David James is CLO at 360Learning, host of The Learning & Development Podcast and former Director of L&D for The Walt Disney Company.
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Our approach to technology in learning and development (L&D) has been largely the same for decades. Platforms filled with suites of off-the-shelf content rarely lead to sustained learner engagement after launch and, despite being expensive, procurers find it hard to equate spend with ROI.
The problem we find ourselves in now is that L&D is now being held to account for upskilling and reskilling large parts of the workforce, in the face of widening skills gaps. OK, we might not be wholly accountable for this, but if we’re not expected to make a meaningful, demonstrable difference then what’s the point?
The problem is that many L&D leaders are choosing a slightly different approach to what’s always done. They’re looking to vendors with their silver-bullet solutions, and only now they’re searching for "smart" ways of matching generic content to the most commonly required skills across the entire workforce. On the surface, this might seem to make sense. With millions of items of learning content and only 50,000 employees, the algorithm will find something for everyone, right? That’s what we’ve bet the house on.
Shouldn’t the same generic content sold to so many different organizations still work in your unique culture? I’m sorry to say it likely won't since all organizational expectations are not the same. The lack of engagement from employees is a clue because they know it too. It’s not that they don’t know how to learn or they don’t like to learn online. It’s because their experience tells them that their valuable time spent "learning" might not equate to actual skills development.
Instead, we in L&D need to upskill and reskill employees so that they can perform with competence and adapt when required. Doing the same thing we’ve always done and expecting different results is, well, you know the rest.
'We Can’t Get There From Here'
My good friend and champion of performance-oriented L&D for more than 40 years recently brought this quote credited to Geary Rummler dating back to 1969 to my attention. The point is—and this is something we’ve known for decades—we can't upskill and reskill by doing the same (or very similar things) as we’d done before. We weren’t able to equate spend and activity to performance and get employees to engage in generic content when they needed help to develop, transition or adapt in your unique organization. Something needs to change.
The crux of this is that L&D’s preoccupation with more and better "learning" is a dead end if it doesn’t fully incorporate the work context and what employees are trying to do. The development of a learning provision cannot predictably and reliably affect performance if it’s off-the-shelf or only loosely tailored to an organization’s culture. When put in the context of the skills gap, if solutions (programs or content) don't reflect how the work is done in your organization then they can’t positively affect capability and performance.
Building out the learning provision has seemed like a "cover all bases" approach to L&D. After all, the more content we have the better off we are, right? What more can we do?
Analysis? What analysis?
One of the stock-in-trade tools in L&D has been the learning needs analysis. This has helped L&D find out what training (or learning) is needed to further bolster the learning provision and determine how we spend our budgets. But it rarely relates to actual jobs: the very tasks, interactions, roles, expectations and outcomes employees are measured against. The learning needs analysis helps aggregate common needs so we can develop or purchase standardized programs and content that covers all bases without doing much analysis of the work context. The logic is: If we add more courses and buy big enough suites of generic content then there must be something for everybody, right? Surely? Except this doesn’t stand up to any level of scrutiny.
Doing the course or completing the content does not mean reskilling. We know this, but we often ignore it. The big learning content vendors can give us the credits and produce certificates, but completion doesn’t mean competence. Not even close. It just means you were there.
How We Get There From Here
A sturdy house needs foundations. For L&D, those foundations are knowing what those who are expected to perform actually need help with—beyond the titles of programs and content. This requires performance analysis:
• What are employees expected to achieve that they are not able to?
• How should things be working?
Performance analysis means seeking the answers to questions that relate to what employees are expected to achieve and that they are not able to easily or effectively. What is actually being observed and what are the implications of things not working the way they should? Recognize those responsible for the work and the expected deliverables. Completely articulate how things should be working. L&D professionals have been too quick to interpret performance needs into learning needs and completely distort reality in order to develop courses. But an exploration of the way the work is done and the results expected will help us move from perpetual anxiety about our value and impact to actually affecting the way the work is done.
Only performance analysis can bridge the knowledge gaps in our workforces.
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