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Shifting the perception of learning in your organisation has never been so important. We are witnessing widespread skills gaps due to global disruptions, technology advances, knowledge breakthroughs, the displacement of old roles and the emergence of new ones, and changing workforce expectations. Over the past 18 months, ‘The Great Resignation’ has further accelerated these skills shortages, especially in industries like health care and technology, where pandemic-induced workloads and employee burnout have led to dramatic changes in staff turnover.
In the face of an ever-tightening talent market, business leaders are concerned about the impact of the growing skills gap. The 2022 LinkedIn Learning Workplace Learning study revealed that 49% of L&D professionals say that executives are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to execute business strategy, up 9% from the year prior.
The pressure is on L&D to reskill and upskill the existing internal workforce.
Yet, time for learning continues to be a key barrier to workplace learning. Awash with learning content available for self-help, people are busy and struggle to fit learning into their day. They turn to L&D to support them with courses to help them to do their job properly and develop skills for future roles. Yet managers struggle to release people to attend training due to high workloads and staff shortages. As an L&D leader, this leaves you stuck in the middle of competing demands and expectations, struggling to drive engagement with learning.
Learning Uncut hosted a webinar where we asked: “What story do people currently tell about learning in your organisation?” The typical responses were disheartening.
“Learning is something else to fit into my busy day.”
“It’s boring.”
“It’s separate to work.”
“There’s not enough of it.”
“Lots of resources. Too overwhelming.”
It can feel like an uphill battle to drive learning engagement amidst this all too familiar story. It’s a challenge that I hear often from L&D leaders – and one that is at the heart of my work helping progressive L&D leaders to realise their aspirations to transform learning.
The good news is that YOU DO have the power to change the story about learning in your organisation.
Stories are potent. Steve Jobs famously said: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
In an organisational setting, Jobs’ premise of powerful storytelling rings true. Stories can create an inspiring shared vision. Stories can effectively communicate what is valued in an organisation. And stories can help set the agenda – guiding people to adopt behaviours or actions.
HOW DOES A VALUE PROPOSITION CHANGE YOUR LEARNING STORY?
Ironically, changing the story about learning in your organisation starts with listening. It requires deep empathy. While you have the power to change the story, you cannot do it alone. To truly set the vision for learning and drive extraordinary buy-in, it must be built not only around the needs of the people in your organisation, but WITH them.
This critical step in creating or refreshing an organisational learning strategy is often overlooked, but it is the key to developing a compelling value proposition that defines the benefits that your learning strategy will deliver. A compelling value proposition that uses a human-centered design approach is one of the most powerful steps you can take to create a game-changing organisational learning strategy because it is built around the needs of your stakeholders.
A strong value proposition does two things for the people in your organisation. First, it alleviates pain points to make it easier for them to do their job or enhance their career prospects. And second, it establishes a clear gain; that is, it provides them with something that they really want.
Truly understanding what matters to your stakeholders cuts through your assumptions and blind spots.
Investing the time in this critical step puts you in the best position to create an overarching strategy that meets your organisation’s learning needs, alongside an attractive, compelling, and simple story that stakeholders can identify with.
Imagine that instead of having to market and push people to engage, they see high value in learning and take personal responsibility for their development because they are connected to a compelling story that clearly communicates what’s in it for them.
I’ve often seen L&D leaders and teams have a light bulb moment as I guide them through co-creating a value proposition for learning. You have the opportunity to create a powerful new story that will lift the impact and value of learning – a new learning story that will serve your organisation now and into the future.
To set you up for success, we have distilled our deep hands-on experience into a robust process and set of tools in our Strategy Builder service.
To give L&D Leaders a taste of our approach we invite you to book in for a free Strategy Health Check. If you are an L&D leader who values constructive reflection, reviews, and recommendations, then this offering from Learning Uncut is for you!
Your Learning Strategy Health Check consists of:
If you’re ready to access high-value support with your learning strategy from our experts use this link to book your Learning Strategy Health Check.
