Is Learning & Development The “Blockbuster” Of HR?

How L&D professionals can shift their mindset to stay relevant

Pop quiz: An employee has a work-related question. Where do they turn? 

Will they head to company intranet to find a painfully boring click-then-quiz e-learning module or a dense, information-heavy PDF? 

No. 

They’ll go straight to the internet. That’s what everyone does. And that’s what employees should do. In fact, they are already doing it. 

The field of learning and development is changing, and so are the responsibilities of L&D professionals, whose fundamental role is helping employees learn new things. L&D as we know it is over, but with a little creativity and innovation, it can remain a vital driver of business results. 

L&D still has a role to play. But first, learning and development professionals need to give up the game of preventing employees from using the internet as a way to learn (forcing them instead to only access organization-approved content).  

Take Blockbuster. They had an opportunity to invest in Netflix – get ahead of the curve. Instead, they said no, resisted change and underestimated the power of easy accessibility.  

Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Coursera, and TED Talks are table stakes for the modern citizen – and professional. 

It’s just not possible to create better tutorial videos than employees can find on YouTube, or build better researched courses than Harvard professors on Coursera. Competing with the internet has never been a good idea.

True, employees are unlikely to find the exact blog, video or resource on the web to suit their unique needs – a common objection to letting employees loose on the web. 

But that’s a feature – not a bug – of the internet. With a few simple search strings and a couple of clicks you can cobble together a robust set of insights from relatively few sources that is actually better than any one source on its own.

The hard-but-true fact is that L&D is fighting for its life. 

The increased frequency with which CEOs are asking for the business case for L&D is not because they are confused about how learning is supposed to drive organizational success. That’s easy to explain: the more your employees know, the more human capital you have to outperform your competitors.

It’s because they are not convinced that L&D matters anymore. 

I think it does. But learning and development professionals looking to stay relevant in their field, need to shift their mindset. Fast.

First and foremost, put the best interests of your business and employees ahead of all else. 

Then follow these steps to stay relevant:
 

1. Develop and share simple vetting guidelines. If you’re really worried about misinformation online, provide employees with vetting standards to help them evaluate the veracity and relevance of web content. A one-page PDF with ‘gotchas’ to watch for will do the trick. This is at most an 8-hour task (which I bet will mostly consist of someone searching the internet for existing standards!).

 

2. Think of yourself as a performance coach, not an L&D person. Develop personalized learning plans for employees, and update this on an ongoing basis through coaching. You can have a really important role in shaping the information employees seek and the information that they use to improve their performance - and lives. 

 

Coaching should be aimed towards performance goals, not learning goals. Align business, team and individual goals, and help employees find resources as fast as possible. Then turn them out to the web, and get out of their way.
 

3. Create scenario-based learning where appropriate. Only develop your own custom content when:

a. The development of a skill is required (not knowledge or information)
b. The mastering of that skill requires repeated, authentic practice; and
c. The kind of practice required must take place in high-fidelity simulations of employees’ day-to-day tasks and experiences.

When these conditions are met, simulation – or scenario-based training – is required from an instructional design standpoint. Effective simulations put employees in real-world situations to practice solving real problems. This is the right place to create custom content. Skills need practice. And practice needs scenarios. And you can’t find the right kinds of scenarios online. That’s your job :)

Competing with the internet is neither possible nor profitable. Redefine your role before someone else does. 

So, pop quiz: Who's done with pop quizzes? 

Additional Resources

3 Symptoms of Whiz-bang E-learning Disease & How to Cure It
Empowering Employees