‘Learning & Development Edition’

HR: give yourselves a pat on the back. At the start of this year, you might have been slowly thinking about what the next stage of your digital transformation looks like and what Brexit might do to your hiring in 12 months' time. Now, you’ve learnt what furlough means, likely understand what Zoom fatigue feels like and have figured out in real time how your actions truly do impact the employer brand. It's been exhausting. Yet, it's not over yet. With so much change having occurred over the past 11 months, the last thing that HR practitioners might want to think about is further development and change. Alas! In order to prepare the uncertainty of next year, this is exactly where the function might need to focus its energies.

This focus on development will, broadly speaking, have to manifest itself in two ways. Not only will the function have to chart a developmental pathway for itself – figuring out how to harness the enforced changes of 2020 for the betterment of business, people and work, as well as, what many HR leaders have noted, holding onto the central standing that the function has earned through the pandemic – it will also need to figure out how to get the skills businesses need to survive. The latter being a ongoing, and central, priority of business executives everywhere.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. Other functions might be pitching the leadership as having the answers to their future problems and many business practices might revert to type, undoing 2020 progress in areas of flexibility and adaptability. Additionally, investment in learning or skills might be undone by a patchy economic outlook. And, even if HR does get the resource-backing it needs to promote developing of core skills, it will do so on a landscape where employee and business needs, delivery methods and the technology that helps constantly change.

Which is why this issue of HR Grapevine focuses on development: how to deliver it and how the function can continue to grow. With insight into how to make a change resilient strategy to what the hottest L&D trends are; we hope it helps you into 2021.

As ever, stay safe and enjoy.

Daniel Cave - Head of Content