Ditch Your LMS And Embrace The New Era Of Learning

Is your learning & development platform able to deliver today’s diverse learning demands?

Imagine a world of work where continuous talent development carries as much weight as a fair salary and a decent amount of paid time off. Imagine if opportunities for growth and improvement that began on Day 1 on the job and continued all the way through offboarding was a nonnegotiable employee benefit — and not only at companies that want to thrive rather than simply survive.

Stop imagining. It’s time to accept that learning and development (L&D) wasn’t what it was just a very short time ago, and that there’s no turning back. This view is gaining momentum among forward-leaning HR and talent development leaders. Consider, for example, this statement from a recent article from Robert Half, the global HR consulting firm: 
 

“Leading employers know how important it is to place employees’ professional development at the heart of company policy. Why? Their workers expect it. Talented professionals want to work for a company that will help them to build skills and knowledge and further their careers.”

How might HR translate that sentiment into action? That same Robert Half article offers seven suggestions: 

1. Take a personal interest in employee career goals
2. Promote training and development of employees
3. Encourage mentoring and job shadowing
4. Rotate employee roles
5. Support work-life balance
6. Paint the big picture
7. Create a succession planning program

If you look at those seven items through the lens of a savvy, experienced HR professional, you’ll see they’re all connected by a very clear line. (And, note that I didn’t take the easy path and limit my argument to the first three recommendations — three initiatives that relate directly to the programs offered by my company.) What all seven recommendations have in common is that they can all be supported by programs and initiatives living on a modern, robust, and multifaceted L&D platform.

It’s Time for Holistic L&D

Most HR leaders today accept the wisdom of holistic benefits — benefits that go beyond medical, dental, and vision to embrace the full spectrum of mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. The pandemic only accelerated the trend, as illustrated in the results of a survey last year of 500 HR and C-suite decision-makers by Care.com, an online marketplace for a variety of voluntary employee benefits. 

Almost all (98%) of the leaders surveyed planned to offer at least one new or expanded employee benefit, “prioritizing the ones workers deem most essential, like child and senior care benefits, flexibility around when and where work gets done, and expanded mental health support.”

It’s time to take the same approach toward talent development. It’s incumbent upon HR leaders to accept the reality that too many of today’s L&D solutions are failing to help their people:
 

• Prepare for the ongoing and increasing digital transformation in every aspect of work
• Meet the demands of the new reality of work — a world of hybrid work environments and ever-greater collaboration
• Integrate with, and be able to shift among, various workflows and processes

Quite the opposite of holistic wellbeing benefits, we mostly have three options among most of the L&D platforms today:
 

• Legacy talent development solutions are pretty much dinosaurs — hugely expensive, impersonal, and slow as molasses to deliver results. 
• Shiny-but-shallow and overpriced Silicon Valley flavors of the day. They can’t possibly reach everyone everywhere in your organization, can they?
• Outdated L&D platforms that don’t deliver end-to-end learning, clear and efficient program administration, or measurable outcomes. So, you keep struggling and going half-nuts trying to meet strategic goals, manage your learning programs, and try to touch everyone in your organization.

What Holistic L&D Can Deliver

A holistic L&D strategy demands that an L&D partner not only offers a full range of programs, but also offers programs that can nourish and support employees up and down the ladder and in every corner of the company. In other words, it’s critical for businesses to deliver programs that meet people right where they are, right now. 

And that means saying goodbye to one-size-fits-all, off-the-shelf learning solutions and solutions that are too narrowly focused or lack deep development expertise.

How can one size fit all when you have diverse teams with broad skill sets and personalities? How can it support your hybrid work model or your heightened diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives? How can one-size-fits-all or shallow, niche providers deliver a range of experts in a variety of fields to ensure every individual on your team can develop the hard and soft skills they need to level up? A one-size-fits-all or niche point solution can’t do any of that for you.

To move you forward, a holistic L&D partner will offer both personalized, continuous learning with personalized coaches, as well as blended learning. It’s the only sure path to upskilling anyone, anywhere, in any organization. Holistic L&D will also offer career pathing for employees at any level in the organization, to fuel everyone's desire to thrive and support reskilling. And they should offer a cost-effective learning-stipend program that’s easy for you to administer, manage, track, and see the results of, and lets employees select coaches for one-on-one, tailored coaching to meet their self-development goals.

In short, it’s time to look at L&D the way we’re looking at employee wellbeing and other initiatives that enhance the employee experience: holistically and for everyone.

Kristy McCann Flynn is CEO and Co-Founder of GoCoach. Kristy has over 15 years of experience as a strategic human resource leader, change manager, and organizational development expert. She has served in senior leadership positions throughout her career — most notably with Pearson Education and Constant Contact. Kristy brings a big-picture perspective and a hands-on, tactical approach to her leadership style that she’s brought to life with GoCoach. Kristy’s goal is to help and educate companies to meet their ultimate goals by empowering their employees to take ownership of their careers. Visit www.gocoachgo.com  Connect Kristy McCann Flynn