There’s no rest for L&D leaders.
It’s your mission to create better learning experiences, improve engagement, and create a learning culture that helps achieve company goals.
But there are only 24 hours in a day.
So you may have been too busy to explore the following top trends in learning and development. We believe that including some or all of these trends in your L&D plans for 2024 would make a difference in the success of your mission.
1. Personalized learning is on the rise
Every experience is better when it’s personalized.
When training is personalized, the employee is more engaged, retains the content better, and feels more satisfaction about their learning path.
In personalized learning, your L&D team helps fulfill the goals of the business by taking a learner-centric approach. In other words, the learning path needs to be adapted to the employee’s skills and skill gaps, learning goals, level of expertise, and preferences.
As a result, employees take charge of their career development while your team provides guidance and support along the way.
2. Skills development is a priority
Several factors in the labor market are obliging companies to focus more on upskilling and reskilling:
Rapid technological innovation. Companies surveyed in “The Future of Jobs Report 2023” expect that 44% of workers’ skills will be disrupted in the five years to come.
Furthermore, for some professionals (e.g., IT), the speed of technological innovation keeps shortening the lifecycle of their skill set. As a result, these practitioners need to retrain regularly.
The war for talent. The demand for skilled people outstrips supply. So companies are looking more closely at the true costs of disruptive lay-offs and recruiting binges.
For example, to lay off skilled people management needs to break the news, reallocate the work, train replacements, remedy the impacts on morale, and absorb the loss of knowledge skills, contacts, or customers.
When months down the line, business improves, management must support the costs of ramping up, recruiting, and training new people.
Totalling up these costs, more and more companies see the business case for training their employees to help them meet the opportunities and challenges ahead.
3. Learning in the flow of work gains ground
The separation between a traditional classroom and the workplace is disappearing fast. After all, how productive can it be for an employee to leave work for X period to gain new skills or knowledge when he or she could learn the same things on the job?
In a continuous learning environment, an employee faced with a challenge that stretches them beyond their current skill set should be able to learn what’s needed on the spot.
That’s where micro-learning can be helpful. In micro-learning, a brief learning module (generally, two to seven minutes) focuses on teaching a concept to help the learner retain or refresh their training.
For learners with precise learning gaps, micro-learning enables you to customize a learning path to counteract the “forgetting curve” that follows any training not appropriately reinforced.
Micro-learning can be made instantly accessible by your LMS whenever your learner needs it. Moreover, people retain what they learn much longer when they immediately use their new knowledge and get feedback on their performance.
4. Blended training is here to stay
Blended learning combines in-person learning with a range of digital technologies and L&D practices.
For companies with a hybrid work model, blended learning allows them to lower operating costs with more efficient use of instructor and classroom resources.
For your busy employees, online learning is the training medium of choice for the convenience it offers. They can study on the job, at home, or during a commute, without having to take any leave from work.
Consider these statistics from Training magazine’s “2023 Training Industry Report” (surveying U.S.-based companies with 100+ employees):
- 11% of the companies used blended learning 90%-100% of their training time.
- 43% of the businesses turned to blended learning for 10%-29% of their training.
- 47% of the organizations deploy virtual classrooms/webcasts for 10%-29% of their training.
What the exact blend of learning should be in each course will be defined by your L&D team, on a case-by-case basis, as you design content based on the needs of your company, learners, and subject matter.
5. Data-based decisions come to your rescue
Data reduces the educated guesswork of your job.
Through the data collection of your LMS and its powerful learning analytics module, your L&D team can make a bigger contribution to company goals by identifying the following:
- The competencies and knowledge your employees have
- The skill gaps you can address to help people add value to their employability and the company
- The time employees spend in training activities, how they learn and perform, and how you can help remedy any learning challenges
With this information in hand, you’ll have both an overall view of the company’s skill sets and knowledge, as well as an individual portrait of each employee. The result?
You can design more targeted and effective L&D activities.
6. Gamification is seriously effective in L&D
People like games.
So it’s not surprising that for years the instructional design of online training has taken advantage of interest in gaming to increase the effectiveness of learning.
Gamified learning boosts engagement, motivation, and learning transfer by adding game-like elements, such as goal-setting, progress-tracking, and virtual rewards (e.g., custom badges and certifications).
Your LMS can help gamify learning by rewarding member achievement with badges. In the same vein, you can also add quiz games or interactive courses to your content to make learning more fun.
You can track your gamification statistics, such as badges earned, to discover what is attracting the interest of your learners.
If you’d like to learn more about these top trends and how the right LMS can help you take full advantage of them, connect with us!
