Now is not the time to put the brakes on workplace learning

This year’s biggest workplace trend was mass redundancies (aka The Great Resignation), and if your business avoided it, you’re in the lucky minority.

Businesses spent most of 2022 plugging their leaky talent pipelines with expensive new hires, trying to fit their employee experience into a new world of work, and adapting to a seismic shift in power dynamics between employer and employee. All while battling the ongoing threat of widespread burnout and a looming recession.

No pressure then.

The case for learning

One of the first budget lines to get the squeeze when times are tight is professional development.

According to the latest Workplace Intelligence Upskilling Study, 74% of millennial and gen Z employees report that they’d be likely to quit within the next year due to a lack of skills development opportunities.

In Deloitte’s recent Global Millennial and Gen Z survey, 29% of both millennials and gen Z’s said that learning and development opportunities were the top reason they chose their job.

With millennials making up 34% of the workforce, and gen Zs to make up 27% of the workforce by 2025, this is not a demographic to ignore.

If you’ve recently made the investment in building (or rebuilding) your team, why put that investment at risk by not providing development opportunities?

The rapid changes and upskilling required across organisations and industries are not slowing down either. We saw a pause in workplace learning during the pandemic. If we wait another one or two years for the market to settle, we could find ourselves nearly five years behind.

That’s a lot of catching up.

Get the basics right

Development for your team doesn’t need to be extravagant and expensive, and it’s much broader than simply sending people on courses. You can go a long way by providing:

• Clear career paths: help people understand possible upwards and sideways career trajectories, what they need to do to get there, and what development options you’ll provide or support (financially and/or with time off). This can be as simple as a calendar of learning events, or a map of career paths;
• Quality career discussions: Work is entering hyper-personalisation mode and a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works. Help managers have great career conversations to understand and support people achieving their unique career goals;
• Opportunities to work on different projects: Job-swaps or shadowing can be great ways of helping people dip their toe into a new area and learn some skills. If that’s not possible, you could allow time for someone to work on their side-gig, especially as they will likely develop skills that they can bring back into your business; and
• Regular reflection: If you have any kind of stand-up or weekly meeting, you’re already most of the way there on this one. Add a recurring agenda item for everyone to share something they learnt that week. Anything from an interesting idea from a news article to solving a customer’s tricky problem all make for good conversation.

Get started faster

The quality of learning available outside of work has risen since 2020. There’s a plethora of high-quality, targeted, job-ready courses available that take people from zero to go faster than traditional higher-education options. Organisations like Code Like a Girl, Shillington, IECL, and General Assembly now offer a variety of delivery methods for greater flexibility.

Curate, don’t create

We have intimate and immediate access to almost any expert who’s been alive in the last 20+ years through podcasts and YouTube videos. Books give us access to centuries of thinking.

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Curating this myriad of content is a skill, but will likely be quicker than creating new programs for your business. Some organisations have book clubs or podcast clubs where people get together and discuss what they’ve learnt in their recent reads or listens.

Partner up

You could get more bang for your buck by partnering with another friendly organisation for your development activities. This not only splits the workload required for organising, but also means your teams get to develop alongside people they don’t work with everyday and who bring fresh perspectives.

Make it stick with mentoring

All of the learning in the world won’t make much of a difference if people don’t have an opportunity to practise, reflect, and get feedback. A culture of mentoring will help people bring their learning to life in a supportive environment and mean you’re more likely to get a return on the investment you’ve made in their development.

0A mentor can be internal, but could also be someone from outside of your business. Groups such as Mentor Walks are great ways to get a dose of insight and guidance from someone who’s been there and done it before.

Think laterally about learning

If the pandemic taught us anything it’s that everything can be reimagined. Learning and development are no exception. There are so many more options available now, and so many ways to be creative, think laterally and raise the bar on this part of your employee experience. As with anything, you just have to start.