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"An organisation's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage"
Jack Welch


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Market Insights

Learning and Development: Moving from training for skills to learning for performance

Seven Challenges facing L&D today:

  • Workforce skills management
  • Targeting learning to meet business needs - in particular, freeing up L&D time to work with business units to help identify and address their learning needs
  • Evaluating learning - what to measure and how to make it happen
  • Management intelligence - focus on the measurement of performance outputs rather than activity inputs
  • Achieving line manager collaboration in supporting the transfer of learning to the workplace
  • To recognise and foster effective informal learning
  • To design effective blended learning solutions

Learning specialists tell us that their challenge is to develop people with superior skills, knowledge and experience. Their organisations and the markets in which they operate are demanding ever greater efficiencies, which can only be achieved by improving performance throughout the workforce. This has to be done not only in the context of a learning strategy, but also within many organisational and cultural parameters in a way that:

  1. Contributes to the business objectives
  2. Inspires learners, but also makes them accountable for their own development
  3. Is accessible, offering the right learning at the right place and the right time
  4. Acknowledges and promotes effective informal learning
  5. Supports evaluation, across the learning portfolio
  6. Is the very best value for money

At the same time, learning specialists are becoming less activity-focused and more output-focused. They are less likely to ask "how many people have we trained?" and more likely to ask "how much have we improved performance?".