamic learning journey that fits the unique context of every people manager. The challenges of leaders and managers are diverse and affected by many factors, an AI can match this array of needs by identifying which areas need more support and when. This tailored approach keeps employees engaged with content that fits their needs. It leads to better knowledge retention and skill development. The outcome is a more confident workforce that can help the organization succeed.
#2 Democratize access to learning in your organization
How many people can you meaningfully train in your entire organization? For most L&D teams, the number isn’t huge. Moreover, since many learning at work opportunities run in cohorts, employees must wait before getting help. It means letting the problems arising due to lack of skill development pester for a long, and at times, they grow into bigger troubles. For instance, if a manager is bad at delegating and has to pass six months before they can get training, their entire team will face overburdening work for that time. Meanwhile, more challenges like turnover due to tight deadlines and heavy workloads become prominent.
Adding an AI coach like Merlin to this manager’s learning and development plan will help cut down on the problem. It will help the manager access support and help in a way that fits their unique needs, such as the challenges with a couple of specific team members. Similarly, an AI coach can reach hundreds of managers without the L&D team needing to scale up operations and having multiple leadership coaches on the roaster. It’s also a great way to reduce challenges arising from geographical and time zone differences among workplaces.
#3 AI-driven analytics for tracking learning progress
AI-powered analytics give L&D leaders useful insights about employee growth and how well learning programs work. By monitoring learning progress and engagement, AI can find out where employees are doing well or having difficulties. This approach, based on data, helps HR leaders to tailor learning help, offer specific support, and see how learning actions affect the entire organization. AI-driven analytics makes sure that learning programs match business goals and help the company’s overall success.
#4 Enhance employee engagement through gamified learning experiences
Integrating fun and game-like features into learning experiences helps improve employee satisfaction. This method encourages a culture of workplace learning. AI-powered platforms use elements like challenges, rewards, and leader boards to motivate workers and make learning enjoyable. For example, Risely uses daily nudges as a microlearning pathway for leadership development. It shares a small actionable insight to support a small bit of progress toward each manager’s specific challenges.
By using these game-like features, employees can remember what they learn better. It also creates a friendly competition and teamwork among them. By adopting AI for gamified learning, companies can make the learning process more fun and effective. This plays a critical role in increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.
#5 Improve skills gap analysis with AI’s predictive abilities
Another interesting use case that L&D professionals can explore with AI’s abilities is improving the skills gap analysis for their teams. The conventional skills gap analysis exercise takes time and resources. Ultimately. this exercise offers us a list of skills and competencies that the team needs to build in order to fit in. But what if, we could figure out what the team needs to succeed in the future?
The predictive abilities of AI can forecast what skills would be in demand soon. That way, you are not just chasing after what has already happened. Instead, you can make the first move in the industry and build a competitive edge. For example, let ‘s assume you are leading L&D for a retail chain. With the help of AI for learning at work, you can:
Identify emerging skill trends in the retail industry
Predict potential skill obsolescence
Anticipate technological and market changes that will impact required skills
Your next would be planning a learning and development program using these insights. Further, as we discussed in the first point, you can personalize the learning track to meet the individual learning needs and align with the business goals simultaneously.
Read more: 7 Easy Ways to Use AI in Learning and Development
Wrapping Up
AI is changing how we learn. Many new tools and platforms are now available. They help organizations improve their learning and development programs. These AI-driven solutions offer personal learning experiences, automate tasks, and provide insights based on data. There are many options, like platforms that adapt to each learner and mentorship programs that use AI. Organizations must assess their needs and pick the tools and platforms that match their learning goals and objectives in effective ways.
In conclusion, using AI in workplace learning is not about taking over human skills but making them better. AI gives people personalized learning, helps them gain new skills, and supports their growth. By using AI, companies can build a culture where learning never stops. Employees get to play fun games and benefit from helpful AI insights. We can check how well AI learning programs work through set goals and feedback to keep improving. As we move into the AI age, it is important to use the right AI tools, fit them into what we already have, and keep an eye on future trends in AI and workplace learning. Welcome this change to make a more lively and employee-focused learning space.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Turn your L&D plans into reality with Risely’s easy to apply templates!
Grab your free copy of Risely’s learning and development strategy framework and get started.
It is no surprise that the world of learning and development is changing. A lot of innovation is happening in the space, particularly with the advent of AI, which everyone expects to be the game changer.
There’s also the need for a post-pandemic revival that never happened in its true sense, an economic scenario that shies away from promising certainty and calls for reimagining learning and development in workplaces from its present faces.
In this blog post, we are talking about the top 7 learning and development trends that will take center stage in 2025.
What comes to your mind when you think of training the people, managers, and leaders on your team? For most of us, the answer used to be a nice-looking workshop by a well-known instructor and an online course to add a cherry on top because that would build reinforcement.
But let’s be real. Most of this fails to account for the context of the manager we are training and delivers little value to them personally. Unsurprisingly, they are disgruntled about having to take out precious hours from work or personal life to endure the ordeal. Sure, networking is a benefit of these programs. But what about the learning itself?
The learning and development trends 2025 promise a break from these old-school ideas. As we started by noticing the many changes in the learning and development landscape, the impacts started to show. Lean teams want to create an impact that organically reaches more people and creates happy experiences. The mechanic mode of learning is out, while empathetic learning, ironically powered by machines, is in.
For learning and development initiatives focused on people management roles, this means a revamp right from the beginning. For instance, while going through Risely users to curate the State of Leadership Development Report, we understood that most of their challenges do not fit neat boxes.
Instead, they look like this statement: “My team feels overworked.” It could mean the manager is not setting the right expectations with their team, the team is not sufficiently skilled for jobs, or the team needs to hire someone very soon. The context is married to the challenge in a way that we are just beginning to understand and solve with the help of innovative solutions in L&D.
In fact, diagnosing the right challenge is a task in itself! At best, most managers can tell you the symptoms, provided they have the space and security to do so. Risely’s AI coach Merlin is one step in this direction because it starts with a tabula rasa – a blank slate where the user’s challenges and contexts are defined with them, with no assumptions or biases hurting the process. Similarly, microlearning continues to pique interest and reach job areas needing a personalized learning and development approach.
#2 L&D teams will move ahead with cautious optimism
What has defined L&D in 2024? Sadly, it has been a categorically bad thing. It was the year when L&D and HR teams lost people, budgets were harder to acquire, and there was uncertainty across the board. So, how do we move into 2025? “Cautious optimism” is the way to go.
I asked this question in a recent conversation with Kelli Dragovich, and it was part of her answer.
“I just feel like the soil is loosening up a bit, even though this growth isn’t out there yet. It’s underground and I feel good about that, and look when when things are moving forward and you’re building and you’re not tearing down ,it becomes fun. I do think there will be more elements of optimism and fun this year. which is great because that keep us going.“
It means that although the past few years have been shaky, we are in for something new. As I mentioned earlier in the first point, empathetic learning powered by new tools is in big time. Organizations are looking for ways to solve for visible challenges like retention and keeping the best talent ammunition with them, so it’s a no brainer that HR and L&D teams move ahead with the idea of innovation with the human touch at the center.
#3 Skills for L&D professionals are changing
What does it take to be an L&D professional in 2025? The answer is not limited to learning design and knowing how to run a lecture anymore. As more tech comes in, there is demand for L&D professionals who can leverage it to do less with more. In essence, Kelli’s insight suggests that organizations are looking for solutions that touch more people but within their limited means.
Even earlier this year, the LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report had pitched a more active role for complex skills like analytical ability, working with data effectively, and a set of “human skills” that make you more endearing to the people around you. After all, you must sell L&D programs to multiple people, get approvals, and garner engagement.
And, of course, there’s AI. Is it going to steal your job? Likely no.
I spoke with Dr. Steven Hunt, the author of Talent Tectonics, over a podcast, and he remarked that two pivotal changes are modifying the skills matrix for L&D professionals. The first is digitization—AI and many other avatars are showing promise. As with every technical advancement, some jobs get lost, and new ones are created. The second is demographics, since many people are aging out of the workforce, and there’s demand for more.
So, there’s space to learn, innovate, and be more humane in L&D.
#4 Keeping the employees upskilled and happy takes centre stage
When it comes to being a nice HR or L&D professional, what do you think about? One vital area is ensuring that the employees can realize their potential. It includes supporting employees on their professional journeys, keeping up with their interests and ideas for upskilling, and building employee loyalty toward the organization.
A lot of traditional ideas in this space are really constricting. They put boundaries on how work is done, organized, and even approached. But fret not! The good thing about ideas is that new ones are always there. The Inside Gig is one concept that calls you to move away from the conventional job descriptions.
With an inside gig, employees pick and choose projects that match their needs. It also supports your resource needs, because teams sometimes have shortages and excesses. It can be a game changer for managers because it calls for a shift from the mindset of “my employee” to a more open, care-intensive view toward people where managers coach, support, and sustain others. However, the best unlock comes for the employees who get to put all their skills to use, learn new ones, and explore areas that restrictive jobs would otherwise prevent them from.
Dr. Edie Goldberg has documented plenty of of successful examples, including big names like HERE Technologies and TATA Communications. For L&D teams, it is a call to make more active connections with the HR function because you are the ones in charge of keeping up the organization’s skills inventory, upskilling and reskilling workers, and ensuring that people have effective learning experiences.
#5 AI will change how we approach learning strategies
Reinventing the wheel of training people better at work to keep up with their interests is one thing; speeding up the game is another. What about the core processes of learning and development itself? Turns out, there are some changes on the horizon for those, too. The learning and development trends 2025 point to one clear thing—we want more AI to be used effectively. The question is: where can L&D teams leverage AI?
The basic idea is that AI will help us better create content faster. But is that all? Earlier this year, I was speaking with Inna Horvath, and she gave an amazing reality check:
“When it comes to content, it’s not enough to just type in ‘I need a course on talent management; and you would have 10 pages of text, maybe a quiz if with multiple choices if you are lucky. But that’s not enough. We all know that, that’s not enough… What I think is important is to learn technology in an ecological way.”
In essence, there are more vital applications for AI, which are not just about doing quick fixes in many vital areas of L&D operations like data analysis, localization with translators, and even hyper-personalization. For instance, Steve mentioned a great concept in our conversation. While potential is equally distributed across society, potential is not. What technology can do is it will enable us to not only spot the skills that we need but also point out the under-looked potential in people. It allows us to think much more deeply!
#6 AI will change L&D beyond just content creation
However, developing learning content is one step among the many in the learning and development of professionals. The future of L&D looks at AI disruptions in many more areas like that. As Paul Matthews, the founder of People Alchemy, remarked in a podcast earlier:
“We’re right at the beginning of stumbling around in the dark.”
A few years down the line, incredible AI solutions will be available for the learning and development space. Paul clarified that while the present day is all about prompting AI to generate results, the very near future will take a different shape. There are AI solutions that essentially sit between me and you as facilitators in a very human way.
There’s a lot more AI in L&D under the wraps, particularly with improved training to create personalized, specific solutions for certain use cases. In fact, Risely’s AI coach, Merlin, is one such solution for people managers. What it does is fill the gap that traditional coaching leaves in the hearts of many managers and leaders due to its high investment needs and low accessibility.
#7 L&D goes out of boring classrooms
If the AI age is here, do we remain stuck to our screens? Isn’t it a travesty to move from classrooms to classrooms on screens? Well, it’s a good thing that we are not doing that. More innovative and interesting ideas come to life with more research in the learning and development space. The focus is on learning experiences derived from designing user and customer experiences in product development and sales, respectively.
A good learning experience considers what the learner wants and ties it to what the organization needs, which essentially saves us from imposing goals and processes on anyone. Some practitioners are doing incredible work in making learning experiences worth it for employees. One such example is the equine-facilitated learning program that Janis Cooper and her team run at the Best Friends of Animal Society.
They use horses for leadership training programs with people managers. Why horses? Well, they are very receptive and empathetic animals who would love to build a connection with you. And they don’t know that you are a senior in the company and you cannot really cut their salary. Jokes aside, this interesting program works with people managers to help them build trust with their teams by understanding how to make someone feel safe and secure in the environment.
This offers a huge break from the daily hustle of work and the boredom that has now come to be associated with “upskilling” for professionals. We look forward to more such L&D programs breaking the notions of boredom soon.
To Sum Up
TL;DR on the learning and development trends of 2025:
Manager training gets a much needed revamp.
L&D teams begin the year with cautious optimism.
New skills for L&D professionals, focusing on the human aspect, become in demand.
Employee aspirations get more spotlight in L&D plans.
AI changes how learning strategies are viewed.
AI also changes for L&D teams function.
L&D heads out of classrooms for immersive experiences.
Let’s check in at the end of the year?
Meanwhile, in case you want to check out the detailed conversations that led to these trends, they are a part of our podcast listed here:
Ashish is an entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience in strategy, coaching and product. In the present avatar, he is building Risely, an AI-enabled leadership development platform in between breaks from treks and baking.
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Top 7 Learning And Development Podcasts You Must See
500 million. That’s the number of people watching podcasts every single day across the world.
The medium is hot for the depth and variety it can offer. Podcasts are a savior and the right commute buddy for an increasingly busy world. The same goes for learning and development podcasts, a niche that has quietly built up into a great repository of valuable content.
In this blog post, we will explore some of the top learning and development podcasts that you should keep an eye on.
Staying updated on the newest trends and ideas in L&D is very important for your success. Learning and development podcasts are a simple and easy way to do this. They have interesting talks, expert interviews, and inspiring content. These podcasts offer a lot of useful knowledge for L&D workers at all stages of their careers.
If you are an experienced L&D expert or just starting out, adding these podcasts to your learning routine will boost your knowledge and keep you motivated. Listen to these L&D podcasts to discover the latest strategies, best practices, and innovative approaches to talent development and growth in organizations.
Many podcasts invite people to talk about their episodes on social media and online forums. This helps listeners connect with each other. It also gives you chances to network and learn together as L&D professionals.
So, let’s dive straight in:
#1 RiseUp Radio
by Risely, with Ashish Manchanda
Why should you watch this?
The RiseUp Radio podcast brings experts and practitioners to talk about leadership development and effective L&D. It brings actionable advice from people who have been through the challenges you are facing today.
Must watch episode:
Developing leaders, featuring Kelli Dragovich, This episode combines a personal journey with valuable lessons and advice to shape up for L&D journey.
The RiseUp Radio podcast offers learning and development insights in two exciting formats. First, we have topical episodes that focus on specific areas within HR and L&D, such as building empathy at work. The second format takes deep dives into leaders’ professional journeys, like this episode with Harjeet Khanduja, the SVP of HR at Reliance Jio. This brings in experience and expertise for your consideration.
You can watch all the episodes on YouTube.
#2 L&D Plus
by 360Learning, with David James
Why should you watch this?
The L&D Plus podcast discusses topics beyond “learning” and “development.” Your impact is in areas like growth, employee enablement, and operations. This podcast explains the what, why, and how behind it.
Must watch episode:
L&D Plus Talent, which breaks down how the two teams can build an impactful collaboration.
The L&D Plus podcast is a great tool for any professional not ready to remain limited to a strict job description. It prompts you to think beyond the word “learning and development.” Instead, you consider connections across marketing, sales, operations, and many other areas. David James brings in practitioners to tell their stories of building these connections.
You can check out all the Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts episodes.
#3 The Overnight Trainer
by Sarah Cannistra
Why should you watch this?
This weekly podcast is made with love to support you in the journey of achieving all your professional goals in L&D.
Must watch episode:
Upskilling for the L&D of the future, which breaks down what future ready skillsets for L&D professionals look like.
The Overnight Trainer podcast takes you on the upskilling journey amid busy schedules. It offers interesting takes on problems that you would resonate with, such as searching for the next role in your career or keeping up against rapidly changing skill demands in the market.
You can discover The Overnight Trainer podcast on Spotify.
#4 The Learning Xchange
by Matthew Brown
Why should you watch this?
Matthew Brown’s Learning Xchange podcast addressed issues beyond the conventional ones, such as building a diverse network and tackling trauma in workplaces.
Must watch episode:
The Importance of Evaluating Systems Implemented for Learning. This episode urges L&D to not just do things, but also review them as time passes for maximum impact.
This podcast focused on learning in the digital world and provided a lot of practical value due to the host’s experience as a Chief People and Culture Officer. As a result, it proved to be a valuable resource for L&D professionals carving a space of their own in a rapidly evolving field.
The Learning Xchange podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Music.
#5 All Hands
by Lattice, with Katelin Holloway
Why should you watch this?
People success is business success – that’s the core mantra echoing through all episodes of the All Hands podcast, where experts join in to break down their playbooks for people success.
Must watch episode:
Building strong CEO-CPO relationships with Melanie Naranjo, that breaks down how to connect across the table and lead your team to success.
The All Hands podcast has completed four seasons, with amazing guests sharing insights on how they have built successful people functions. The topics are diverse, ranging from thoughts on adopting an intersectional lens to using AI the right way with your organization.
The All Hands podcast is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
#5 Learning at Large
by Kirstie Greany
Why should you watch this?
The Learning at Large podcast is the perfect resource for L&D professionals building online learning practices. It features stories from some of the most successful organizations.
Must watch episode:
Delivering Decentralized Learning, where Geraldine Murphy shares how to deliver learning to 90,000+ people.
The Learning at Large podcast discusses questions that matter to your growth, such as meaningfully implementing AI in L&D practices, preparing and fighting for budgets, and rethinking old practices for innovative L&D strategies. These insights come from people who have been there, experts who understand where you are and how to move forward.
The Learning at Large podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
#6 Coaching Real Leaders
by HBR, with Muriel Wilkins
Why should you watch this?
Led by an executive coach backed by years of experience, the Coaching Real Leaders podcast helps leaders and C-suite executives tackle professional challenges.
Must watch episode:
How do I avoid a career plateau in mid life, which talks of an all-too-common challenge many professionals face.
The insights from the Coaching Real Leaders podcast are useful for the people in your organization and, at times, would resonate with your challenges, too. As an L&D professional reaching new heights, you would find many questions relevant and helpful to your journey.
This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
#7 HR Happy Hour
by Steve Boese and Trish McFarlaney
Why should you watch this?
As the longest-running HR podcast in America, HR Happy Hour has proven to be a valuable resource for professionals, as it takes up issues that impact your everyday work.
Must watch episode:
The ROI of kindness at work, which calls you to be a little more deliberate about being nice – because it matters a lot.
Beyond this show, the HR Happy Hour network carries many more useful conversations for HR and L&D professionals, including content on leadership development, HR technology, and management. HR Happy Hour is also an old player in the field, running since 2009 and constantly evolving with the industry.
This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
The information from these podcasts can greatly help your L&D career. When you keep up with trends, best practices, and new technologies, you make yourself more valuable to your organization.
The advice and examples shared by industry experts build your credibility. This helps you add real value to your company’s L&D strategy. By engaging with these podcasts, you show that you care about professional development and continuous learning. This can help you stand out in the L&D field.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
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Learning analytics is changing the way we look at research. It uses data to help improve learner success. With the insights from this data, L&D teams better understand how employees learn. This helps them learn more about employees behavior, likes, and performance. As a result, you can create better learning and development strategies. It allows for personalized learning experiences and timely help for your employees and successful interventions focused on business goals.
This field combines research, data science, and analytics to find useful information from the large amounts of data produced in workplaces to create impactful learning programs.
Learning analytics refers to the process of collecting and analyzing data about how people learn to improve training effectiveness. It focuses on the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of data about learners and their educational set-ups.
By looking at patterns, trends, and connections in this data, L&D professionals make better choices. You can adjust your teaching methods and create a learning environment that encourages learner engagement, success, and well-being.
What data should we be collecting?
Learning analytics is not simply data about who is learning what. Instead, it allows you to take a more data-driven approach to solve your organization’s learning challenges and enhance outcomes. For example, if an employee struggles with a particular task or concept, the system can suggest relevant resources or training modules to promptly address the issue. This targeted approach enhances individual performance and aligns with broader business goals by ensuring that employees have the necessary skills to contribute effectively to the organization.
Some other examples of learning analytics at work include:
Tracking the performance of a sales team pre and post-training implementation
Monitoring the engagement of a team on the learning platform
Using skill assessments to find out role-based skill and competency gaps
Identifying the costs involved in training per employee and its resultant impact on performance
Measuring the effectiveness of content in terms of engagement rates and feedback
Learning analytics are an L&D team’s go-to tool for getting answers in many critical business areas. But before jumping on to that, let’s look through the ways learning and development teams can use learning analytics in different aspects:
Ensure training effectiveness: Learning analytics are the first and foremost way to track the effectiveness of your training and development plans. You can consider filling skill gaps, rectifying performance issues, or determining how employees work with the learning content. It can further help you evaluate and make smart choices when it comes to planning, structuring, and designing learning and development strategies for your organization.
Calculating ROI: Many training programs have an ROI that is difficult to quantify or often ignored. Learning analytics prevents this and ensures that you can consistently evaluate and showcase the results of your efforts. It further helps in resource and budget allocations and creates proof of L&D success for relevant stakeholders.
Create better workforce planning practices: Learning analytics, specifically with workforce planning, such as upskilling and succession planning, can help your overall HR strategy be more effective and fail-proof. It includes preparing for future skill needs and adapting to industry trends to retain a competitive edge.
Learn how employees want to grow: Learning analytics gives you a bird’ s-eye view of what your employees want in terms of learning opportunities, how they are using the existing ones, and what you can do to create more in the future. As a result, you can emphasize learner-centricity with data-driven insights. It further ties into career development and growth plans for employees.
Keep building good content: As L&D professionals, we simply do not want to create content. We want to create learning content that efficiently resonates with employees and solves their problems. Learning analytics support this principle by tracking how employees engage with content, their satisfaction levels, retention, and application.
Compliance and risk management: These are essential concerns for many training and development programs because our environment is constantly evolving. Analytics help you see whether you are able to keep up or whether there’s a gap between the training that employees need and what you are currently offering. Moreover, it helps you comply with legal and normal training requirements.
Decode the business impact of L&D: That’s the most vital function of learning analytics because, ultimately, it is a question of impact. As little as about 5% of companies evaluate their training programs. Evaluation and analysis can put you among the top innovators and builders in the L&D space and ensure that the organization recognizes your contributions.
Key business questions learning analytics can answer across various L&D focus areas:
Training Effectiveness
How well are employees retaining information? Which learning methods are most effective for different roles? Are employees applying what they’ve learned on the job? Which courses have the highest/lowest success rates? How does training impact employee performance metrics?
Return on Investment (ROI)
What is the cost per learner for each program? How does training investment correlate with performance improvement? Which programs deliver the best value for money? What is the opportunity cost of training time? How does e-learning ROI compare to instructor-led training?
Skill Gaps and Workforce Planning
Where are the current skill gaps in the organization? Which departments need additional training? How prepared is the workforce for future skill requirements? What competencies are most critical for specific roles? How effective is the current upskilling strategy?
Employee Engagement and Behavior
When and how do employees prefer to learn? What motivates employees to complete training? Which content formats drive the most engagement? How do social learning features impact participation? What barriers prevent training completion?
Content Optimization
Which learning materials are most/least effective? What content needs updating or removal? How can we improve course design? Where do learners struggle or drop off? What additional resources do learners need?
Compliance and Risk Management
Are employees up-to-date with required training? How quickly are compliance gaps addressed? What is the certification completion rate? Which areas pose the highest compliance risk? How effective is mandatory training?
Career Development and Succession Planning
Who are the high-potential learners? What learning paths lead to successful role transitions? How effective are leadership development programs? Which skills correlate with career advancement? How well are we preparing future leaders?
Business Impact
How does training affect key performance indicators (KPIs)? What is the impact on customer satisfaction? How does learning contribute to employee retention? What is the relationship between training and productivity? How does learning affect innovation and adaptability?
What are the common methods of learning analytics?
Primarily, learning analytics can be of four types. Let’s understand each of these in detail below:
#1 Descriptive analytics – What happened?
As the name suggests, descriptive analytics are all about things that have happened. They summarize the data collected historically over incidents and events to figure out trends and patterns. It will help you understand how the team received a certain training program, engaged with the material, and how many of them eventually completed the assignment. Some examples of descriptive analytics in L&D include course completion rates, time spent on modules, assessment scores, video watch times, login frequency, etc. With this, you can understand the performance of your present L&D functions. However, it cannot help you think of the next steps or predict employees’ future behavior.
#2 Diagnostic analytics – Why did it happen?
Once we are aware of the what, the next question is why. Diagnostic analytics answers that question for L&D teams. It helps you understand the reasons behind your employees’ current learning behavior. It will help you answer questions like why some employees are not completing a training module or why around 75% of test takers fail at one specific point. A few examples of using diagnostic analytics in L&D include identifying common wrong answers in assessments, learning path bottlenecks, and performance gap analysis. Similar to descriptive analytics, diagnostic analytical methods also help you evaluate past and present behavior only.
#3 Predictive analytics – What will happen?
This is an important question because who would not like to know the future? Predictive analytics, focused on identifying signs and possible future courses of action, helps L&D teams figure out how learning will be impacted by both internal and external factors. It can help you determine the skill and learning gaps that are about to be created as the industry moves forward, as well as the expected completion timelines and forecast future learning needs. Since L&D teams cannot afford to play catch up, predictive analytics are critical for L&D teams to keep up with the changing world.
#4 Prescriptive analytics – What should you do?
Knowledge is one thing; the actions based on it are the real deal. That’s what prescriptive analytics help you determine. Prescriptive analytics are key to understanding the insights about the future course of L&D and putting them down into actionable steps. For instance, if you foresee the need for digital literacy in your sales team, prescriptive analytics will help identify what type of training you can do, what your employees are expecting, and how to conduct it efficiently, keeping the organization’s goals in mind. Similarly, a few other examples of prescriptive analytics include personalized learning recommendations and adaptive learning paths, intervention triggers, resource allocation suggestions, and content optimization recommendations.
How to get started with learning analytics for your employees?
Setting up learning analytics for your team has many advantages. But it looks like a confusing task, doesn’t it? We can simplify this process and break it down into eight steps as follows:
#1 Create the foundation setup
Learning analytics is a tool for offering more clarity within and about the L&D strategy. Thus, clarity is what we should start with. The process begins by identifying the goals you want to achieve and the relevant KPIs for them.
For example:
If your goal is to improve sales team’s performance. Your KPIs will include:
Training completion rates for product knowledge courses
Post-training assessment scores
Time to reach sales quotas for new hires
Number of successful sales demonstrations
Customer satisfaction scores
Further, to do this analysis, you need data. Data can be generated from many sources, including assessment scores, performance reviews, feedback meetings, etc. Depending upon the use case, you need to identify what data sources you are using for learning analytics with your team.
Once these are done, you will also need to set benchmarks for the data. The key question is, what is the ideal score on a particular metric? Benchmarking for learning analytics goes two ways:
Internal benchmarking: Deriving a standard of scores based on the overall performance within the organization.
External benchmarking: Deriving a standard based on the wider trends across the industry in similar organizations/competitors.
Since you are dealing with data, you need a data governance framework to ensure the secure transportation and ethical use of the data being collected. It can also help specify regular reporting schedules for the learning analytics team.
#2 Build the technical infrastructure for learning analytics
Learning analytics do not look the same for every organization. Instead, your team’s learning maturity, the level of comfort with digital infrastructure, and what you set out to solve impact the shape of the technical infrastructure you will use for analytics.
It includes choosing appropriate tools that you might need, such as:
Learning Management System (LMS): An LMS is software that essentially manages learning content, delivery, and distribution for your team. It can have basic features like tracking logins and completion rates and collecting feedback through quizzes.
Learning Experience Platform (LXP): An LXP is an evolved form of learning software that emphasizes keeping the individual user at the center with tailored recommendations and learning pathways. It can often have features to support social learning and microlearning, so you can also track those.
Analytics dashboards: These visual interfaces display key learning metrics and data in real-time, such as Risely’s skill center for admins, which shows your learners’ progress on key people management skills. Some platforms offer a great deal of customization and automated reporting, too.
Data visualization tools: These are simply tools that translate your data into clear visual representations. With tools like PowerBI and Tableau, you can create custom interfaces to match your needs, but managing these could be challenging.
Survey and feedback platforms: Lastly, these are simply tools for collecting learner data and input to support your decisions. Many options exist, such as SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, and Google Forms, which you can use for free or at a minimal charge.
To make things easier for the L&D teams, you should also look into integrations across platforms. This cuts down on the need to reshape and migrate data consistently. Similarly, data collection can be a tricky process to handle. Look for ways to automate things wherever you can.
#3 Create a data collection strategy
Once your goals and tools are set, you need to decide how you are going to collect the data. A few learning analytics tools we listed above support data collection. You can also look into performance reviews, collect feedback directly, and use methods like our skill gap analysis template and training evaluation forms.
Given that we understand the impact of learning analytics across three areas, we will have three types of data to collect:
Learning data: It includes metrics such as training completion rates and time spent learning, along with metrics tracking learning application and transfer. Tracking resource usage and learning patterns is the key here.
Performance data: Learning needs to impact performance ultimately, and these metrics show exactly that. It includes job performance metrics, skills assessments, certification progress, on-the-job application, and manager feedback.
Business data: The last set of metrics tracks the impact of learning investment on business outcomes. It would include productivity metrics, customer satisfaction, employee retention, error rates, etc.
#4 Implement learning analytics
When you start implementing learning analytics at work, start with a smaller set of goals and metrics in your mind. You can pick something like the example used above. Start small with a few key metrics and learning programs targeted to a team or department. You will start with descriptive and diagnostic analytics, primarily to understand what is happening in learning and work and why it is happening. Once these are mastered, you can grow further in predictive and prescriptive capabilities and have a future-oriented outlook toward learning.
Over time, you can test and refine the process and implement it. At the same time, ensure that you document learnings and mistakes as they happen. Over time, you should add more complex metrics and develop more sophisticated reports for the learning and development processes.
#5 Enhance L&D team capabilities
To master learning analytics, you need a few team members trained to use learning analytics tools and interpret the results. It presents an opportunity to upskill the L&D function while running a test on how analytics for learning work.
Further, once your capabilities grow, you can think of dividing the work across functions such as:
Data collection: The main responsibility includes gathering and organizing learning data systematically. This role requires comprehensive knowledge of data collection and processing and care toward ethical and normative guidelines.
Analysis: An analyst is essentially a translator who converts raw data into meaningful points to consider and act upon. The skills needed here include statistical analysis, analytical thinking, data modeling, and problem-solving.
Reporting: This is where your team creates clear, actionable reports from analysis. You need data visualization and automation skills here, as well as the ability to design and manage learning dashboards effectively.
Stakeholder communication: All your audiences won’t understand what a training completion rate stands for. That’s why managing stakeholder communication is essential. It involves translating data insights for different audiences and needs skills such as communication, storytelling, and relationship management.
You can also consider hiring consultants or outsourcing parts of the process to help your team out.
#6 Design a reporting framework
Once your data is collected, the rest hinges on effectively communicating them. This is why we need a reporting framework for learning analytics. A reporting framework will help you generate standardized reports across the organization and design intuitive dashboards. You can also set up automated reporting.
The other focus area here is to create different views for different stakeholders that your L&D teams need to manage. For instance, the C-suite and executive leadership would appreciate focusing on business goals. Lower turnover and a positive employer brand can pique their interest. However, the stakes are different for a team manager who is implementing learning with their team. They would be more concerned about reducing skill gaps and properly using the learning opportunities to promote employee satisfaction. Similarly, the employees would be more concerned about how learning can enable them to achieve their long-term career goals. Thus, the same data needs to tell multiple stories.
Read more: How to Obtain Buy-In for Training from Stakeholders?
#7 Think of quality assurance
Quality is critical in any data-heavy process, and the same holds for learning analytics. Validating and cleaning the data is important to get helpful results. However, more concerns are hidden behind the curtains, such as error-checking protocols and legal bindings on how to use the data. Ensuring all of these things run properly means that you put a regular and comprehensive data audit process in place for the L&D team.
#8 Continuously improve
Ultimately, there’s always more to learn. Learning analytics has the same journey. As you keep going, you can identify mistakes and determine the scope for improvement. For instance, you might discover that there are better metrics to track phenomena or there’s a better visualization platform that your team can use. Some considerations for improvement can include:
Is there a new tool for reporting/visualization/data collection that we can use?
Are we tracking the right metrics?
Does our team have the required skill set?
Is our process efficient? Can we cut down on some excesses?
Are we following the privacy compliance directives properly?
Is our data accurately collected and reported?
Keep your eyes open and your mind curious to constantly enhance the impact you are making.
Wrapping up
Learning Analytics is changing learning at work for the better. It gives useful insights that help to create personalized learning experiences and improve results for employees. When L&D teams use data correctly, they can increase learner engagement and spot where help is needed. As technology improves, AI’s role in learning is getting bigger. This is leading to better predictive analytics and smarter decision-making. Still, there are challenges like privacy concerns and skill gaps that need attention. Looking to the future, learning analytics shows exciting trends and changes that will influence new workplace learning strategies.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
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The old way of simple lectures and too much information is behind us. Now, active learning techniques are a great method to boost student learning and improve the overall learning process. This blog looks at what active learning is, its advantages, and how to put it into practice at work for your team’s success.
Active learning is a big change from old, passive learning methods. Instead of just taking in information, workers are asked to take part in the learning process. This way of learning shows that real understanding comes from doing, asking questions, and getting involved with the subject matter. It is a sure-shot way to beat one of L&D’s common challenge, that is, disengagement with the learning material that many teams face.
Active learning matches well with theories about how adults learn. These theories highlight that it’s important for your learners to have experiences, find relevance in what they study, and actively take part in learning. Adults learn better when they can connect new information to what they already know and use it in real life.
In contrast to passive learning, active learning gets people involved in solving problems, thinking critically, and working with others. This approach helps them understand the course content more deeply. By focusing on the needs and interests of adult learners, you build a better learning environment that is more engaging.
What are some examples of active learning at work?
Examples of active learning activities for adults include group discussions, case studies, simulations, and role-playing. The main idea is to create tasks that make the participants in your learning program think critically, solve problems, and use their learning in useful ways.
For instance, Sarah, a product manager, needed her team to learn a new project management software. Instead of a traditional training session, she structured it this way:
CONNECTING TO EXISTING KNOWLEDGE “I know most of you already use Trello for personal tasks, and some use Asana at work. Let’s start by comparing how you organize your current projects, and then I’ll show you how those same principles apply in our new software.”
APPLYING TO REAL WORK Instead of using generic examples, she had the team do simple tasks like migrating their actual current project into the new system, setting up their real upcoming sprint, creating templates based on their most common workflows, and customizing dashboards for their specific needs
MAKING IT RELEVANT When teaching new features, she tied each one to their daily challenges: “Remember how we struggled to track dependencies last month? Here’s how this feature would have solved that problem…” “This automation will save you those 30 minutes you spend each week updating status reports…”
BOOSTING ENGAGEMENT Team members shared their own productivity hacks and they identified process improvements based on new capabilities. Ultimately, everyone contributed to creating team best practices and they immediately saw time savings in their actual work!
The result? The team mastered the new software in half the expected time because they were working with familiar concepts and solving real problems, not just completing training exercises. When your employees take part in the learning process, they think about information more deeply. They link ideas together and create strong mental pictures. This helps them understand better and learn for a longer time.
Why should you choose active learning over other methods?
Adult learning theories, like Malcolm Knowles’ andragogy, highlight how important it is for learners to be in charge of their own education. They also focus on learning through experiences and making sure what they learn connects to their personal goals. Active learning fits well with these ideas by giving your learners control, thus raising the level of satisfaction and trust.
When adults take part in activities, they can use what they already know. They can apply new knowledge to real life. This makes learning meaningful and shows how relevant it is. It also boosts their motivation and engagement. Active learning is becoming more popular in training at work. It works well for adult learners because it meets their specific needs. It shifts away from the old-fashioned, mentor-focused way of learning and promotes a more learner-focused experience. This helps create a deeper and more valuable learning experience.
Using active learning at work does not need a big change in your training programs. You can begin by finding ways to add interactive parts to what you already have and enhance the impact of your learning and development strategies. Even small changes can help. Think about what you want to learn and the topic you are teaching when choosing active learning activities. To make a more lively and interesting learning environment, encourage your team members to work together and share knowledge.
#1 Identify opportunities to use active learning with your team
The great thing about active learning is that it can fit in many different places. It works well in many formats. When you look for chances to use it in your organization, think about:
Onboarding: Instead of giving new hires too much information at once, use icebreakers, group work on real situations, or mentorship programs. This helps them engage early.
Team Meetings: Set aside time for brainstorming, solving problems, or discussing case studies related to current projects. This encourages active participation.
Training Workshops: Avoid dull presentations. Add group activities, quizzes, role-playing, or simulations to make the training more interesting and effective.
By using active learning in these areas, you aren’t just sharing information. You are also making a space for people to explore and apply what they learn.
#2 Choose the active learning methods that match your needs
Active learning in the workplace thrives on practical, hands-on methods that connect directly to daily work. One of the most effective approaches that you can try is case study workshops, where teams tackle real business challenges using actual company data and scenarios, developing solutions they can implement immediately. This pairs naturally with peer teaching sessions, where employees share their expertise through 15-30 minute demonstrations followed by immediate practice and feedback sessions.
You can also create skill application sprints provide focused learning opportunities, with teams mastering one new skill each week through deliberate practice and progress tracking. This approach works particularly well with interactive tech training, where employees learn new tools by completing actual work tasks while receiving live support and building an internal knowledge base. Regular reflection sessions, typically 15 minutes weekly, help your teams review what worked, capture lessons learned, and plan implementation steps.
Active learning works best when your employees feel they own their learning. They should not be afraid to ask questions or seek help if they need it. It is also important to have regular feedback and open talks between employees and trainers. This helps everyone improve.
#3 Take a helping hand from tech
Technology is important for improving active learning. It gives us access to many learning resources and tools. Online platforms and team software allow employees to join in exercises, simulations, and group projects anytime and anywhere. Video conferencing tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams allow live sessions. You can have discussions in breakout rooms and get real-time feedback. Collaborative platforms such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 let people edit documents together, manage projects, and brainstorm online.
But that’s just the beginning! For example, instead of regular pen-and-paper quizzes, use online quiz tools. They provide instant feedback and fun game features. You can change case studies into simulations where employees make choices and see what happens safely. Similarly, you can enable role play training for everyone in your company with the help of AI coaches like Merlin.
#4 Consider resistance and approach with an open mind
Implementing active learning can be tough. One big challenge is that some employees resist change since they are used to traditional, passive learning styles. To overcome this resistance, you need to communicate the benefits of active learning clearly. Similarly, to get buy-in from the C-suite, focus on showcasing how it enhances skills, boosts engagement, and leads to better outcomes. Providing training and support during the transition can also help employees adapt smoothly.
Another common challenge is time constraints. To address this, integrate active learning into existing processes or shorten activities without compromising on effectiveness. Prioritize activities based on their impact and relevance to maximize learning in limited time frames. At times, something interactive can save you from hours of lectures, so ensure that you are leveraging this technique with your teams effectively.
Wrapping Up
Active learning helps adults grow by making their education more engaging. When you use active learning strategies, you create a workplace culture that focuses on constant improvement and new ideas. Using technology makes these strategies even more effective. This leads to real benefits for employees and the organization. By adopting active learning in your workplace, you can give your team the skills and knowledge they need. This helps them adapt and grow in today’s changing business world.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Get Started with the Free Training and Development Plan Template!
Grab free L&D resources and more for holistic growth of people managers. Only on Risely.
Learning Design: Why Instructional Design is Old School Today
Designing learning and development initiatives to be great is not as simple as it seems! Learning and development strategies involve multiple steps, including setting learning goals, designing the content in various formats, delivery and distribution, and so on. Learning design, or instructional design, is concerned with the making of the training and development material that you will ultimately use. In this blog, we will learn all about how these designs work, where they can help you ace your L&D goals, and what key ideas are central to making effective learning designs for your team.
Learning design is defined as a framework that supports learning experiences. What does that mean?
Learning design is the systematic approach to planning, creating, and delivering learning experiences that cater to specific learning and development goals. It includes the use of many learning theories and models and aims to deliver effective learning.
Effective learning design is more than just sharing information. It is about making learning experiences that help people gain, remember, and use new knowledge and skills. This approach is learner-centered. It looks at what the learners need and want to help them grow and develop.
What is the learning design process?
The design process in learning design includes several important steps. These steps are analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. Each step is vital to create effective learning experiences.
In the analysis phase, instructional designers work with experts and stakeholders. They figure out the learning goals and see what learning opportunities are needed.
The design phase is about organizing the content, choosing teaching methods, and making engaging activities for the learners.
Development is when instructional materials and resources are made.
The implementation stage is where the learning experience is delivered.
Throughout the design process, regular evaluation and feedback are key. This helps gather information and make changes to improve the design. This way, learning opportunities are always being updated to better serve the needs of the learners.
At the heart of effective learning design is really knowing the learners and their situation. By figuring out what they already know, their skills, what drives them, and any problems they face, instructional designers can create learning experiences that connect with the learners and meet their needs.
Evolution of the learning design landscape
Because of its interdisciplinary nature, learning design is impacted by many areas. In its earlier avatar, it was known as instructional design, but the modern world has called for a more holistic approach and a new name for this facet of corporate learning and development.
In the very early days, learning design was informed by psychology theories, including behaviorism, which focused on stimulus and response relationships, and cognitivism, which shed light on the mental processes underlying how we learn. In the later years, new developments in the fields of linguistics and neuroscience have added more insights.
Technological advancements have added their share of impact by forcing some of these changes. Back then, corporate learning was restricted to classrooms and seminar halls, so at best, you only designed instructional material. The later focus on using video as an effective learning medium and the current wave of AI has forced L&D teams to rethink the entire paradigm and tilt in favour of ideas that keep the learner at the center. As a result, there is a higher emphasis on engagement with the end-users (the employees in our case), focus on their unique needs and preferences, and personalization in learning design.
How does learning design differ from instructional design?
Learning design and instructional design are closely related but have distinct differences. While instructional design focuses on creating effective learning materials and strategies, learning design goes a step further by emphasizing a more learner-centered approach.
Instructional design primarily deals with the development of training materials and methods to facilitate learning. It is more about the technical aspects of delivering information effectively. On the other hand, learning design takes into consideration the specific needs, preferences, and motivations of learners. It aims to create experiences that not only transfer knowledge but also engage, inspire, and empower learners to apply what they learn in real-life situations.
Why can’t we just stick to instructional design? There’s not a lot of change after all. Except, there are very important reasons why your success as an L&D professional depends on how you use and understand learning designs. Let’s understand them in some detail below:
#1 Learning design is critical in L&D success
You have a great learning and development strategy. Your content was built by in-house subject matter experts and is ready to be sent to everyone across the team. But there’s one issue: the learning content is a document lasting 100+ pages. We both know that no one is reading it. Learning design practices can save you from blunders like this by informing you what learning methods and mediums of delivery would be well received by the end-users in your organization. It ensures you match the objectives and helps you create memorable learning experiences. These further help reduce inefficiency and improve knowledge retention and practical application.
#2 Adult learning principles
The learning design approach is informed by many learning theories and models in the context of adult learners in workplaces. It uses frameworks such as Bloom’s Taxonomy, Gage’s Nine Levels of Learning, ADDIE, and GROW coaching models to inform actions in the L&D function.
It ensures that employee training methods have a theoretical basis and evidence backing their efficacy. As a result, we can maintain higher levels of motivation and engagement. Learning design helps boost engagement. It changes old, boring ways of learning into fun, interactive experiences. By using gamification, storytelling, and real-world simulations, learning designers can spark interest, encourage active involvement, and make learning more enjoyable.
#3 Content development
Learning design processes structure the entire content development, creation, and delivery timeline into a systematic flow of events. As a result, you create digestible chunks of learning arranged in a logical sequence, which helps balance theory and application-based learning. Along with the content, you can create assessments and other activities in the learning and development process to build milestones and monitor progress as you go. Ultimately, the clear learning paths you get are helpful for the employees navigating the learning material and also simplify the process of calculating the impact and ROI of learning.
#4 Technology integration
Most teams are looking forward to using tech to reach more learners and create more impact. But the question is, how do they do it best? Learning designs help you in this journey by enabling a mix of appropriate delivery methods (e.g., eLearning, blended, instructor-led) to balance in-person learning with digitally delivered one. As a result, you can utilize learning technologies instead of merely getting lost in the huge jungle of emerging tech.
When you approach learning and development with design thinking, you can also cater to the unique needs of your employees working in distributed teams across the globe, such as the language options we have on Merlin. Risely’s AI coach can talk to people managers in over 40 languages! Similarly, a design process enables you to create many more ways to build inclusivity and accessibility within your learning experiences.
#5 Communicate value to stakeholders easily
As we noted earlier, due to the precise targeting of specific strategic learning objectives and high clarity, learning designs are a great tool to calculate ROI and demonstrate the impact of your L&D operations. A well-curated learning design will help you showcase a variety of programs focused on specific goals, the depth of your learning interventions, personalization and employee satisfaction that you created, and, ultimately, the performance improvements you enabled.
When we are talking about stakeholders, the C-suite is just one side of the equation. The employees who are the end-users of your L&D programs are much more directly impacted by learning designs. Ensuring that their needs are met and preferences are kept in mind will help you get more satisfied learners. When this ties in with personal development goals and internal mobility, you end up happy employees who believe that learning is their super power.
Read more: How to Obtain Buy-In for Training from Stakeholders?
#6 Meet the learners where they are
Employees are an important cog in the L&D machine. A good learning design will keep them at the center of everything and focus on meeting their needs regarding what they want to learn, how they want to learn, and when they want to learn. For instance, most manager development programs take people out for two or three days and place them in a seminar hall with an expert offering tips and tricks. It’s great, but what if they have a challenge they cannot discuss in front of a crowd? It happens more often than not; we have all been there, hesitating and keeping challenges to ourselves.
In such spots, you need an AI coach like Merlin, who will surely not share the concern with anyone ever and will answer as many questions as the manager needs. Keeping such things in mind ensures that your design does not burden the learners but gives them a safe space to correct themselves and develop better versions. As a result, you will also witness a higher level of learning transfer and application in the workplace.
What are the pillars of effective learning design?
Now that we know why learning designs matter let’s focus on the key question: What makes some learning designs good?
#1 Strategic alignment
Impactful learning designs are strategically aligned. It means that there is a clear connection to business/organizational goals. For example, suppose the organizational goal is to increase sales over the next quarter. In that case, your learning design will incorporate an online course to give product knowledge to everyone and mentoring sessions to enhance negotiation skills. Thus, it is mixing up two methods to cover two different areas as needed for the broader goals. Similarly, the learning process has goals and milestones to help track progress. Such learning designs are relevant to the organization and employee as they focus on addressing performance gaps critical to their success.
#2 Learner centricity
The learner is the pivot for any effective design. Learner centricity means that their needs and preferences are considered during the development of the learning plan at every moment. These choices are not made by someone else and imposed on them. Learner centricity is critical in getting engagement for your programs. It further secures buy-in, enhances learning transfer, and raises the satisfaction levels of the employees. It could include designing learner personas to understand the people you have, creating learning content at the right difficulty level, focusing on inclusion, and remaining sensitive.
#3 Engagement factors
We don’t want the learners to be bored, do we? Otherwise, they will just drop out of the program. If the learning program is mandatory, they will sit through it, find it annoying, and never apply anything to their daily work. That’s why you need engagement factors and consciously design for them. Overall, the program should provide a challenge that they can tackle but one that forces them to think. It is similar to how SMART goals are set – they are achievable but need effort. Beyond that, think of interactive and participatory elements that bring real-world applications and examples. You can also use story-driven or scenario-based learning to create the right balance of content and activity.
#4 Effective structure
Good learning design follows an effective structure in delivering the learning content. It has a logical content progression and chunked information for better retention. For example, if we are talking of project management principles, it should ideally look like this:
Module 1: Project Basics (Foundational Concepts) Chunk 1: What is a Project? (15 min) Definition and characteristics Types of projects Quick knowledge check Chunk 2: Project Life Cycle (20 min) Initiation to closure Key milestones Practice Activity: Identify phases
Module 3: Execution Skills (Application) Chunk 1: Team Management (20 min) Roles and responsibilities Communication plans Role-play exercise Chunk 2: Risk Management (25 min) Risk identification Mitigation strategies Scenario-based practice
The progression follows: Understanding basics > Learning planning tools > Applying management skills
Each chunk starts with clear objectives and contains 3-5 key points. It also includes a practice element, gives an approximate timeline and ends with a quick review, Having a clear structure is essential in ensuring effectiveness of any learning plan.
#5 Learning transfer
Did you notice how the plan above had some practice elements? The 2nd chunk of the 2nd module asks the learners to create a timeline just like they would do in real life while handling projects. Such actions break the friction that learners experience while applying new things at their jobs, But hesitation is one aspect, there are many more sources of concern. A good learning design breaks them down by creating opportunities for learning transfer. It can include follow-up mentorship sessions or activities, peer groups to continuously engage on the topic, or reinforcement strategies like the nudges Risely uses for people managers.
#6 Evaluation framework
Ultimately, we need results. And for that, we need to measure things. As we started, there has to be a clear focus on learning goals derived from business goals. Further, along with goals, you must define success metrics and create regular assessment points. For instance, in the example above, some chunks of learning ended with a quick quiz to reinforce and track learning until that point.
The data you collect this way is quite helpful in two key areas:
First, it will help you present the program’s ROI to the concerned stakeholders. Based on this, you can enable more data-driven decisions and seek higher budgets and bigger roles in the organization.
Second, the data regarding the evaluation of learning programs helps improve the program itself. Multiple feedback points such as employee surveys, satisfaction scores, and beyond-the-performance scores help you shape more effective learning designs.
#7 Support systems
Last but not the least. People can be your biggest enablers but also your biggest source of trouble. Leadership development programs worldwide have faced challenges because the senior leadership is not role modelling the values they call these programs to propagate. Similarly, if the employees don’t see value in your programs, there’s bound to be trouble. The key is to anticipate and beat these challenges by design.
One of the foremost things is to provide adequate learner support. That’s where a lot of plans fail. Because the content might be great but there’s no one to answer a question. Some organizations building leadership development programs have been stuck there too, and now they have incorporated Merlin in their L&D plans to provide support when humans cannot. That’s just one angle. There’s more to creating a support system for learning at work including solid peer networks that motivate progress, managers who support training and application, and creating resources to be used once the training is over – because learning does not end the moment training does.
Janis Cooper shed more light on this topic in a podcast with Risely about building great learning experiences at workplaces:
Wrapping up
Learning designs are very important for how employees perform and how successful a company can be. When companies connect learning goals to their business needs, use engaging activities, and take advantage of technology, they can boost how involved and motivated employees feel. To make learning better, it is key to check how well these designs work by using clear measurements. Keep up with the best ways to learn and assess how good your learning plans are to help keep and grow your staff.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Get Started with the Free Training and Development Plan Template!
Grab free L&D resources and more for holistic growth of people managers. Only on Risely.
3 Reasons Why Your Digital Learning Strategy Fails
In the last few years, digital learning strategies have changed how we learn. More and more organizations are using online learning platforms and tools. Because of this, it’s very important to have a clear plan. Sadly, many digital learning programs do not meet expectations. This blog post looks at three common reasons why digital learning strategies fail. It also offers tips for making learning experiences better.
Digital learning has changed the way we gain knowledge and skills. Online learning platforms have made it possible for people everywhere to access educational resources at any time and place. With more mobile devices around, learning is now easier and more convenient.
Today’s learning platforms provide many tools and resources. These include video calls, interactive modules, and personalized learning plans. In the latest wave of L&D’s digital revolution, the tides are shifting toward higher adoption and integration of AI in workplaces to create meaningful digital learning experiences. More and more L&D teams are exploring options like microlearning and personalized journeys for the employees to focus on key pain points like learner retention and application of training at work.
Still, having these technological features does not ensure a successful digital learning strategy.
3 Reasons Why Digital Learning is Not Working Out for You
Digital learning has many great opportunities, but it also has some challenges. You need to deal with technological changes, teaching methods, and what learners expect. As a result, you need to think of many points of failure while creating learning and development strategies.
Reason #1: Lack of Clear Objectives and Goals
A common problem in digital learning is not having clear goals. Without clear learning objectives, it is hard to create good learning experiences or to see if your learning strategy is working. Many organizations focus too much on technology and not enough on the results they want to achieve. When AI is becoming more of a buzzword rather than a tool, it is easy to fall into the hype and directly jump into the application stage without thinking through it.
To create a strong learning strategy, start by identifying the skills and knowledge you want learners to gain (this should further connect to your organization’s business goals). By setting clear learning objectives, you give a plan for teams and individual learners so everyone aims for the same goal. It is only after the goals are set that you can think of execution.
Moving to corporate learning plans for next year, keep this one mantra in mind:
Do: Use AI to achieve strategic learning goals.
Don’t: Treat “Use AI” as a goal in your L&D strategy.
One aspect of bad goal-setting is getting lost in the process. The second aspect is the lack of clarity. Each goal should explain what learners can do after finishing the training. For instance, instead of saying learners will “understand project management principles,” a better goal is “learners will be able to apply project management principles to create a project plan with clear timelines, milestones, and resources.”
Measuring learning outcomes helps you track progress and see how well your training is working. You can use different methods, such as quizzes, assignments, simulations, and observations, to check whether learners have the right skills or knowledge after the programs are complete.
Also, by creating realistic and relevant learning goals, you boost learners’ motivation and knowledge retention. When learners know the goals and values of their learning experience, they are more likely to get involved with the material and ultimately create strategic results that you are assessed on.
Reason #2: Ignoring the Needs of Your Learners
A learner-focused approach is very important for making engaging and effective digital learning experiences. Many organizations, however, do not pay enough attention to learner analysis and skills gap analysis. Ignoring the needs, preferences, and learning styles of your audience can cause low engagement, weak knowledge retention, and a poor learning strategy.
For instance, if an organization made up entirely of people who are largely not tech-savvy and above 60 adopts an online learning program, we know what to expect. Before heading into the action, think of what your learners need.
Tech skills: Are they good with online learning platforms, or do they need more help using them?
Time limits: Do they have flexible schedules, or are they busy with work, family, and other things?
Learning styles: Do they like visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or mixed learning methods?
The story does not end with analyzing the surface before creating a digital learning strategy. Make sure your online course is accessible. It means adding captions to videos, transcripts for audio, keyboard navigation, and alternative text for images. Meeting these accessibility needs, you help create a learning space that includes everyone.
Lastly, keep your content short, relevant, and engaging. Use microlearning methods to break big topics into smaller pieces. Include real-life examples, case studies, and scenarios to make the learning more useful and relatable. Catering to the needs of learners means focusing on both what they need to learn and how they can learn it best.
Reason #3: Over-Reliance on Technology
Technology is very important for digital learning. However, relying too much on digital tools without thinking about teaching methods can lead to problems. It’s easy to be distracted by new gadgets and software. But remember, technology should help improve the learning process, not take over.
A good digital learning strategy finds the right balance between technology and teaching methods. The main goal should be to create valuable learning experiences. It helps people gain knowledge, think critically, and develop skills. When you plan your digital learning strategy, think about the teaching principles that will help you choose the right technology and methods for teaching.
For example, think about using social learning tools to encourage teamwork and sharing ideas among learners. These can include discussion forums, group projects, or giving feedback to friends. Look into gamification methods or interactive simulations to improve engagement and help with knowledge retention. Or, if you’re teaching a highly technical subject, interactive simulations or virtual reality experiences might be beneficial for providing learners with hands-on experience. On the other hand, if you’re focusing on soft skills development, role-playing scenarios or video-based coaching sessions might be more effective.
The main idea is to pick digital tools that match your teaching goals. Ensure they add to the learning experience instead of taking away from it. Don’t let technology control how you teach. Choose the tools that best fit your teaching objectives and the needs of your learners.
TL;DR Your digital learning strategy fails when:
You don’t have clearly defined learning goals.
You don’t look into what your learners need.
You focus only on the “digital” aspect of the learning strategy.
Key Components of a Successful Digital Learning Strategy
Now, the big question is, how can we change learning and development for the present age? What makes a successful learning strategy? Let’s try to answer that next.
#1 Clarity on Goals and the Role of Tech
Goals are the pivot for your learning initiatives. This holds true even when the said learning happens in a digital landscape. Hence, start thinking of digital learning strategies in tandem with the wider learning and development strategy of your organization. Your business objectives should inform your learning objectives, and from there you can further carve out the areas that fall under the scope of digital learning.
For example, a retail chain wants to improve customer service ratings by 25% within six months across 50 stores. That’s the business goal. Upon analysis, the company realizes the need to improve its customer service practice, leading to three key learning goals:
Train staff in advanced customer service techniques
Standardize service protocols across all stores
Improve product knowledge among sales staff
When it comes to developing the digital learning strategy, the L&D team realizes that the staff needs something with a simple UI; they have limited hours to devote to training. Some soft skill training needs cannot be simply addressed through lectures, etc. Based on these ideas, we can think of a mix including:
Mobile LMS for easy access during store hours
Microlearning modules for quick learning between shifts
AR-based product demonstration tools
Virtual role-play scenarios for customer interaction practice
Similarly, you also need of think of where tech can fulfil your learning needs effectively and where it cannot before starting the implementation.
Need help for your learning and development plan? Download the free L&D strategy framework by Risely!
#2 Learner-centricity
As we saw in the example of a digital learning strategy above, the needs of the end-user (learner in our case) are critical in determining the ideal course of action. Practicing this ensures learners are at the center of the process, leading to higher engagement in learning and development initiatives. When employees understand the why behind a training program, they are much more open to understanding the what and how. Beyond the C-suite, you need to sell ideas here too. It results in higher participation, performance outcomes, and, ultimately, the success of L&D strategies.
But what does learner centricity even mean? We are designing learning for the employee, duh. That’s an extremely simplistic way of looking at it. Learner centricity would mean ensuring that your team can access and apply learning without additional trouble. It includes distributing and delivering material in the right format, gathering feedback and using it for improvements, and providing personalized attention to their unique needs with digital learning platforms and services.
For instance, Risely creates personalized learning journeys for people managers since their contexts and challenges cannot be lumped up into a single program. And since managers are often busy and booked people with overflowing calendars, Risely uses microlearning and nudging to meet them where they are – in the middle of a lot happening!
#3 Ease of Use in Digital Learning
No one likes clunky tech, but ask people what they hate the most about the learning systems (mostly an LMS) that their workplaces force down their throats, and you will hear about this age-old woe. Conventionally, digital learning comes in the form of online pre-recorded lectures, a quizzing module if you are lucky, and some platforms that seem to work best on mobile when you are on the desktop version and vice-versa. It’s 2024, and it’s high time this thing was left behind. Josh Bersin pointed to this move away from LMSs even back in 2017.
If LMS is out, what’s in?
We are moving to the era of digital learning that meets the learners where they are. It means fitting into their schedules and day-to-day routines. One way of doing this is microlearning, just like we practice at Risely with daily nudges and activities pictured above. But there’s more to it; another way to meet the learner where they literally are, which we have adopted lately, is integrations within digital workplaces like Slack and Teams. It helps reduce the friction in accessing learning content and thus makes your digital learning strategy much more visible in everyone’s eyes.
Similarly, we spoke of accessibility as one of the restricting factors in the success of digital learning strategies. But what if you could learn anywhere, anytime, and in the way you want? AI is making such adaptations possible, and organizations are loving them. In the 2024 LinkedIn Learning Report, we saw that coaching is used as a booster shot for career progression by many organizations, with about 47% actively using it. AI is set to double down on the impact.
We have worked on a few of these ideas and added them to Merlin, our AI coach for leadership development. On top of customized coaching to meet the unique needs of people managers, Merlin now offers:
An interactive voice mode along with chat mode for coaching
Support in 40+ languages across both the modes
Custom integrations to include company values in coaching sessions
And this is just the beginning! Voice mode is quite helpful in expressing unclear and abstract ideas in a coaching conversation, which often involves thoughts that are harder to put into words precisely. It’s hassle-free for everyone who wants to add a minute-long note to their coach before heading into yet another meeting.
Similarly, multiple languages are needed to make coaching easier and accessible for everyone. The coaching industry may be big, but it’s highly concentrated in a few regions and biased toward English speakers, thus leaving others at an automatic disadvantage. Adding company-specific culture and value-related notes also ensures that there’s a touch of you and your vision in every conversation that goes on. Plus, it saves your team members from digging into long PDFs featuring lists of do’s and don’ts. There’s more to come with greater tech innovation in the L&D space.
# 4 Giving Digital Learning the Space to Grow with You
Who doesn’t love a product packed with features and constant updates, right? But do you really need something to convert every document into a quiz with multiple-choice options? Probably not. Your digital learning strategy should always be rooted in the reality of your needs for success. Plus, we both know how learning budgets work. Let’s be frugal over prodigal.
Thus, a good learning strategy will include prioritization. Let me expand on prioritizing essential features for digital learning with a practical example of a company that wants to train 500 employees on safety protocols. We will implement this digital learning strategy in two phases.
Phase 1: Core Needs Assessment Essential Features
Basic reporting
Basic content delivery system
Simple assessment tools
Progress tracking
Mobile accessibility
Here the focus lays on getting the system up and running. This means creating the basic video lectures, thinking of the main elements of technical infra you need like playback options, some ways to assess to learning like quizzes and completion certificates to get started.
Phase 2: Nice-to-Have Features
Advanced analytics
Gamification
Social learning tools
AI-powered recommendations
Custom branding
Later, as you move forward, you can consider adding more elements, like AI-enabled personalization to match what the learner needs more precisely, offering options to share and collaborate on assignments, and so on.
Similar to how we think of an organizational learning maturity model, we need a digital learning maturity model in place which can help us progress step-wise rather than brute force a 0-1 change.
For instance, the initial phase starts with ad-hoc adoption of digital learning. It can mean an online course here and there, using tracking systems online, and sharing information over PDFs rather than traditional booklets. But all of this is without an LMS or any such platform at the center. In the second phase, as people gain trust in these methods, they become standard for some areas of the organization. You get digital learning advocates within your organization; some features are mentioned in L&D strategy documents.
Phase 3 of digital learning maturity makes things real, wherein there is increased adoption, ideally through a central platform. More interactive options are available, and data tracked digitally informs decisions about learning and development initiatives. Ultimately, toward the last phase, your organization develops into an avid user of a digital learning strategy with a focus on getting the best and latest on board. It could mean anything from AI-led personalized efforts to heavy use of analytics or even creating digital learning that is used outside the scope of your organization and puts you out as the leader in the arena.
In the initial phase, your team might not be ready to adopt the solutions you suggest, no matter how easy they can make lives. You will meet resistance and people favoring the status quo over anything and everything. The key is to be realistic with digital learning strategies regarding what you want to do, what you can do, and how you can do it best.
I discussed a few more ideas on the future of learning strategies in a recently recorded podcast with Inna Horvath, check it out here:
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, a good digital learning strategy depends on having clear goals, focusing on the learner, and mixing technology with teaching methods. It is important to understand how digital learning is changing. This helps us deal with challenges and find new chances. By setting clear and measurable goals, meeting learner needs, and wisely using technology, you can improve your learning programs. Having a complete view that connects learning results with business goals makes a strong and effective digital learning strategy. Remember, the key is to adapt to the changing needs of modern workplaces while putting learners first.
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How To Build Learner Personas For L&D? Free Template
For every learning designer, the root question is who will use this content. All your actions to ensure that the learning plan and content match the ultimate goals at every level stem from this answer. But we cannot design tailored courses for every learner out there, can we? Not in the traditional sense. AI is changing this by including hyper-personalization in its action plans. Yet not every type and form of training takes well to it, and learner personas act as a great starting point in the design process for learning and development teams.
By knowing your learners’ journey well, you can create learning experiences that really connect with them. This is where learner personas help. These are semi-fictional images of your best learners based on real information. Using learner personas helps you build training programs that are personal and effective. It leads to real results. In this blog, we will learn all about these personas of learners at work.
Think of learner personas as models that show the typical traits, backgrounds, and aims of the people you want to reach. They provide more than just basic details.
A learner persona is a fictionalized representation of your target group or audience. It is used extensively in designing learning and development programs.
They give important clues about your learners’ needs, dreams, worries, and goals. When you understand these different parts, you can design your training content and the way you deliver it. This will help meet the special needs of your target audience and improve the overall learning experience. Ultimately, you get an impactful L&D strategy!
Learner personas are similar to the profiles of ideal buyers and consumers that marketing and sales professionals use to tailor their recommendations and fine-tune the offerings for better matching. The use case of personas in learning follows the same principle by creating programs for a hypothetical person who is an average summation of your learners.
Where can learner personas help you?
Effective learner personas are more than just demographics. They show real details about your target audience, like how they learn, what drives them, and what challenges they face. By doing thorough audience analysis and creating clear learner personas, you set up a strong base for training programs that work well.
These personas help you go beyond basic training materials. You can create content that truly fits your audience’s needs and learning styles. You can understand common characteristics, like how they prefer to learn, what they already know, and where they need help. This way, you can make training that is engaging and relevant. The outcome is better learner involvement and improved knowledge retention, because you design with empathy for the learner.
That gives us many use cases for learner personas in L&D, such as:
Curriculum Design: They help connect your training content to specific learning outcomes, making sure it is relevant.
Content Creation: You can adjust the format, language, and examples to connect better with your target audience.
Delivery Optimization: They help you choose the right delivery methods and technology.
But that does not mean that learner personas are the best thing out there. There are many pitfalls associated with misuse and overuse of learner personas in the L&D function. While learner personas are incredibly valuable tools in most training scenarios, there are instances where their use may not be as beneficial. One such scenario is when dealing with highly homogenous learner groups where individual differences are minimal. In such cases, investing time and resources in creating detailed personas may not yield significant returns.
What are the common pitfalls for learner personas in L&D?
Overgeneralization: Developing overly broad personas that do not accurately represent the diversity within your target audience makes them powerless as a tool.
Static personas: Your audience evolves and changes. Similarly, the level of learning maturity in your organization also grows over time. Thus, your personas of learners need to evolve with these. Otherwise, you will continue to design L&D with a non-existent person in mind.
Neglecting feedback: Not incorporating feedback from learners to refine and adjust the personas over time is another major issue. Remember, learner personas should be dynamic tools that adapt to changing needs.
Lack of validation: Relying solely on assumptions or limited data to create personas without validating them through research or direct input from the audience creates trouble as it can make you biased and stereotypical.
Ignoring outliers: Disregarding unique or outlier characteristics within your audience that could impact learning preferences and outcomes.
How can you build and use learner personas for L&D?
Creating effective learner personas is a smart process. It focuses on collecting, studying, and understanding data to clearly show who your target audience is. Let’s break it down into a few simple steps:
It’s about changing plain data into valuable images of your learners.
#1 Gathering and Analyzing Data for Your Personas
The success of good learner personas depends on having rich and detailed data. It’s important to collect both numbers and personal stories to fully understand your learners. You can use surveys and data analysis for facts about demographics and learning likes before averaging them out to get the profile.
But that’s just the beginning. Go deeper by gathering personal insights through interviews and focus groups. Ask participants to talk about their experiences, struggles, and hopes related to learning. The aim is to discover the ‘why’ behind how they learn.
Looking at this valuable data shows patterns and trends. It helps identify different groups in your target audience. This could lead to finding one main learner persona, along with secondary personas that represent other key parts of your learners.
#2 Validating Personas with Stakeholders
Once you make your first learner personas, it’s important to work with others to confirm them. Get ideas from subject matter experts, team members, and even future learners. This helps make sure your personas are correct and relevant.
Working with stakeholders helps catch any unrealistic profiles or unconscious bias that might slip in during development. Open talks and feedback help you make your personas better and more useful for training decisions. Keep in mind that creating learner personas is a process that changes over time. Be ready to adjust based on feedback from others.
There are two main actions here:
Stakeholder Feedback: Seek input from subject matter experts, team members, and potential learners. Specifically ask for feedback on whether the personas resonate with their experiences and observations.
User Testing: Conduct interviews or focus groups with actual learners to see if the personas align with their behaviors and preferences. Observe how users interact with your learning materials and compare it against the persona traits.
#3 Crafting Your Learner Personas
Bring your learner personas to life by transforming data-driven insights into relatable, easy-to-understand profiles. There are many ways to do it. You can use a Word Doc, or a slide deck, or even ready to use templates for learner personas like the one we have.
Structure the information using a clear and concise format, providing a snapshot of each persona. A learner persona should include details such as demographics (age, gender, location), learning preferences, motivations, goals, challenges faced in learning, preferred learning styles, tech proficiency level, and any other relevant information that gives a holistic understanding of the individual’s learning journey.
These insights create a vivid representation of the target audience, guiding the development of tailored development strategies. The key is to humanize the data and make it relatable for effective decision-making in training and educational planning.
You should consider incorporating elements like:
Element
Description
Example
Persona Name
A memorable name representing the persona
Tech-Savvy Sarah
Job Title
Reflects their role within the organization
Marketing Manager
Skill Level
Indicates their proficiency in relevant areas
Intermediate
Pain Points
Highlights key challenges they face
Struggles to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends
Learning Preferences
Describes their preferred learning methods
Enjoys interactive online courses and video tutorials
These tangible representations make it easier for your design team to relate to and understand the diverse needs of your learners. For instance, let’s try to create the learner persona of Andrew Antonoff, a Marketing Manager at XYZ Corp.
Learner Persona Example (with Free Template)
We start the process by obtaining hypothetical personal details for Andrew. Since he is a marketing manager, we develop educational and professional information that is in tune with that. Further, we attempt to understand Andrew’s personality type, which can help you judge the person’s openness to learning, likely reaction to different training methods, and preferences.
Similarly, the professional goals and challenges showcase what impacts the learner regularly as they carry on their daily business. All of this context comes together to help us summarize who Andrew is and add a quote that goes with his personality.
In the second part, we focus on learning-specific details. This is a critical area since we are designing the persona for L&D-related issues.
Does that sound good? You can do the same with our free learner persona template, which is packed with more insights and support for L&D teams.
Conclusion
In conclusion, creating accurate learner personas is crucial for successful learning and development (L&D) strategies. By knowing what your audience needs and likes, you can adjust your learning materials. This helps keep them engaged and helps them remember more. Use the step-by-step guide to collect data, check it with stakeholders, and make detailed learner personas. These personas serve as a guide for making personalized and effective learning experiences for different styles. Embrace learner personas to improve your training programs and make your organization’s learning culture better over time.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Grab Risely’s free learner persona template now!
Start solving critical L&D challenges with Risely holding your hand.
How To Use A Learning And Development Maturity Model?
How strong is your organization on the learning and development front? Answering that question is not super simple. Many factors are at play, and further human bias makes us interpret things differently. For instance, a team emphasizing learning for the present goals might not see much value in developing a future-ready learning plan. But another team would! The learning and development function itself has to grow through all of these stages to support your organization’s ambitions. The learning and development maturity model helps us add clarity to this picture.
Learning maturity is about ensuring that your corporate learning efforts align with talent management and business goals. It is not just about offering training programs. It is also about building a culture that appreciates ongoing learning and helps employees grow.
As organizations improve at this, they move from just giving training to building a learning environment. This new approach supports employee development, boosts skills, and improves business performance. Learning is more connected to other HR activities like performance management and talent development, creating a complete way to develop the workforce.
A learning maturity model is a tool that shows different stages of growth in an organization’s learning and development (L&D) function. It acts like a roadmap, showing how L&D can change from being basic and reactive to becoming a key part of the business. Each maturity level has its traits, skills, and methods linked to corporate learning. This model lets you check your current L&D practices, resources, and technology against set standards to prepare better.
Learning Maturity is incredibly connected to better business outcomes, as Deloitte has defined that organizations with higher learning maturity are three times more likely to:
Key Components of a Learning and Development Maturity Model
The building blocks of a solid learning and development maturity model include:
A step-wise structure: L&D maturity models feature different levels or stages that signify the level of consolidation of the L&D function with the business side of things. A learning maturity model typically helps you understand it in three to five tiers.
Core dimensions: Every learning and development maturity model revolves around a few core dimensions, such as learning strategy, content and materials, learning environment and culture, alignment with business objectives, processes, and impact.
Indicators of maturity: Every level of maturity in the model is associated with certain indicators. For example, the presence and sophistication of a formal L&D strategy help us see that the organization is in Stage 4. Conversely, a chalk-and-talk attitude toward learning shows that it’s at a pretty early stage in terms of learning maturity.
Assessment and evaluation: These twins form the basis of any learning and development maturity model you see working around you. The teams can only judge their level of organizational learning maturity and plan things further based on assessments and constant evaluations.
Assessing Your Organization’s Current L&D Maturity Level
You need to start with an assessment to use an L&D maturity model for growth. This means carefully examining your organization’s learning culture, practices, and resources to determine where you stand in the maturity model.
The first assessment uses the maturity model to examine different parts of your learning and development (L&D) processes. Start by checking how clear and detailed your learning strategy is. Is it easy to understand and share, and is it in line with your business goals?
Then, look at how you design and deliver your L&D programs. Are they made to meet specific needs in your organization and focus on important skills gaps? Also, check the technology and tools you use for L&D. Do you use an LMS or other digital learning platforms effectively?
Next, evaluate how engaged the learners are and how well your programs achieve their goals. This first assessment will show you how skilled your organization is in various L&D areas and point out where you need to improve.
What are the Four Stages of L&D Maturity?
Each level shows a separate stage in how an organization’s L&D function grows. They are marked by special practices, mindsets, and results. Moving through these levels takes hard work to improve the learning culture, match L&D activities with the business strategy, and keep making learning programs better.
Stage 1: Ad-Hoc and Reactive Learning Approaches
At stage one, organizations usually deal with learning and development (L&D) in a reactive way. Training programs happen when there are immediate needs instead of following a clear plan. L&D is viewed as a place that only costs money rather than one that can help the business grow.
Many organizations do not have an official learning strategy or a dedicated L&D team at this stage. You would discover that training is often inconsistent and mainly uses traditional methods like classroom learning. There is also little use of technology or online learning.
The main focus is on fixing immediate skill gaps. Little effort is made to create a continuous learning culture or connect L&D with long-term business goals. It leads to uneven learning experiences, little measurement of results, and challenges in proving the value of L&D to the organization.
Stage 2: Developing Structured Learning Processes
Moving to the second stage of maturity means organizations start using a more organized Learning and Development (L&D) approach. They begin to set up clear learning processes. It often happens because they need to meet compliance training needs or create standard programs for professional development.
At this stage, many organizations will use a learning management system (LMS). It centralizes training materials and helps track how well learners are doing. There is more focus on making structured learning content. They define learning goals and aim to give a steadier learning experience.
Still, your L&D function mostly focuses on providing set training programs. Even though stage two shows progress, you still need to connect learning more with uour business strategy and show the larger effect of their L&D efforts.
Stage 3: Integrating Learning with Business Strategy
A big change happens in this stage as L&D works closely with the business strategy. Organizations see learning as a key factor for business success and talent development. L&D professionals focus on finding skill gaps and training needs that fit the organization’s goals.
They try to measure how L&D programs work and show the ROI of learning investments. Technology is used better to tailor learning experiences, track progress, and offer data-based insights. Still, some challenges exist as organizations want to make a real learning system. This system should integrate learning into the flow of work and connect smoothly with other talent management processes.
Stage 4: Investing in People Assets
Stage four shows a high level of maturity. At this stage, Learning and Development (L&D) is a core part of how the organization manages its talent. Companies here invest a lot in their people.
Learning is now key to career development, planning for future leaders, and performance management. Employees are pushed to take charge of their learning and seek professional development chances. They often have coaching and mentoring programs to help them grow and promote sharing knowledge.
L&D is smart and focused. It uses data and analytics to predict future skill needs, tailor learning experiences, and check how learning affects individual and company performance. Companies at this stage are proactive in anticipating industry changes and preparing their workforce accordingly through cutting-edge learning initiatives.
How to Advance Through L&D Maturity Levels?
Transitioning to higher levels of L&D maturity requires a smart and organized approach. Start by setting a clear L&D vision that aligns with business goals. Invest in new technology to update learning experiences. Also, use data to check and improve the effectiveness of your programs. But those are just the basics; there’s more that you can do to move up the organizational learning maturity ladder.
#1 Adopt an active approach to L&D initiatives
Develop an L&D strategy that aligns with your business objectives and augments your approach to reaching them soon. Your L&D plan needs to be proactive, anticipating needs before they show up heavily on the organization’s face, and agile enough to cater to changing trends and demands of the industry and people.
#2 Gain leadership support and commitment
Many L&D initiatives fail to see the light of day simply because the owners could not gain the trust and support of the leaders who could have given the programs a much-needed nudge toward acceptance. So what’s the way out? Focus on the first idea, i.e., making a business impact, and showcase it to the relevant leaders so that your work is not a vanity point but something valuable and gets the care it deserves.
Read more: How to Obtain Buy-In for Training from Stakeholders?
#3 Make some investments
L&D in the early stages, lacking maturity, is also characterized by a lack of investments in three major areas: time, effort, and assets. You will need to up all three before attempting to hit higher levels of learning maturity with your team.
Second, you need to put effort into building the learning content, arranging experts, conducting assessments, etc., to have a more impactful learning process available.
Third, all of this costs money, whether done in-house or externally. So, be prepared to pitch to the leaders with proof and estimates of the impact that learning brings to your organization.
#4 Leverage tech
Organizational learning is no longer limited to old-school coaches and lectures. Instead, it’s happening increasingly in the flow of work and not stealing precious work hours anymore. While most organizations limit themselves to an LMS, there are plenty more areas where tech can help you do more in corporate learning. For instance, Risely offers in-built skill assessments on its platform for leadership development. We also have an integrated AI coach, Merlin, who meets coaching needs at the point of need in preferred languages and workspaces. Mature learning organizations ensure that they introduce L&D to more and more employees using tech in a standard format.
To Wrap Up
In conclusion, using a Learning and Development Maturity Model can really improve how well your organization trains and develops its employees. Start by checking your current L&D maturity level. Then, find important areas to focus on and move through the different stages using best practices. This way, you can adjust your learning methods to fit your business goals. Use technology and data to help you, and learn from real-life examples. This will help your organization reach higher maturity levels. Also, remember that regular evaluation and support from leaders are key for ongoing growth in L&D maturity.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Free Resource for You: Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
Learning Experience Platforms: A Brief Introduction
When it comes to technology that supports workplace learning, our minds race to LMS. The humble learning management systems support a plethora of courses, skill databases, and administrative reports for the entire workplace.
But there’s a new entrant in the market. It’s known as the learning experience platform (LXP) and focuses on the experience that learning creates for the end users. It’s not just an administrative tool for the HR and L&D heads; instead, it emphasizes making learning more user-centric with solid experiences.
Let’s discover more about LXPs!
Learning experience platforms are software designed to support corporate learning through various stages by doubling down on creating good daily learner experiences. They help L&D teams create curated learning content that meet their teams’ unique needs, prepare a digital learning environment, and function as complete learning management systems.
LXPs change this by focusing on the end-user instead through their modern features that bring about a great UI, personalization, and even gamification to keep learners engaged. This autonomy empowers learners to take charge, as they can decide what they want to learn, when they want to learn, and how it will happen. Moreover, these systems can mostly integrate with the existing operational systems of your organization’s HR stack, thus enabling better access and usage.
Essential features of a good learning experience platform (LXP)
Advanced Personalization: Utilize artificial intelligence to provide personalized content recommendations based on individual learning preferences, past behaviors, and career goals.
Microlearning: Offer bite-sized learning modules that are easy to consume and fit into learners’ busy schedules, promoting continuous learning.
Discussion Forums: Provide platforms for learners to engage in discussions, share insights, and collaborate with peers, fostering a sense of community and collaborative learning.
Peer Reviews and Ratings: Enable learners to review and rate content, helping others identify valuable resources and enhancing the quality of learning materials.
Badges and Certifications: Incorporate gamification elements like badges, points, and certifications to motivate learners and recognize their achievements.
Integration with Existing Systems: Ensure compatibility and seamless integration with existing enterprise systems, such as HRIS, LMS, CRM, and other tools, creating a cohesive learning ecosystem.
Comprehensive Insights: Offer advanced analytics and reporting tools that provide insights into learner behavior, engagement levels, content effectiveness, and learning outcomes.
How can a learning experience platform help you?
Learning experience platforms bring several benefits to your team. Primarily, they can help you with:
Creating personalized learning paths
Personalized learning is the defining feature of effective learning. It’s not just about creating a list of modules that follow one after another; we are speaking of an experience where your employee is at the center of everything. The training plan is designed with their needs and challenges in mind. Learning experience platforms are solid support in this movement, as they leverage AI to integrate your company objectives and an employee’s personal goals to create personalized learning experiences.
Curate learning content
A handbook here, a webinar here, and another course module over there—scattered training material bugs the learner experience big time. Learning experience platforms allow L&D teams to collate widespread resources into one place and distribute them effectively according to the needs of the individual users. This wide range of resources ensures that employees will access the most relevant and up-to-date information.
Making learning a social initiative
Social interaction, the impact of peers and managers, and opportunities for recognition are critical to the success of learning initiatives. Learning experience platforms bring these benefits to your table with their collaborative features. These may include a shared wall of honor for high achievers, shareable certificates, discussion forums where employees learn from each other, etc.
Enhance engagement and motivation
One of the most common challenges in an L&D plan is the lack of engagement from individual employees, which is bound to happen when the courses are not designed with their needs in mind. Boring video lectures, or long workshops are a matter of the past, we are moving toward a world where learning is hyper personalized and does not steal time away from work.
Instead, it integrates seamlessly into workflows, provides support at the point of need, and stimulates learning. Learning experience platforms are working on this by including gamified features such as quizzes, simulations, and real-world situations, making learning more experiential and applicable regularly.
Analyze data with ease and at scale
Learning experience platforms make the lives of HR and L&D teams easier with their impactful dashboards that collect and report valuable data points for the entire organization. LXPs provide comprehensive analytics that allows L&D and HR teams to track learner progress, engagement levels, content effectiveness, and learning outcomes. These insights help you make data-driven decisions to enhance training programs.
Further, LXPs can integrate with existing HR systems, such as HR Information Systems (HRIS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS), creating a cohesive ecosystem for managing employee development aspects within your L&D strategy.
Learning experience platform vs LMS: What’s the difference?
Sounds similar? They are not! LXPs offer significant advantages over the conventional LMS in many ways. While a conventional LMS is designed with improved reporting and analysis as the objective, LXPs take things further by shifting the focus toward the experience your learners are dealing with and creating personalized paths where they remain engaged and satisfied.
We have explored some points of difference in learning experience platforms vs LMS below:
Basis
LXP
LMS
Focus
LXPs are user-centric with focus on content discovery
LMSs primarily manage and administer training programs
Content Management
LXPs aggregate content from multiple sources
LMS platforms deliver structured courses
Personalization
LXPs leverage AI and machine learning to personalize learning experiences
LMSs offer standardized learning paths set by the admins
Engagement
LXPs often incorporate gamification elements
Engagement methods on LMS are limited
Analytics
LXPs share insights into learner behavior, engagement levels, and content effectiveness
LMS analytics are focused heavily on tracking completion and compliance
Integrations
LXPs can integrate with various tools and platforms, including LMSs
LMS platforms often integrate with enterprise systems like HRIS and ERP
What are the best learning experience platforms?
Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs) are a shift from the traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS), which garnered a bad reputation over the years due to their super focus on the administrative side of things. Let’s have a look at how the big players in the league are doing this with great features:
Degreed
Degreed is a learning experience platform that focuses on skills-based learning. It considers your present skills and learning gaps and creates a personalized map to guide you toward professional objectives. For L&D teams, it means results that come faster and cheaper. And for employees, it means an experience that revolves around their needs. The attached content marketplace further broadens access to resources within the platform.
Unique features: AI-powered scalable upskilling at speed for organizations
G2 Rating: 4.2
Pricing: Available upon request
EdCast
Edcast is an employee experience platform that focuses on learning and building skills. In its own words, the platform facilitates the retention and attraction of high-quality talent that companies love. Edcast uses expert content to enable growth in advanced areas relevant to the employees, all shaped into a hyper-personalized learning journey that fuels mobile careers.
Unique features: Improves employee experience by embedding learning in the flow of work
G2 Rating: 4.1
Pricing: Available upon request
LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning is an educational platform for professionals with multiple fields of work and years of experience. It uses AI to suggest courses based on your profile, including your work roles, years of experience, trending industry topics, etc. Moreover, you can see what courses your connections take and connect over learning. Eventually these certifications contribute directly to the career development of your employees as they can be easily showcased and shared with global acceptance.
Unique features: Goes into functional job skills as well as people skills
G2 Rating: 4.4
Pricing: Starting from $29.99
Cornerstone
Cornerstone presents itself as the only platform you need for solid learner experiences. Its primary focus is on future readiness; as the world is changing, they want you to keep up, too. This is enabled through unique features in its learner experience platform, such as measuring the workforce readiness gap and keeping workforce agility as the #1 goal in your organization’s development journey. AI adds to this journey by building personalized learning plans for the employees and providing top-notch learning recommendations.
Unique features: Focuses on closing the workforce readiness gap for future performance
G2 Rating: 4.1
Pricing: Custom quotes available upon request
Percipio
Percipio by Skillsoft is an online learning experience platform driven by AI that enables skill transformation for organizations. The core areas of focus include reskilling and upskilling the current workforce to be up-to-date with the challenges and opportunities to come in the next years and decades. The learner experience platform helps organizations measure and track skill repositories in the teams. Based on these assessments, you can find gaps and plan initiatives to create a resilient workforce in your organization with the help of blended learning modes available on the platform.
Unique features: AI-driven emphasis on skill building across the organization
G2 Rating: 4.1
Pricing: Available upon request
When you are choosing a learning experience platform for your organization, keep the features and benefits we discussed above and make a solid choice!
Conclusion
Learning experience platforms can add much value to your employee learning journeys. They can be the next step toward a solid learning and development strategy that creates an amazing learning journey for your organization. The key is understanding how these features blend in with your existing learning mechanisms and building on top of them. Remember your goals and choose the right learning experience platform to keep growing.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Download your free copy of Risely’s Training and Development Plan Template
Start growing with your team effectively with the help of free L&D resources by Risely.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss why creating fantastic learner experiences is crucial for learning and development success at work. We’ll also discuss what could go wrong if it is overlooked and offer some tips on how L&D professionals can develop effective strategies to ensure every student has a positive journey through education.
Let’s explore ways we can give our employees top-notch educational experiences at work
Learner experience refers to the holistic journey that your team undergoes throughout an educational course or training as part of learning and development initiatives. It includes all the touch points and moments of interaction, from the small ones, like the look-and-feel of an online quiz, to the bigger, more visible factors, like a classroom lecture’s atmosphere. These learner experiences are critical in ensuring the transfer and application of knowledge.
Learner experience (LX) design is all about making learning experiences that really change how learners see things. It’s when you plan and make learning activities with a clear goal in mind, focusing on the learner to keep them interested and help them learn better. LX design takes bits from instructional design, user experience (UX) design, and cognitive psychology to ensure these learning experiences are not only effective but also meaningful.
Why do Your Learner’s Experiences Matter?
Does your organization invest in creating a meaningful learner experience? If not, you are missing out. The learning experience is not just a vanity metric; it carries a valuable impact that can often be hard to notice. First up, learner experience is vital to the success of learning and development efforts. Picture it yourself: where would you enjoy learning more, in a boring recorded video lecture or with a subject matter expert seeking your questions?
A well-designed learner experience enhances knowledge retention and skill acquisition. Learners who are engaged and find the learning process intuitive and enjoyable are more likely to absorb and apply new information effectively. This undoubtedly means that your ROI for training is better when the LX is solid.
Plus, there are secondary benefits to investing in training experiences at work. With a good learner experience, your teams are happier, and you can curb turnover because your employees see your company’s investment in their long-term growth. Over time, this adds up to a competitive advantage.
Show you positive impact on employee satisfaction and engagement
Make internal mobility and career progressions easier
The role of engagement in the success of learning cannot be underestimated. Research shows that up to 75% of learning is lost within the next six days, as Janis Cooper highlighted in our conversation. This phenomenon, tracked well by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, leads us to the core question—what’s a good learner experience, and how can we build one?
How are Delightful Learning Experiences Made?
Corporate learning = boring. That’s a common enough perception. And not one without reason.
According to a Forbes article, nearly half (47%) of workers are dissatisfied with the training they receive at work. Corporate learning experiences are often dull, disconnected from real-life applications, and sometimes distracting from deadlines. The area is in for a rehaul.
In conversation with Janis Cooper (VP, HR at Best Friends of Animal Society), we uncover how they make corporate training effective by focusing on experiences. The secret ingredient? Horses. Equine-facilitated learning is ushering in a new realm of leadership training for many companies.
Experiential learning engages the learner directly in an incident that focuses on a particular area, such as leadership skills. The experience is profound and memorable for the employees. For the team, it offers a quick ROI because learners need to collaborate with the horses to accomplish specific activities designed for them, as Janis explains.
What else adds up to good learner experience? Let’s narrow down on the essentials –
6 Factors of Good Learner Experiences
Multiple ingredients shape a solid learner experience:
Addressing existing pain points
Do you want to create a good learning experience? Why don’t you start by understanding what is making it bad? Addressing the existing pain points in a learning journey is key to creating an experience that the team loves. For example, simplifying complex navigation in e-learning platforms or providing clearer instructions for assignments. Addressing pain points shows learners that their needs are understood and valued. This feeling of being heard already adds to positive workplace experiences.
Building relevance
If you have ever been part of bad training, you know this question eventually pops up: Why am I here? A good learner experience answers it effectively. Within the learning path, build relevance for the user. Using real-world, relatable examples helps learners connect new information to their existing knowledge and work context. It could involve industry-specific case studies or scenarios that mirror common workplace situations, making the learning more applicable and memorable for your employees.
Explore custom learning journeys on Risely.
Don’t jam as much content as possible
Unsurprisingly, no one likes being bombarded with content. That’s plain old cognitive overload. A good learner experience considers this and creates balance. It focuses on high quality and the right quantity of inputs so that the learners can retain and apply ideas effectively.
Adapts to user needs
It’s a no-brainer that learning styles, needs, and moods differ. What suits you may not suit another. However, being stuck in rigid learning experiences designed without considering unique needs is frustrating. Adaptability saves from this by tailoring content, pace, and difficulty to individual learners. It could involve allowing learners to choose their learning path or using AI to adjust content based on performance. Adaptivity ensures that learning is neither too easy nor too challenging.
Checking for understanding
Pushing content constantly without seeing if it is getting understood or useful for the end-user is unhelpful. After all, how do you measure impact here? Effective learner experiences have elements that reinforce whether the user has understood or not. Regular knowledge checks, quizzes, or interactive elements help here. Based on this, you can ensure that learning gaps get detected and filled rather than overlooked.
Your organization’s culture
Learning does not happen in isolation. Even the best programs could be a waste of time if senior leadership declares them so. This has been felt in the failure of leadership development programs over the years. Your team’s culture is critical in motivating people, shaping their attitude toward learning, making opportunities accessible, and even providing the support a learner receives in addition to the content they consume.
Now that we know what shapes a good learner experience, let’s dive a bit better into the making of learning experiences.
Free Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
To make learning really work, it’s all about planning carefully and designing with thought. Here are a few key steps that you should take to ensure it all goes well. First, let’s design the experience for our learners. For simplicity, we have broken it down into four steps.
Analysis
Everything starts by understanding where you are and where you are headed. So, think of the current learner experience. What does it look like? Try to evaluate against the factors we saw listed above.
Further, take a look at your learning and development objectives. Learner experiences differ based on what goals you are moving toward. You will also need to understand your target audience.
For example, what’s the best way of teaching a new skill to ten teams of developers? Create a uniform and structured course with standardized assessments. But what about the team leads who need to work with a new tech? Help them build a growth mindset that opens them up to continuous learning with the help of one-on-one leadership coaching.
Design
In step two, identify the building blocks of a solid learning experience. Start with a broad outline (read more about learning and development strategies). Next, finalize the components. What are those? Think of training methods, training delivery modes, subject-specific modules, and so on. Remember that we spoke of checking to understand to ensure LX’s success? We will need assessments, too!
At the end of this step, you have all these placed along a clear roadmap.
Development
In the third step of building learning experiences comes developing the training materials and methods we spoke of earlier. This is where you can create the most impact by focusing on the small details like:
Use good UI practices to create helpful learning pathways.
Mix in media and interactive elements to cut down monotony in learning material.
Use an understanding of psychology to plan lessons better. You might need to equip the trainers with resources and training, too.
Keep the schedules and priorities of learners in mind to ensure that you are not overburdening them.
Build a digital and physical learning environment, including setting up the LMS and the culture that supports growth
Update training materials and assessments to reflect the latest know-how and boost your team’s expertise.
Implementation and evaluation
Now comes the real deal. Put your plans into action and observe the rollout. It is the right time to ask yourself how much you score on the factors of a good LX we saw earlier.
Grab the template here and conduct a before-and-after evaluation of your organization’s learning experience with your employees.
But this is just one side of the equation! Learner experience has a broader impact that must be evaluated. Where can you find that?
Look for performance changes. Improvements in regular reviews with direct managers are a good way to track the impact. A few one-on-one discussions can further help you gain clarity on the early patterns you might notice.
Search for behavioral changes, too, such as meeting more deadlines or handling conflicts better.
Assess against the learning objectives. You can do this using in-house assessments or external resources like Risely’s leadership skill assessments.
Based on these inputs, you can identify areas of improvement to feed back into the broader L&D strategy. With all this done, think ROI because that’s ultimately where L&D teams have a battle to fight.
A healthier learning experience enhances learners’ interest in participating in training (you might observe these in higher completion and participation rates, more detailed answers during focus interviews, interest toward more learning opportunities, not needing to send multiple reminders, etc.), which show a more significant positive business impact.
3 Pitfalls to avoid while designing a learner experience at work
We all make mistakes. So let’s prevent some before they happen.
#1 You threw strategy and objectives out the window
Not really, but figuratively, it happens plenty while learning programs are being designed. An essential feature of good learning experiences is that they tie the company together into one. How does that happen? Ensure that learning objectives are derived from strategic ones and that learners’ needs are assessed before they are handed a plan. Not meeting learners where they are is setting your L&D strategy up for failure, as you will not be able to conceive the ideal learning experience.
#2 You did not modernize with time
It’s 2024, and learning is no longer located in tall halls alone. It’s often happening at the moment, in small bursts, and likely through a mobile device. For instance, video is losing momentum across the US as a learning delivery mode. It’s scalable, available on demand, and saves you from arranging schedules. That sounds like a great thing, right? It’s not. Video learning is found to be the least engaging. As the content is pre-recording, there’s no stimulation to perform, and little mechanism to engage with the whole material.
So the question is, what’s in?
AI, hyper-personalization, microlearning, are some of the defining words of learning today. The world of L&D is more focused on the ultimate user, i.e. the employee, than ever.
Similarly, there are new trends in L&D that you need to watch out for. Incorporate microlearning, hyper-personalization, user-centered planning, and the power of AI in learning experiences to make them a class apart.
#3 You ignored the context of the learner
How one perceives the same lesson depends a lot on the context. Thus, it’s a powerful consideration of how a particular experience turns out. You could have designed it with the best intentions, but it can still be a misfit. Sounds confusing? It’s not. Employees need learning that helps them in some way – either empower them, improve their performance, or add to their long-term goals. If it does neither, no fancy illustrations will lead to a great experience. So first, keep their goals in mind.
You also need to consider that they often don’t have three hours to put into learning after work and don’t like working with a mentor who probably gossips about them later. Plus, does your sales manager, with a chaotic team of five, need conflict resolution training? Would delegation skills be a better area to work on? All of this needs to be thought out before being planned out. Thus, the second point is to keep their needs in mind. It creates psychological safety and support, that are needed to learn successfully.
You might not get all of this right in one go. That’s why this process of developing a learning experience for your team is often iterative, with feedback loops allowing for continuous improvement. Many instructional designers use specific models like ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) or SAM (Successive Approximation Model) to guide their process.
Let’s Tie It All Up: How Does Learner Experience Align Within The Wider L&D Strategy?
Learner experience is just one part of the wider L&D strategy. There are more elements in the play. Primarily, learners’ experience is one of the two critical enablers along with the organization’s culture and learner personas developed by the L&D teams.
Learner Personas and Learner Experience
These two work together pretty directly. Learner personas are important in curating learner experiences. They help create user-centric and informed designs that are more helpful and impactful.
As we see in the learner experience platforms, many of them focus on personalized learning journeys, which are designed with personas in mind. In your role, you can use learner personas to make learner experiences more tailored and interactive for particular users. There are many ways to do it:
curating relevant content for the user
using appropriate modes of training delivery
designing the suitable UI and interactions throughout the journey
addressing specific concerns using precise communication and goal alignment
exchanging feedback in the right medium
Now, what about the learning environment?
How does that tie in with learning experiences? Let’s understand this with a simple example:
Environment 1
The team manager wants you to learn. They have pointed you toward some free online resources in your niche. And that’s pretty much it. However, your schedule does not allow for much free time. Plus, another colleague is working in the area you are learning. When it comes up in the performance review, you are marked low for not learning enough.
Environment 2
Your team manager shared some resources that their friend from your professional area vouched for. A week later, they ask you about it. How did it go? Did you get time to surf through the material? The team manager also makes you shadow a colleague working on a project in that area. By the time reviews roll in, you are all set. You have learned and applied it hands-on; your manager knows all this.
Feel the difference?
That’s the influence of a company’s environment on learner experiences. When a proper learning environment is facilitated with the collaboration of L&D, HR, and supervisors, the employees have an easier time handling personal learning goals.
As your employees can find support at the right moments and see others going on similar learning journeys, reinforcement and motivation occur naturally. Overall, it builds psychological safety, allowing your team members to learn by doing and make mistakes when they are at it.
In essence, the learning environment sets the stage for the learner experience. While a great environment doesn’t guarantee a positive experience, it provides the necessary conditions for one. Conversely, a poor learning environment can significantly hinder even the best-designed learning experiences.
To Sum Up
In wrapping things up, remember that it’s super important to put the learner’s experience first when creating workplace educational content. By ensuring learning is engaging and sticks with learners, we boost what they get out of training. If we don’t pay attention to how learners feel, they might lose interest or not want to join in as much, which hurts the efficiency and success of L&D initiatives.
When we fully commit to principles focused on giving learners an awesome ride through education—thinking deeply about experience design, focusing on learner experience design, and ensuring everything works effectively—we make learning something truly special.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Free Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
Learning and development is one of the most critical yet hard-to-get-right areas within HR. A learning and development strategy ties together everything about your plans—from the goals to the people and even the actions you are going to take. Having a solid plan for learning and development is key not only to drawing in top-notch talent but also to boosting the engagement and productivity of employees, which in turn helps meet company objectives.
A successful approach to learning and development does more than just offer basic employee training. It provides chances for professional growth, helps people develop new abilities, and ensures these educational efforts support the bigger picture of your company’s goals. The goal here is to create an environment where everyone is encouraged to continuously learn better themselves.
This blog will develop an effective strategy that matches your company’s aims while promoting staff advancement. When you finish reading, you will know:
What’s an L&D strategy, and why it matters?
What goals can you achieve, and how do you set them?
What are the common learning methods and designs?
How do you design an effective learning and development strategy for your team?
A Learning and Development (L&D) strategy is a comprehensive plan designed to improve individual and organizational performance through the continuous growth and development of employees’ skills, knowledge, and abilities. This strategy aligns with your organization’s overall goals and objectives and ensures that employees have the necessary tools and opportunities to excel in their roles.
How does a learning and development strategy impact your team?
L&D strategies are crucial for ensuring a company’s success because they match learning with the business’s goals. A good L&D strategy means a plan is in place to help employees improve their jobs, which improves the whole organization. But is that all? Absolutely not! Learning and development plans have a strategic role to play; primarily, it can create an impact at three levels:
Organizational level
First, learning and development boost the value of your human capital. You get employees who are ready for the challenges of the present and the future. It also ensures greater employee loyalty, engagement, and satisfaction. What’s the ultimate result? Great talent sticks with you, and turnover reduces, and you can attract better prospects.
Department level
At the team level, a good learning and development strategy is the best boost to employee performance. Picture a manager getting training for effective delegation or a team member building their functional skills. All of it boils down to better performance and productivity. It also curbs internal tensions, creates shared experiences, and prepares the pipeline for succession planning.
Individual level
Employees cherish valuable workplace learning opportunities, especially when they support their growth ambitions and needs. For the new generation of talent in the market, learning and development opportunities are among the top three considerations before choosing a job. Thus, with a solid learning and development strategy, you can unlock a great employee experience, high satisfaction, and a long-term career for them.
Let’s narrow this down further.
What does a learning and strategy do for you?
Align employee learning and development plans with the strategic goals of the organization by overcoming the skill and competency gaps in your organization.
Build resilience and future readiness in the organization’s human capital, thus safeguarding from redundancy.
Building a Solid Learning and Development Strategy
A good plan makes sure we know exactly what skills we want folks at work to learn. These should match up with both what the company wants and what employees feel they need. It lays out the steps and tools needed for these learning goals, acting like a map that keeps everyone moving forward.
Let’s explore this in further detail:
#1 Recap Organizational Objectives
Where does your learning and development strategy begin? At the strategic goals of your organization. Think of what your company wants to achieve in the next year, the next five years, etc. There are multiple considerations here.
For instance, AI is entering many industries, even unexpected ones like people management. Is expertise in that area something valuable for your team? Technological advancements and evolving job roles are some of the many factors that shape your learning and development strategy.
There’s more you will need to think of, like:
What are your company’s goals? Your organization’s direction will define the mix of skills and competencies you will need to succeed. Get in touch with the vision and goal setters to understand what your future looks like.
What are your competitors doing? People can be the differentiating factor between an average and an amazing company. Are your competitors investing in talent development across innovative or impactful areas? Keep an eye on what can make you special.
What do the stakeholders think? We are considering the senior management who need to approve plans and sanction budgets, the middle managers who will be critical to implementation, and even the individual employees who will undergo training—each of these players has a goal and vision they would love you to fulfil.
What’s the climate? Rains need an umbrella, but sunscreen might save you on a rather sunny day. Keep an eye on the factors that can impact your business (as per the PESTLE framework) and align your learning and development strategy with the wider world.
Once you have found this edge, you need to break it down into department and individual-level goals and actions.
#2 Derive Learning Objectives That Align and Feed Into Organizational Objectives
Alright, now you know what your organization wants. The next question is: How can learning and development do it? From the key organizational objectives, you will need to derive learning objectives.
For example, if your organizational objective is to expand into new markets, your learning objective can enhance cross-cultural communication skills. Otherwise, if your organization wants to improve product quality, you might want to check out learning and development methods to gain knowledge of quality control methods and Six Sigma principles.
You can also examine skills that you want people to strengthen in addition to competencies or specific areas. This means figuring out which skills people need to help reach those business goals and ensuring that training sessions boost these abilities in team members.
Thus, before saying yes to anything on the learning and development strategy, play the devil’s advocate and ask yourself: is this adding up to the goals outlined in #1?
#3 Identify departmental learning needs
At this point, you are one level down from the three-step framework we started with. After outlining the learning goals at an organizational level, the next step is to break them down into departmental learning goals and plans.
Let’s continue with the earlier example. Suppose your organization wants to expand into a new market. What does your learning and development strategy look like across departments?
HR department: If you hire people in the new market, there are legalities and environments to assess before forming compensation packages that meet local expectations. Recruitment could need a new strategy.
Marketing: It includes compliance with new laws and rules, gaining know-how of societal norms, and language skills to create content in a familiar language for the new market.
Tech: There are cybersecurity laws, vendors in the new market, infrastructure limitations, and so on.
The point is that a single goal can create multiple areas of learning and development across the teams. Each department’s learning needs should be tailored to its specific role in the expansion, ensuring it can effectively support the company’s growth in the new market.
#4 Skill Gap Analysis
A skill gap analysis is the process by which organizations can assess the gap between the skills they need and their current skills. You can do this at the team or individual level to get high-level or precise results. Essentially, this exercise informs how much of a gap needs to be bridged before moving toward your goals.
Further, you can classify where to work and fine-tune your L&D strategy accordingly. Simply put, a skill gap analysis should track needs across:
Functional skills
These skills directly impact job performance. We can further divide functional skills into two categories –
Hard skills: They include hard skills like technical know-how and tangible abilities like proficiency with a particular coaching language, software tool, or writing ability.
Soft skills: The other part, soft skills, includes non-technical areas like objection handling in a sales team or adapting at speed.
People skills
These skills impact relationships and people. They include areas like active listening or the ability to handle conflicts involving emotional and social intelligence.
How can you identify skills gaps in your team?
Analyze performance reviews: Performance reviews record details about the missing competencies as well as the team members’ goals and aspirations, thus giving a great starting point for building a skill profile for them. You can also look for common themes and consult their managers to understand skill gaps.
Feedback and one-on-one sessions: Make the most of these meetings by consulting employees on skill gaps and better understanding their needs. If you are running short on time or handling a larger organization, you can also turn to focus groups, where several employees discuss training needs together.
Self-Assessments: These help you identify particular skills or areas that need improvement. For instance, you can look at assessments offered by Risely to examine the critical people management skills in your team.
Along with a formal skill gap analysis, think of the areas where the particular individual wants to shine. Do they want to grow as a team lead within the product or switch to the design team if they can? These are the questions you need to answer and the mobility you can enable with effective learning and development plans. Employees best receive learning and development that aligns with personal goals or fuels ambitions.
Grab your free copy of Risely’s skills gap analysis framework now!
Inside you’ll find an easily adaptable template to track the skill needs of your team effectively.
#5 Bottom-up Analysis to Identify Core Training Areas
Now that you have identified your team members’ skills gaps, the next step is putting these together. Based on the skill gap analysis, understanding of company objectives, and forecasting future skills needed, you have many skills and learning initiatives to focus on. But budgets and time are limited. You cannot invest in all. That’s why we refine and pick the important fruits in building an L&D framework.
Let’s understand this with an example.
As the L&D manager, you have conducted the skills gap analysis through self-assessments and manager evaluations. At this point, you have three ideas for every employee:
Areas where they excel and could potentially teach others
Skills crucial to their current role
Skills they need to develop for future roles or projects
The second and third points are where we need to focus further. For this, you will need to look at skill gaps from a bird’s eye view to understand the entire organization’s context. It involves aggregating the data from individual assessments and identifying which skills most frequently appear in the top 3 lists. Then, you calculate the proportion of employees needing development in each skill area.
This approach aligns with the Pareto Principle. In essence, you focus on the top 20% of skills that will create an 80% impact. These become the core training areas where you invest your effort, time, and resources.
#6 Design and Deliver Learning Experiences
Till step #5, you have outlined everything you need strategy-wise. The next steps take us to implement this learning and development strategy, so let’s collect the materials for that.
Let’s briefly understand learning design first. What does it include?
Picking the right Training methods
There are plenty of them! Your job is to figure out what matches your organization’s needs and culture. Moreover, different skills or teams could need different training methods. For instance, while a hard skill like advances in a programming language is best delivered with a combination of lectures and projects for the entire team, leadership development needs a coach who can take one-on-one sessions.
Balancing In-house and outsourced L&D programs
The answer depends on your team once again. If you have the bandwidth, expertise, and interested SMEs, in-house training can do wonders as the team can access learning easily. Plus, you save some hassle. But it’s not the best fit for every context. You may need expertise that your organization does not have, or you would need people trained in delivering learning, or you could simply not have enough human resources to expend on training. Depending on these factors, you’ll need to balance between deploying the people and content you have and external ones through L&D outsourcing.
Developing great content to facilitate learning
A repository of resources like webinars, handouts, and ebooks facilitates learning and development. You can also design skill and competency assessments internally based on the overall strategy. With this all comes the ultimate job of organizing, managing, and updating the organizational learning content.
Cool, we have gathered the material. What’s next?
Delivering the training
As with design, delivery is varied and context-dependent. You can choose from blended learning approaches that mix online and offline resources, attend seminars to hyper-focus on particular areas, or create a job shadowing program. In the newest developments of learning and development, learning delivered in the flow of work through nudges is an innovative approach shaking the world.
This step is about translating the identified needs into actual learning experiences that will effectively develop the required skills and knowledge within the organization. The key is creating engaging, relevant, and impactful learning experiences that align with organizational goals and individual needs.
#7 Track and Measure Experiences, Performance, and ROI
Once you have put things into action, the next step is to monitor their progress. It involves tracking employee experiences, measuring performance improvements, and calculating the training initiatives’ return on investment (ROI).
First, you will have to examine the reception of your learning and development strategy. The primary question is whether it resonated with your employees. If not, then there are certain improvements in learner experience that you can make. Again, returning to the employees can help you understand what’s happening and how to tackle it. This exercise is known as collecting training feedback, which you can do immediately after the learning is delivered and later through surveys or discussions.
Then, could you observe any behavioral changes as the learning took place? The right place to search for this impact can be performance reviews, everyday instances in the case of soft skills, etc3. Remember the goals you set in early steps, you need to track against those. Pre and post-training assessments are a great way to handle this.
Ultimately, comes the important part of the equation: evaluating the ROI of training. It is a critical metric, as it lies at the core of your evaluation as a function within the organization. Training effectiveness in terms of visible impact on employees is one part. Also, think of the costs of initiatives and what you get in return. If the balance seems off, it’s time to head back and tweak some things in the initial steps.
#8 Feed the Learnings Back to The L&D Strategy
All done? Pretty much.
As we saw in our example, we had cross-cultural communication training. Let’s assume a couple of participants felt it was lacking and they were unprepared to handle a real-life situation. You went back and evaluated the learning plan for that specific area, only to find that it was delivered primarily with lectures. There were no coaches to guide through conversations or enable role plays for practice. You can go back and add them now because you know that the need is present.
This final step closes the loop by using the insights gained from the implementation and measurement phases to refine the strategy. Depending on the outcomes, you might need to revisit the organizational objectives (step 1) or just adjust the learning objectives (step 2).
Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
Let’s have a look at what major companies are doing with their learning and development strategies in these examples.
Making an impact with peer learning at Google
The company behind this brilliant idea is not unknown. In fact, you are likely availing yourself of its services right now. Google has a peer learning program called Googlers-to-Googlers, abbreviated as g-2-g, that focuses on delivering learning to your peers. The idea is simple: whatever area an employee is passionate about, they can teach to others around them. It’s a voluntary teaching network with thousands of members and hundreds of subjects being covered. The best part is that the buck doesn’t stop at learning: this program adds value in many ways and stops you from getting into the perpetual debate of formal vs informal learning.
It allows people to cut down monotony by investing up to 20% of their time into teaching and mentoring others in an interesting area. Thus, employees are genuinely fulfilled with their workplace experiences.
It makes learning accessible to all, even in areas where they might not be able to explore conventional learning opportunities. For employees, it opens new doors, leading to internal mobility and growth.
And lastly, there’s the aspect of having a community and support that meets you where you are. The program facilitates high-trust relationships among peers, which enhance employee loyalty.
Keeping the employee at the center at Salesforce
Salesforce leads the training game with its unique program for learning from anywhere, known as Trailhead. Trailhead simplifies learning for skills in Salesforce and allied areas by enabling free learning content that users can access anytime. With this come two additional benefits:
First, it brings recognized credentials. Upon taking up assessments, the learners can earn globally acceptable credentials, a major factor motivating learning at work.
Second, learners can join a global community that supports and guides each other. The sense of belonging and community is another factor greatly improving the program’s reception and success.
The key lesson to learn from Salesforce’s learning and development strategy example is the user-centricity and focus on their needs. Key areas such as widely acceptable recognition, support from other learners, and integration with wider career opportunities are embedded as features within this journey.
Democratizing data science at Airbnb
In their own words, data is at the center of everything at Airbnb. Every employee needs those skills, and that’s how Airbnb’s data university was born, with a motto to take them to every employee amid rapid expansion. When this happened, there was momentum to work with, and that’s how the learning and development strategy was made with a focus on scaling and accessibility.
With a strong aim to reach every employee, here’s what the data university got right:
They started from the basics and created over 30 classes on different topics. This allowed the team to explore topics from foundation to advanced levels as they felt comfortable. The learning was designed to meet the learner where they were.
Airbnb did this with the help of their in-house data scientist, who came with the most experience. As a result, they leveraged internal resources and eventually supported the program with volunteers. It resulted in a sense of belongingness.
What Drives Success? Building the Enablers of an L&D Strategy
So far, we discovered some key steps in developing a learning and development strategy. Then, we proceeded to look through some examples of L&D strategies. Did you notice something more between this? What was the defining factor in the three success stories we read? Let’s explore the enablers of a learning and development strategy or the long-term prep you need to do before setting a learning plan in place.
The Team Culture Needs to be Learning Ready
Is your culture ready for learning? That’s one question you need to ask before heading toward plans and modules. Organizational learning culture impacts learning at all levels, be it the program’s reception, engagement, or ultimate impact. As per McKinsey, embedding L&D strategies into the culture fulfills the vision and long-term goals. Otherwise, there would be resistance and roadblocks on the way.
What does a learning-ready culture look like?
Your team is open to asking questions, accepting that they do not know certain things, and expressing interest in learning.
Your leadership actively participates in learning through on-hand presence during sessions and putting L&D as a strategic priority.
At a team level, mistakes mean opportunities to learn. Skill gaps are discussed, planned, and filled.
Supplementing this, mentorship and coaching are considered people management competencies, and team leads are encouraged to support others.
Your employees are recognized for learning new things. This recognition could take the form of better opportunities and keeping the talent pipeline aligned with their learning.
Learning budgets are accessible and available to all team members.
The impact of learning is measured and optimized. It’s not just a box to tick with one webinar a month.
Provide an Environment That Enables Learning
In the next step, we need to look at the hard metrics and ask ourselves again – is this workplace ready to learn? Picture this: you have to attend a webinar after work hours. It eats into the two hours of family time you finally had after a long day. Or, you learned a new coding language, but there’s no use for it at the time. Your manager is asking what the point is. These situations are hard to face. More than that, they are demotivating and prove that the workplace is not effectively accommodating the learning and development strategy.
How can you create the right learning environment at work?
Think of what frames a learner at work: their desk, emails that notify deadlines, colleagues, resources, etc. This learning environment is key to a good experience. For instance, visible cues toward the role of learning in success, like a quote in a common area, can be a great nudge.
For bigger workplaces, dedicated areas for learning equipped with resources are an excellent way to signal the value attached to learning. Or, as we saw in the case of Google above, this environment develops as the cultural context. When everyone around you engages in learning, it becomes second nature and propels positive peer influence.
Embrace technology to make the most impact
Tech can differentiate between a good and a great learning strategy. And no, we are not just talking about an LMS! You can build a solid tech stack to support the strategy at all stages and increase its robustness in many areas. We saw this in the example of Salesforce above, which created an online solution to ensure that learning was not limited. Similarly, Airbnb reached 1/8th of its employees in its initial run as the platform worked independently of physical location.
There’s more to tech in L&D than assessments. Think visualization of data and relationships across big numbers, faster update of learning content, engaging formats (quizzes, videos, downloadable cheat sheets), super-fast distribution, virtual walls of honor, personalized learning journeys, – these are just the tip of the iceberg.
Democratizing and increasing access is just one aspect where tech can have 10x the impact of L&D. There are more use cases in development. For instance, while delivering coaching to team leaders and managers via Risely, users can access an AI coach anytime, anywhere, and with any question. It offers them advice customized to their learning journey, personal challenges, and company policies.
To take this further, a unified dashboard empowers admins to view the people management skills of their team managers at a glance, thus dissecting the common challenges and progress at an organizational level easily. It is especially great for organizations that understand the value of leadership development but feel limited by traditional approaches and short budgets.
Try it all now: Sign up on Risely for a free trial!
Wrapping Up
To wrap up, a robust L&D strategy is crucial for driving organizational growth and enhancing employee capabilities. By aligning L&D objectives with business goals, setting realistic targets, and implementing diverse learning methodologies, companies can foster an environment of continuous improvement.
Overcoming challenges and facilitating personalized learning journeys are key to maximizing impact. Embracing emerging technologies and securing leadership buy-in are essential for a resilient L&D program.
By integrating continuous learning into the organizational culture, companies maintain agility in our rapidly evolving landscape while staying aligned with business objectives as their organizational learning maturity enhances. This approach ensures the organization remains adaptable, competitive, and well-positioned for future challenges and opportunities.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Free Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
What Does A Learning And Development Team (L&D) Do?
The role of Learning and Development teams is critical in fostering growth within organizations. Understanding the essence of L&D in today’s workplace is key to driving talent management and achieving business goals. By understanding the core functions and processes of L&D, you can address skills gaps efficiently. Tune in to explore the anatomy of an effective L&D team, essential processes, key performance indicators, emerging trends, and challenges faced in learning and development.
Learning and Development teams drive organizational success through talent development and training initiatives. They focus on bridging skills gaps, enhancing employee engagement, and aligning learning solutions with business goals. L&D professionals utilize learning management systems, instructional design, and performance analytics to tailor training programs that cater to employee needs.
By taking a strategic approach to learning and development, these teams contribute significantly to enhancing organizational performance and fostering a culture of continuous learning.
What are Critical Skills for Success in the L&D Function?
To excel in learning and development, professionals need a diverse skill set that includes:
Strong Communication Skills: The ability to clearly convey information, ideas, and instructions to various stakeholders, ensuring understanding and engagement, is essential for your success as an L&D professional.
Project Management Abilities: Second, you need skills in planning, executing, and closing projects efficiently, including managing resources, timelines, and budgets to achieve specific goals. All of this becomes important while managing multiple development initiatives. For instance, analytical skills are listed by more than half of L&D professionals as per LinkedIn!
Deep Understanding of Instructional Design Principles: Training is best when it meets the needs of your team; that’s why you need knowledge of how to create effective and engaging educational experiences based on learning theories and best practices.
Talent Management Proficiency: The capability to attract, develop, and retain skilled employees, aligning their development with organizational goals, is also a vital component of the L&D function.
Change Management Proficiency: Skills in guiding and managing organizational change, helping employees adapt to new methods, technologies, or shifts in strategy help you overcome resistance and ensure smooth transitions.
Insights into Emerging Trends in L&D: Staying informed about the latest developments and innovations in the learning and development field to keep programs relevant and effective is critical. Knowledge of new tools and technologies to enhance learning experiences, such as e-learning platforms, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
Development Specialists are focusing on skills gaps
Training Facilitators and Coordinators execute these programs
Larger teams can also have administrators for Learning Management Systems, External Consultants, and Specialists for specific areas like change management.
Each role fosters a culture of continuous learning and achieves organizational performance. Structuring your team for impact involves combining project management, communication skills, and talent development expertise. By aligning with business goals, an effective L&D team ensures employee training meets organizational needs, enhancing performance and engagement.
Let’s understand the primary learning and development processes that would make up your work primarily:
From Needs Analysis to Evaluation: The L&D Workflow
Navigating from needs analysis to evaluation involves a structured approach in the L&D workflow. You need to design tailored training programs by beginning with thorough needs assessment utilizing tools like skills gap analysis. Implementing these programs and measuring their effectiveness through KPIs and feedback loops ensures continuous improvement. The evaluation further refines future strategies for enhanced learning outcomes and aligning L&D initiatives with evolving business needs. This iterative process forms the backbone of an effective learning and development framework.
Read more: Think Of These 4 Trends In Your Corporate Learning Strategy
Leveraging Technology in L&D Processes
Incorporating innovative technologies like learning management systems and online courses optimizes training delivery in L&D processes. These tools enable you to track employee progress, customization of learning paths, and immediate feedback mechanisms. Using technology, you can provide on-demand learning solutions, ensuring continuous skill development aligned with organizational goals. Additionally, digital platforms facilitate the analysis of key performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of training initiatives, enabling data-driven decision-making for enhanced employee development strategies.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for L&D Teams
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable goals that organizations use to evaluate the success of their learning and development (L&D) initiatives. LinkedIn Workplace Learning Research has repeatedly highlighted the need for selecting the right metrics, and avoiding the pitfall of “vanity” metrics.
The KPIs of your team can vary depending on the specific goals and objectives of the organization, but some common metrics for L&D teams include:
Business Results: L&D programs should align with the organization’s overall business goals and contribute to improved performance, productivity, and profitability.
Employee Development: KPIs such as employee satisfaction, engagement, and retention help you measure the impact of L&D programs on individual growth and development.
Training Effectiveness: Training KPIs like program completion rates, knowledge retention, and skills improvement can assess the effectiveness of L&D initiatives in enhancing capabilities of employees on your team.
ROI: Measuring the return on investment for L&D investments is crucial to determine if the resources allocated to training and development are generating tangible benefits for the organization.
Continuous Learning: Tracking the participation and engagement levels in ongoing learning activities can indicate the success of L&D programs in fostering a culture of continuous learning within the organization.
How Can You Align L&D Outcomes with Business Goals?
Aligning learning and development (L&D) outcomes with business goals is crucial for organizations to achieve optimal performance and success. You strategically ensure that training and development initiatives directly contribute to the organization’s overall objectives.
To align L&D outcomes with business goals, you must clearly understand their strategic priorities and identify the skills and knowledge required to achieve them. L&D teams can then design and implement training programs that target those specific areas of development.
Furthermore, aligning L&D outcomes with business goals helps you create a culture of continuous learning within the organization. Employees understand the relevance and importance of their development to the organization’s overall success, leading to increased collaboration, innovation, and overall organizational performance. Developing coaching skills in the team managers and leaders is essential in this process, since they are influencers when it comes to absorption of L&D programs by employees.
Thus, this complex process calls for L&D teams to match business needs, design effective programs and balance the expectations of multiple stakeholders.
What are Some Emerging Trends in Learning and Development?
Learning and development (L&D) is continuously evolving to meet the changing needs of organizations and employees. Several emerging trends are shaping the future of L&D:
Digital Learning Platforms: The rise of digital learning platforms has transformed how organizations deliver training and development programs. These platforms provide online access to various learning resources, including e-learning modules, videos, and interactive courses that could be a hit among your employees. These changes have brought focus on design of effective digital learning experiences for employees.
E-Learning: E-learning, or electronic learning, refers to delivering educational content through digital devices such as computers, tablets, and smartphones. E-learning offers flexibility, accessibility, and self-paced learning opportunities for employees.
Soft Skills Training: While technical skills are essential, organizations recognize the value of soft skills such as communication, collaboration, and leadership. L&D programs increasingly incorporate soft skills training to help employees develop the interpersonal skills needed to succeed in today’s workplace.
How to keep up with forever changing L&D trends? Fret not! There are plenty of resources available, such as newsletters, podcasts and offline networking events. We have collected a few of them here for you:
Like any other organizational function, learning and development (L&D) teams face challenges in empowering employee growth and development. Some common challenges for L&D today include:
Change Management: L&D initiatives often require employees to embrace change, which can be met with resistance. To ensure successful implementation, L&D teams must effectively manage the change process and address any resistance.
Resistance to Change: Employees may resist participating in L&D programs for various reasons, such as fear of the unknown, lack of perceived value, or time constraints. You must overcome this resistance and communicate the benefits of development initiatives.
Return on Investment (ROI): Learning analytics are the Achilles heel for many teams – they are needed to prove success; but there’s a lot of confusion around what really matters and how of use them effectively. Demonstrating the ROI for L&D initiatives can be challenging. You need to measure the impact of training programs on business outcomes and articulate the value they bring to the organization.
In summary, a Learning and Development (L&D) team plays a pivotal role in shaping employee growth and organizational success. By identifying skills gaps, designing effective training programs, and leveraging technology, L&D teams drive learning initiatives that align with business objectives. The evolving landscape of digital learning platforms and soft skills training underscores the importance of staying abreast of emerging trends. Establishing a practical L&D function benefits large corporations and holds value for small businesses looking to foster continuous learning and development.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
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