If you grew up with any exposure to the US school system, the idea of “learning” is fairly homogeneous. The average K-12 learner attends school, where topics are taught via reading or lecture. The student works to memorize those topics and is then tested to prove their mastery through quizzes and exams. Whether you thrived in the school system or not, it’s used as the gold standard for most learning, even when you’ve long graduated and ditched the textbooks. Unfortunately, learning outside of school is often seen through the same lens. It only makes sense that when other opportunities for learning arise, they’re usually structured in the same way as the K-12 most are familiar with—right?
Read, memorize, test.
Read, memorize, test.
It’s the pattern we all know. Familiarity is often confused with superiority, so it’s not surprising that even in corporate settings, the K-12 pattern of learning is applied in training too. That’s where the shift from training to learning and development becomes so significant. Learning and development isn’t just another name for training, but a complete reformation of the process from start to finish. From mapping out the reason for learning experiences to implementing different pedagogical strategies, L&D reframes the way we think about training at work.
What is L&D?
Learning and development often gets confused or mixed in with the functions of HR. While there is some overlap between human resources and learning and development, true L&D views training through a different lens than HR. In the past, learners have been seen more as “order takers” in the training pipeline: A knowledge or skills gap exists and learners are required to take training to fill that gap. Because training often goes hand-in-hand with hiring, onboarding, and compliance, it’s traditionally found under the HR umbrella. As “order takers,” the learners complete the training as a function of their roles, and HR is responsible for administering and tracking completion.
In contrast, L&D considers learners as business partners rather than order takes. The true essence of L&D is personal and professional growth through shared values and benefits between the learner and the organization. By understanding how adults actually want to learn, where it happens, and why it happens, L&D becomes a more engaging and empathetic way to encourage growth. Instead of training because they have to, learners find opportunities to expand their skills and knowledge because they’re intrinsically driven.
Too often, L&D is viewed as a formal strategy reserved for organizations that have the budget and resources to dedicate substantial time to things like performance management and talent acquisition. That could not be further from the truth. Any organization—any size, any industry, any budget—can become an L&D-focused organization. The focus on learning over training doesn’t require an expensive overhaul of your existing efforts, but it will require a change in your organization’s attitude and strategy,
Benefits of organizational learning and development
Growth and opportunity is the name of the game when it comes to competing in any space. A 2023 LinkedIn Learning report found that 89 percent of L&D professionals agreed that proactively building employee skills now would positively impact future work. And, when employees were asked to rank their top priorities when considering a new role, three out of the top five most common answers were based on new challenges, growth, and opportunity.
L&D professionals and learners agree: Learning is so much more than completing training just to check a box and move on. When your company is an L&D organization, the priority is less about completion and is centered on the experience of learning as a whole. It means thinking about the hows, whys, and wheres of learning opportunities and creating a culture with a growth mindset. Yes, it can take time, effort, and significant buy-in, but becoming an L&D organization rewards revolutionaries with these distinct benefits:
Improved employee retention
You put all that effort into hiring the right people, but if you’re not offering them chances to upskill, grow, and learn, you might lose them to an organization that prioritizes L&D as a retention strategy. The Society for Human Resource Management reported that 76 percent of polled employees said they’re more likely to stick with a company that offers continuous training. After all, you can offer as many perks as you want, but if employees feel like their role is at a dead end, it’s all too easy for them to keep an eye out for their next big thing—often outside of your organization.
Increased engagement and motivation
A lack of employee engagement costs your organization money. According to Forbes, organizations with disengaged employees have 15 percent lower profitability, while companies with highly engaged employees showed 17 percent more productivity and 21 percent more profitability. Some of the biggest factors in employee engagement? Comprehensive onboarding and a sense of purpose that contributes to happy, motivated talent.
A training organization asks “What can you do for me?” An L&D organization asks employees “How can we help you achieve your goals?” The shift in mindset helps engage learners in experiences that meet them where they are and help them to become what they want to be. It’s acknowledging that learning should benefit the learner first and the organization second.
Better performance
One of the issues in getting your organization on board with making the switch from training to L&D is measuring your ROI. Sometimes, the effect on performance is clear-cut and easy to see, like a bump in sales or a safer work environment. Other times, learning experiences that focus on things like positive culture, soft skills, or self-improvement are harder to track and measure. Still, even without hard numbers, you can expect that learning opportunities will improve employee performance in everything from absenteeism to productivity, loyalty, and even individual well-being. Can your existing training program promise you that?
Positive culture and reputation
Gallup found that only one in five employees feel like they’re being managed in a way that motivates them to do more. Think of L&D as part of your brand experience. By developing learning opportunities and fostering a growth-first environment, you’re able to offer employees more. More chances for learning also mean more chances for motivation, more chances for recognition, and more opportunities for your employees to become ambassadors for your organization.
Designing impactful L&D strategy
You can’t discount the effectiveness of L&D over traditional training. The read, memorize, test model of training might seem to get the job done, but it doesn’t inspire meaningful behavioral changes and positive motivation. We get it: Once you’ve decided to adopt an L&D approach, you’re anxious to get started. Before you revamp your entire L&D strategy, however, we encourage taking the time to decide how L&D will actually affect you, your learners, and your bottom line. Instructional design expert Cathy Moore utilizes a flow chart to help determine whether learners need more training, practice activities, job aids, or something else to fill their gaps. We love her straightforward approach to deciding where to start and finding out where past efforts may have gone wrong.
Try answering the following questions to pinpoint your needs so you can choose an L&D strategy that works for your situation.
- What’s the L&D goal for this project? Start at the end. If an L&D program works flawlessly, what will learners know/do when it’s complete? Settling a goal first helps you reverse-engineer the right L&D strategy to get there. If you’d like to focus on improving communication skills, for example, roleplaying or practice scenarios are more effective than reading about them. Setting the goal also helps you measure that often-slippery ROI throughout the process.
- What do learners need to do? If the first step is honing an idea, the second step is getting practical about what needs to happen. If the goal is to improve communication skills, start using verbs to describe what those improvements look like on a day-to-day basis. List out and prioritize actions that must take place to improve performance and reach the goal.
- What is standing in the way? In a perfect world, employees would already be doing the things they need to do to be successful. Of course, barriers can stand between them and mastery, and an L&D-oriented organization knows how to identify and plan for those barriers. Don’t make the mistake of skipping this step; you could sabotage yourself if you’re not honest about your learners and their limitations. This step can also help you isolate what’s most important to your learners and create more impactful learning opportunities.
- How can training help learners reach the goal? Here’s where you get to delve into L&D strategy and match your goals to the right learning method. Sometimes, learners will need practical application and plenty of practice to reach their learning goals. Other situations may need learning aids or collaboration with fellow colleagues to reach mastery. Learning and development thinks beyond the K-12 model to understand how different types of training requires different learning strategies and resources.
Don’t worry: You don’t have to become an L&D expert overnight. Simply reframing the way you approach training is a great starting point and one that many organizations miss. Taking the time to see things from your learners’ perspectives and go beyond typical training puts you on the path to being an L&D-focused company.
Measuring the impact of L&D
It’s no secret that the most challenging part of L&D is measurement. It’s one thing to design good learning experiences and another to motivate employees to participate in their own learning journey. Quantifying the effectiveness of learning and development can be a complicated process. That’s because some parts of a robust L&D strategy are difficult to analyze on a large scale. Learning is deeply personal, and a measurement system needs to take that into consideration.
For years, the best we could do for measuring L&D ROI was retrofitting the Kirkpatrick model for evaluation and building metrics into L&D projects to try and quantify the four levels of reaction, learning, behavior, and results. It gave us part of the picture but was sometimes difficult to apply to all types of learning, especially those that were particularly out-of-the-box or used with more modern methods. What’s more, metrics used for one organization weren’t always applicable to another, so it was difficult to share numbers across different strategies.
Luckily, the International Organization for Standardization created their new ISO Standard for L&D Metrics in 2023. These guidelines operate as a standardized analysis tool for any L&D organization to plan, deliver, and evaluate their efforts on a spectrum of both formal and informal learning. You can learn more about them here. We are excited to share more about the new ISO gold standard and how you can use it to report on, analyze, and enhance your own learning strategies.
Tying it all together
Performance management, succession planning, onboarding, change management, upskilling, compliance: What do these all have in common? They’re all opportunities for learning and development. When you start to think of traditional training as more opportunity than requirement, you break open a new way to motivate and engage your employees. An L&D mindset helps you consider your learners less as order takers and more as partners in the success and growth of your organization. The days of boring training and required reading make way for new learning strategies and creating a culture of growth. We can’t wait to see where it takes you.
Ready to make the switch from training to L&D? We’re ready when you are. Send a message to get started.