Meeting L&D's new need for 'speed to impact'

Today’s fast-paced, competitive marketplaces generate a relentless demand for innovation. As Bill Gates said: “Success today requires the agility and drive to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent.” Employees at all levels must be empowered to respond quickly to meet customer needs and anticipate changing circumstances and new market opportunities. This creates a fascinating new challenge for L&D, in which the ‘speed to impact’ of your learning material becomes the most important measure of success.

 Recent research by Fosway Group, the HR and learning analyst, highlights that employers are striving to increase learner engagement and create personalised learning experiences, in shorter learning bites, using next-generation searchable content that works on all devices and screen formats. The ‘need for speed’ has created an increased focus on collaborative authoring, rapid prototyping and faster roll-outs of learning.

But L&D teams need to be cautious. It’s easy to be seduced by content providers who offer an extensive choice of thousands of learning options (which won’t get used). You need a solution that will help your learners to quickly develop the skills and competencies they need. However, in today’s agile organisations, those needs can soon change, so your solution not only has to be flexible and adaptive, it also has to constantly delight your learners, whilst sustaining their energy and their enthusiasm for learning.

The starting point is to ensure that your learning support resources adequately cover the core topics that your learners will demand. At Hemsley Fraser, we’ve developed digital learning content that addresses the top 100 learning topics that apply in every organisation, including personal effectiveness, communication skills, digital skills, team performance, people management, performance management, leadership, continuous improvement, wellbeing, customer service and sales. This content ranges from multi-day, expert-led courses to two-three minute micro-learning videos, interactive eBooks, infographics and animations. Individual employees can create their own ‘playlists’ of these resources - effectively, they can create their own library of personalised learning resources that they can dip into, which directly relate to their needs. This makes digital learning more engaging as it becomes more personal for each individual and very specific to the challenge they’re facing.