The Winning Teams Blog

The Future of Learning and Development

The CIPD’s 2008 Learning and Development Survey – now in its 10th year - provides data on current and emerging trends and issues in learning and development. In this post, I’ll review some of the findings on current and future learning and development practices.

Changes in L&D over the last two years

When asked what the most important changes were in L&D over the last two years, 72% of the respondents indicated that it had been the ‘introduction of new programmes to develop the role of line managers’. This was a clear winner by a 10% margin. This reflects the increasing responsibility for learning and development now placed on line managers, and reinforces earlier findings. (This should be compared to an almost static position on instructor-led training, with 49% saying that it has stayed the same.)

Later on in the report, we find that the majority of line managers are now involved in determining learning and development needs (86%), and half of the respondents (49%) predicted that line managers will have even greater responsibility for learning and development over the next five years.

The second change that respondents listed was that organisations are now placing a greater emphasis on developing a learning and development culture (62%). This reflects a growing understanding that continuous learning is critical to building and sustaining a competitive workforce.

Other changes to learning and development practices over the last two years included: the introduction/extension of coaching programmes; the extension of e-learning; and new approaches to monitoring learning and development effectiveness.

Effectiveness of Learning and Development Practices

When asked to identify the most effective learning and development practices, the top three were:

• in-house development programmes (55%),
• coaching by line-managers (53%), and
• on-the-job training (43%).

Only a fifth of respondents (20%) believed that instructor-led training was effective. This reflects a general shift away from the more formal instructor-led approach as a result of learner preferences, and organisational requirements. Today’s learning and development practices are more tailored to the individual; there is a greater emphasis on learning through projects; and there is increased value seen in learning with and from peers.

The least effective practices were the use of training videos – only 1% found these to be useful - and very surprisingly, only 7% believed that e-learning was effective. (Yet 57% of organisations now use e-learning in some form or another.)

Expected changes in L&D over the next five years

The main changes anticipated in L&D over the next five years include:

• a closer integration of learning and development activity and business strategy (68%), and
• more emphasis on monitoring, measurement, and evaluation of training effectiveness (56%).

Another recent CIPD research project (The value of learning: a new model of value and evaluation) has shown that these two activities are closely linked. ROI measures are of limited interest to senior decision makers, and attention is shifting to ROI to return on expectation measures, which make use of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ information to assess the effectiveness of L&D.

Key trends in the US training market in 2008

It’s always useful to know what is happening in the learning and development space around the world.

Some of the key facts and trends in the US training market are:

• Corporates are focusing heavily on current and upcoming leaders as a result of skills shortages in management ranks.

• Approximately 21% of training program dollars is spent on leadership development and management/supervisory training.

• The US training market is worth approximately $58.5 billion.

• The average company spends $1,202 per employee on training per annum.

• The corporate learning market grew slightly from 2006 to 2007 by approximately 4%.

• The highest spending sector is finance and insurance, and the lowest is retail.

• E-learning has grown dramatically, driven largely by an increase in online training among small organisations.

• The younger generation of learners is driving changes in learning strategies toward social media.

These are the findings contained in the just-published 2008 Corporate Learning Factbook, by Bersin & Associates.

Training trends over the last 10 years

This post from trainingzone.co.uk examines training trends over the last 10 years, looking at the world of HRD today and comparing the results with a similar survey taken in the 1990s. Some of the headline results and how they compare to 10 years ago, are:

• 10 years ago the majority of training was traditional ‘off-the-job’ classroom based delivery, today it is much more likely to be ‘on-the-job’, e-learning or one-to-one coaching of one form or another.
• In the last 10 years there has been a significant change in the way trainers talk about their sector of work. They have moved from talking about training and development to learning and development.
• Coaching has increased dramatically over the past 10 years.
• The focus on teams and team working has changed considerably, with a move from the use of the outdoors to the increased use of real workplace problem solving.
• The typical person in an HRD role is a woman aged between 36 and 56, employed in a company, a member of the CIPD. She has been in the role for five years or more and has undertaken 30+ days of CPD in her career to date.