How L&D Will Impact The Future Of Work 🏢

How L&D Will Impact The Future Of Work 🏢

Society has seen huge changes post-pandemic and the impact they’ve had on the work landscape has been huge - to say the least. Loom’s 2021 State of Modern Work report revealed that people now only spend 34.8% of their working hours at the office. 

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And so, with more and more jobs going hybrid (or fully remote) than ever before, organizations have had to find ways to guide their team members in navigating this new way of working. When it comes to L&D, it means the old ways of teaching based on in-person environments alone won’t cut it anymore. 

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The outcome? Organizations are realizing that focusing more on upscaling and developing adaptability strategies should be top of their to-do list. 

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What does L&D stand for? 📒

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Learning and Development (or L&D for short) is a big part of a well-rounded HR department. If HR focuses on company policies, payroll, and general management then L&D helps employees actually do their job. Basically, it’s how organizations create and offer the tools needed for employees to grow their skills and understand how to correctly do their job. 

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In practice, L&D strategies tend to consist of three main parts: onboarding, leadership, and skill development. Through all three points, there’s a heavy focus on training and covering any gaps in knowledge. All with the idea of creating solutions that help people reach peak performance.

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How L&D will impact the future of work 🤔

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Before, L&D focused on teaching people how to do their job, comply with policies, and reach KPIs. But, with more hybrid-based positions popping up the road L&D is taking to keep up will help push the future of work into a more permanent hybrid-based landscape. 

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As a reference point, CIPD’s 2021 Learning And Skills At Work survey reported that 70% of the interviewed organizations increased their use of digital learning solutions in the past year alone. It would make sense then, that the focus has switched to both developing more transferable skills (like adaptability, innovation, agility, and inclusion), and finding new remote-based ways to teach those skills. 

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How to future-proof your L&D strategy 👩‍🏫

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Knowing how to adapt to upcoming changes will go far in setting you apart from other organizations. And while the actual information being taught might vary, the way you share those lessons is what you should be focusing on most.

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With that in mind, here are some actionable tips you can apply to make sure you’re setting your team up for success.

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  • Make it seamless - Integrating learning into their everyday workflow is much more efficient. This means shorter sessions (think 2hrs) across several days or weeks will make sure people are fully focused.
  • Give them options - Not everyone learns the same way and offering different options for each person is important. Try things like lectures, quizzes, and team projects but offer them through video learning, live teaching (in-person and remote), and written documents. 
  • Make it fun - A great way to keep people interested in learning is to make a game out of it. Give little prizes, shoutouts where applicable, and even official certificates they can share on LinkedIn. 

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Final Thoughts 💭

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The best L&D leaders understand that the changes the working world has experienced so far are just the tip of the iceberg. They know there’s a great opportunity to get ahead of the game now so they can set up their teams for success in the future.

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But, keeping up with these changes can take time and money. The good news is that’s where Epoch comes in. We’ll help you spend less time dealing with a web of software tools and manual processes, so you can focus on what you were meant to do: designing and strategizing world-class programs.

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Interested in learning more? Book a demo here.

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