The 5 A’s of a Successful 2023 Learning and Development Strategy

Each year, you look at your employee learning and development programs to see how to stay ahead of the curve and enable your employees to be successful. And each year it gets more challenging because like it or not, the way your employees work is constantly changing. 

Our customers have it easier than most when it comes to training and development to improve employee performance because they’ve used five basic tenets to guide their strategy planning. 

These enable our customers to move the needle on attracting new talent (even during a major labor shortage), keep employees engaged and motivated, offer upskilling and cross-skilling, and keep pace with the rapid rate of change. 

Alignment 

First and foremost, you’ve got to align your L&D programs with overall business objectives. If not, you’re operating in a vacuum and you’re probably having a hard time getting more budget and resources. Employee enablement has to result in benefits back to the business, as well as for individual employees. They’ll need support from you to develop the capabilities and confidence to make things happen. Alignment with the overall business objectives and tracking business impact also helps you get buy-in from leadership to invest in resources that’ll make your strategy more successful.

Adaptability 

When you’re looking at how to improve training and development in an organization for 2023, you cannot omit adaptability these days. Because the reality is, your strategy and your programs are going to have to shift in response to changes in the economy, global markets, and even safety risks (as we’ve seen). Building adaptability into your strategy is how to ensure it’ll be effective. 

But how do you do that?

One easy way is to ensure that your learning and development technology support adaptability. You certainly cannot make sudden shifts if your technology requires complicated coding expertise, doesn’t integrate with other necessary systems, or won’t allow you to change training content as quickly as you need. 

Agility

Along with adaptability, your workforce training strategy will also need to be agile. Not only does change happen but it’s happening faster. 

Enabling your employees to learn from experiences and apply those learning to new situations will be critical to future-proof them from unexpected circumstances that might hinder them from meeting business objectives. With the right training, employees can take quick action. That means you need to enable them to continuously learn new skills, upgrade their skills or reskill to complete new tasks. 

By tapping into mission-critical content, collaborating with subject matter experts, and creating a single source of knowledge and training truth, you’ll be able to be as agile as you need to be for your employees to be successful.

Accessibility

The knowledge that’s locked away in separate systems, in paper manuals, or even in a line of business employee’s head, makes your job more challenging because that’s valuable that needs to be collected and shared.   A component of your 2023 strategy should include a content review to see where you can update, mine, and transform content from across your company. 

Another component is ensuring that your materials are available and easily accessible to employees no matter where they are, and how they work. Because 70% of learning occurs on the job, your learning and development strategy should allow employees to access knowledge and training whenever they need it. That means enabling employees to “bring your own device” to their training experience so they can find what they need, learn in the moment, and do their jobs more effectively. 

Analytics 

There’s a difference between feeling that your strategy is working and knowing it’s working, and that difference is measurement. Without numbers, you don’t really know that your employee learning and development strategy is on target or needs to be adjusted.

A key to gaining comprehensive insight into your programs is tracking the whole journey a learner takes from the moment they enroll in a course through to completion. Look for advanced analytics that gives you detailed information on content including page views, time spent, most popular content, which devices learners use to get the content, what content isn’t getting views, and more. Usage data helps you see where learners are spending their time, who is using course material, what course materials are being used, and how progress falls across a specific group for insight into the learner experience and where it can be improved.

In 2023, you can be like our customers who know they’re using a strategy that works. They know that they’ve got the alignment, adaptability, agility, accessibility, and analytics to help them develop their employees to succeed in the year to come, and beyond.