As the way of doing business continues to rapidly change, it impacts the way learners prefer to learn and keep up with such change. As a result, organizations, in particular L&D functions, are challenged in the way they engage, plan and manage learning to keep up with both business and learner needs. This article examines four questions relating to the transformation of L&D in the next ten years, exploring how L&D function can add value in this decade 2015-2025 and how L&D providers can be part of the L&D transformation equation.

Question 1: What key challenges will organizations face in the next 10 years?

According to the Global Trends 2025 report published by the National Intelligence Council, the globe will grapple with energy, climate change, health, water, cybersecurity, technology and demographic issues. All of these factors affect the global economy and the organizations in it. On one end of the spectrum is the effect of this change on organizations and on the other end, is the effect on the individual learner. According to Bersin by Deloitte, the modern learner is overwhelmed, distracted and impatient with only 1 percent of their workweek to focus on learning and development. In order to compete in the ever-changing global economy they need employees that are agile and adaptive. So, how will organizations squeeze in all the learning their employees need in about 24 minutes per week?

Question 2: What is the evolving role of L&D during 2015-2025?

L&D plays a critical role in helping organizations address learned needs by partnering, advising and number crunching to help improve business performance through meaningful and targeted learning transfer. Understanding the business goals and how to translate them to talent goals and vice versa is a critical must-have for the L&D function to be able to provide solutions to the organization C-Suite leaders.

Question 3: How can the L&D function add value in this decade?

In the next decade, every successful L&D function will need to master their ABC’s:

Align with the Lines of Business, Build a Learning Architecture and Crunch Numbers:

Align with the Lines of Business

The L&D function will need to first and foremost understand the business goals and challenges the line of business is facing. In an effort to drive and achieve business results, the line of business manager now can have a collaborative partner to help them navigate, prioritize and strategize the learning tools and methods to use for their talent teams based on the their specific competency needs, adult learning needs, knowledge acquisition methods and external business pressures. As such, the CLO and their team can begin to be seen as collaborative partners to the Line of Business Executive in a joint effort to achieve business goals and improve the bottom line. An example of this transformative collaboration is Google’s People Operations, which drives strategy at Google as described by Laszlo Bock in his book “Work Rules!” By transforming itself first, the L&D function changes the narrative and becomes a collaborative partner rather than an ornery cost center. 

Build a Learning Architecture:

Once the L&D function is aligned to the business challenges and needs, the next step is to drive effort by building a learning culture and setting up a learning architecture. Bersin by Deloitte research shows that organizations that fostered a learning culture punched in 46 percent improvement across key business metrics. According to Pearson English, from the moment the CEO and the executive team set up the strategy and until the CFO team looks at the financials a year later to evaluate the strategy implementation, what happens in between is a line of business responsibility. HR and L&D can exert significant influence as business advisors enabling the line of business to deliver better business performance by ensuring that talent can have and will use the right body of knowledge, tools and training they need to perform.

Crunch Numbers:

Perhaps the most critical role of the L&D function can play in this decade is to become a capable number cruncher by capturing, analyzing and making sense of learner data: learning needs, preferences, affinity, performance and results to enable both the learner, in their quest for personal and professional growth, and their organizations in their strategy implementation and business results.  According to Jack J. Phillips & Patti P. Phillips in their article “Global Trends in L&D analytics,” L&D is investing less than 1 percent of their budget on measurement, evaluation, metrics and analytics known as MEMA, citing 5 percent as the best practice. Future predictions indicate the investment will grow to at least 8 percent over the next ten years, strengthening learning analytics used in business processes.

Question 4: How can L&D providers add value to the L&D transformation equation?

Today L&D provider offerings include research, analysis, strategy, learning technologies, training development and training implementation among others. There are three ways that L&D providers can differentiate themselves in this space: curation, disruption and leadership. Curation is becoming increasingly critical and will continue to do so in this decade. According to Danny Abdo at Degreed L&D, providers need to focus more on curating content than developing new content. In their September 2015 edition, Inc. magazine lists the 500 fastest growing companies in America across 25 industries. The industry with the fewest entries is education, which Inc. defines as companies that provide instruction sell educational materials, or whose primary customers are schools or universities. The size of the industry, the business needs and individual learner needs may indicate that the industry is ripe for disruption by new entrants.

The remaining question is, how will it all unfold and which organizations will be the leaders of the L&D industry transformation in the next ten years?

Marina Theodotou is a learnings solutions manager at the American Management Association.