How Significant is L&D for the Future of Work?
Today, organizations are restructuring their work culture, which mandates the workforce to constantly upskill, re-skill, and embrace opportunities to stay relevant in the fast-paced business landscape.
The ever-growing skill gaps, high employee turnover, and talent crisis are forcing companies to relook into their Learning and Development Strategy as employee engagement and employee upskilling is increasing prominence and becoming a key imperative for organizations. To grapple with the new pattern of work, L&D will require a transformation and reshaping of the learning and training initiatives to build a workplace culture that promotes continuous learning, consequently helping organizational growth.
At the moment, employers and employees view L&D training programs as an important factor in making an organization a great place to work in 2022 and beyond!
To understand why so, we bring you this article with some information about the significance of L&D in today’s world.
Key Highlights
- Learning and Development (L&D) is crucial for the future of work
- Importance of L&D for employee upskilling and reskilling
- Benefits of investing in L&D for both employees and employers
- Emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, and automation require continuous learning and development
- Key L&D trends in the future of work include microlearning, personalized learning, and gamification
- Strategies for implementing effective L&D programs in the workplace.
What is L&D?
L&D, commonly known as Learning and Development, is the process of empowering employees to learn or acquire new skills and knowledge to improve their performance. Modern companies follow various talent management strategies to align individual goals with the organization’s overall objectives and vision.
You will be surprised to learn that 67% of employers have increased their L&D budgets in 2022, and when it comes to the employees, 75% are overall satisfied with learning and Development in their companies!
Needless to say, these statistics signal the positive implications of having an L&D as a competitive differentiator in an organization.
Business Benefits of Regulating L&D in Corporates
Innovative L&D platforms have strengthened the efficacy of employees in workplaces. In the post-pandemic era, as organizations adapt to reality, prioritizing and strengthening their learning and development contributions has become even more pressing.
The outcomes! Companies enjoy business perks like reduced turnover, employee engagement, and top talent retention, which ultimately accelerate their returns.
Read more: Learning and Development Trends for 2022 and Beyond!
With a robust company learning and development strategy, you can witness many business benefits, such as:
1. Long-Term Business Growth
Today’s labor market is very demanding, and to meet these evolving demands, organizations must be vigilant in agility. This means companies must adjust their internal culture and advantages to sustain a competitive edge.
According to 2021 Gallup Survey conducted on behalf of Amazon, skill training is one of the top perks young workers look for in a new job. The survey states that 66 percent of workers aged 18-24 ranked learning new skills as the third-most important perk when evaluating new job opportunities, behind only health insurance and disability benefits.
In the coming years, it is expected that millennials and Gen-Z workers are reckoned to increase. This necessitates companies to establish resilient learning and development programs to steer sustainable growth, improve employee engagement and productivity, and appeal to modern workers’ demands.
2. Employee Retention
Employee turnover continues to plague businesses. Distressingly, the cost of hiring is much costlier than investing in employee retention.
Research done by Gallup shows, “The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary — and that’s a conservative estimate. So, a 100-person organization that provides an average salary of $50,000 could have turnover and replacement costs of approximately $660,000 to $2.6 million per year.”
Turnover can damage the employer’s reputation and result in revenue loss. Leadership and development initiatives by the organization are called for now more than ever! Investing in training for your employees’ personal and professional training will make them feel valued, improve their performance, and foster the necessary skills for filling crucial managerial roles.
3. Upgrade Company Bottom Line
Effective upskilling programs, particularly to bridge crucial knowledge gaps, have shown an increase in profit between 14%-29%. Employees are your most valuable assets, and bestowing them with necessary and timely training has repeatedly proved their productivity levels burst forth. Upward mobility at individual and organizational levels will accelerate if your teams are equipped with the right resources and tools needed to perform their duties at the ideal level.
4. Customer Service and Allegiance
Resolving your customers’ issues and answering their queries and thus ensuring you give them the best possible customer experience, is a crucial piece of the picture. When done right, this forms the foundation for customer retention and converting your customers into lifetime value members.
When you go easy on your customer service, your business is vulnerable to high churn rates. If you provide your employees with L&D training on the knowledge and skills they need to serve and interact with the customers, the far-reaching benefits for your organization and its people are assured!
Read more: How an L&D Platform Narrows Down Training Management Issues?
How is L&D Significant for the Future of Work?
The pandemic has made organizations find ways to adapt to modern workplace challenges by relying on an L&D strategy. It focuses on promoting a high-performing workforce by implementing remote onboarding programs, initiating L&D training programs, monitoring employee productivity, and assessing the performance of remote teams.
Certainly, L&D plays a pivotal role in driving the future of work.
- Upskilling and reskilling virtual workforce: Organization-wide upskilling and reskilling hold a prime position in the future of work. While upskilling focuses on L&D courses like leadership training, reskilling focuses on a role or industry-specific training and compliance training, among others. These future demands are easily met with an L&D tool while motivating your workforce to develop new skills while authoring and managing content for reskilling or upskilling all from one place, thus saving money, effort, and time!
- Repurposing content: eLearning is the future, and you will have to continuously create, assess, and update your employees’ learning content. L&D courses will have to be reformatted across videos, graphics, and other kinds of multimedia learning content. An L&D supports you in automating the creation of multiple types of learning content. This will eliminate the need for repurposing it into other formats manually.
- Support learning with the flow of work: Future work culture will demand empowering your employees with the right support content in an engaging and interactive mode at the right time. An L&D tool safeguards this future workplace requirement through in-app experiences like interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and knowledge bases. This reduces training and onboarding time and improves the productivity of the workforce.
- Backing learning in the moment of need: L&D backs the rising demand for learning in the moment of need. As against traditional training approaches, need-based learning is more productive by supporting employees with on-the-job training. This has great significance in the future of work as it is more interactive and helps connect the dots between the problem and the solutions they are given.
- Facilitating microlearning: L&D helps you get creative with your learning content by breaking them into small bite-sized chunks of learning modules in the form of small videos, walkthroughs, and daily tasks. Research suggests that microlearning can improve knowledge retention by as much as 80% while also improving the engagement of learners by 50%. These types of content can be easily repurposed and refreshed, which qualifies its significance for the future of work by ensuring the completion of micro-learning courses through gamification of learning and training tasks.
How does an L&D Platform Like Skill Lake Help?
To thrive in the hybrid work culture, organizations will require a solid L&D platform in place to support all their learning and training initiatives for people development. Skill Lake is a modern and comprehensive L&D platform that prepares you for the near future of learning and training with a multitude of features.
Skill Lake is designed to align employee goals with that of the organization. It helps you identify the skill gaps in your organization and deliver the right training to bridge those gaps. It helps develop and implement a robust learning and development strategy in your organization. Some exclusive features include the following-
- Dual learning modes
- Mobile learning
- Competency mapping and management
- Accountability for people’s development
- Personalized learning journey
- Library, learner dashboard, and user management
Want to take a stroll through the features of Skill Lake? Experience it through a live demo, or you can reach out to our team.
Build a culture of continuous learning with Skill Lake’s state-of-the-art people development platform. Give your employees professional training to help them excel in their job roles and propel your business to greater efficiency and success.
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Sachin Krishna
Sachin is a passionate advocate of e-learning with a profound knowledge of the field. He regularly writes compelling content that captivates readers and works to spread awareness of learning solutions.