From crisis to opportunity
Everyone around the world has felt the impact of COVID-19 in one way or another. As learning consultants it is very important for us to understand how people and businesses are adapting to this new situation, how their needs and behaviours are changing and what challenges they’re facing.
Fosway group recently published their findings on how corporate Learning & Development is adapting to COVID-19. Their findings provide very valuable insights into how we can move from crisis to opportunity—food for thought to rethink our assumptions and adopt new ways to support people now and in the future. Reflecting on the findings, I found the following points particularly interesting:
- Change in strategy
- Data and analytics
- Comms as learning
Change in strategy
This crisis has clearly accelerated the need for change. Fosway group reported that 94% of the L&D professionals who participated in their survey have changed their strategy. Although it’s a very promising figure, I take it with a pinch of salt as it’s not clear if ‘change’ here just means digitising F2F training to make it accessible online.
We can no longer afford to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. For change to move beyond a knee jerk reaction and be sustainable we need to have a positive and future-looking strategy. It is time to reassess how we do things and reprioritise projects and investments to support businesses once the immediate crisis is under control.
A true change in strategy should include:
- a shift from focus on content to focus on performance and meeting business goals
- a shift from measuring bums on seat and happy sheets to measuring impact
- use of data and analytics to inform design and create business impact.
Data and analytics
Today understanding people’s behaviour and preferences is more important than ever, and this is now possible through the use of data and analytics. We can and should use the existing data to help draw insightful conclusions about how to communicate change, engage people and help them learn.
When it comes to the type of learning content in supporting organisations throughout the COVID-19 crisis, Fosway group reports video as the highest rated—both in terms of adoption and perceived success. This is, not surprisingly, in line with the latest EMEA search insights from Google Trends reporting a significant increase in learning new skills through online video tutorials. Obviously, we need to look at data for a specific audience but the point is that data is readily available. Although an increased L&D expenditure on learning analytics, according to Fosway report, is quite promising, L&D still needs to spend a lot more time and budget to use data when making decisions. This will accelerate impact and improve outcomes.
Comms as learning
With all the different collaboration and communication platforms available, we can make sure people have several points of access to information at the point of need. Fosway group reports that 84% of L&D leaders think it’s important to integrate learning into platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Trello to encourage collaborative learning.
The report by Fosway group provides great insights into what’s happening in the L&D world in the face of crisis. The good news is that there seems to be a lot of positive vibes regarding change. Whether or not we move to the next step and toward more strategic thinking and decision making is completely up to us to keep the conversation going and take meaningful actions.
