Why tech businesses are wasting money on HR and what they can do about it

By David James, host of the Learning & Development podcast and Chief Learning Officer at 360Learning

Your organization’s Learning & Development team has their annual curriculum set and the courses are always full. There is a learning platform full of content and a budget of up to $17.5 million. Classroom training sessions may be back on the agenda now following the pause of in-person training during the pandemic.

Yet you still have a skills and capability problem. And you’re not the only ones – thousands of organisations around the world are spending millions on L&D with little to show for it. But why?

The difference between spend and performance

L&D has become notorious for not being able to equate spend to performance improvements and an individual employee or organization’s results. TikTok fired its internal talent development team last year for this very reason – citing online talks of mediocre quality and ‘doing things for the sake of doing things.’ It’s not just traditional approaches that are coming under scrutiny but also L&D’s approach to digital training, including learning platforms.

Employees often feel disengaged with the learning tech that is foisted upon them in a bid to gain essential skills, achieve a specific certification for work or onboard into a new role. So L&D teams will respond by explaining this away with excuses that ‘our employees don’t like to learn online’ or ‘they don’t know how to learn.’ They may seek out new tech platforms and content that is specifically marketed at engagement to help improve employee interaction with learning. But rarely do they admit what it is they’re getting wrong.

I’ve worked in L&D for more than 20 years, working for the likes of The Walt Disney Company and Looop. In my experience, what is needed to move on from this never-ending cycle is to see to what extent learning can affect performance.

Changing the status quo of learning

The time is over for the top-down approach to procuring generic content that simply ticks a box for L&D. If a company has developed a comprehensive curriculum supplemented by an exhaustive suite of non-specific content, then the best they can hope for is full attendance at virtual or in-person sessions and a growing number of visitors to the platform that appear satisfied with what they’ve experienced. For some, this may be enough. But for companies that want to become market leaders, tackle hiring challenges and empower their employees, then it’s simply not going to make a difference.

To demonstrate value, start with known problems and create only a few custom-made resources aimed at addressing these problems with subject matter experts inside the organization. This could be leadership training for future managers or a course for a specific industry-related certificate. By analyzing the problems, using data to back them up and moving towards actual solutions for employees, a real difference can be witnessed among employees and L&D teams alike.

Using this framework, learners can then be prompted to identify a challenge, benefit from the experience of a peer who overcame the same challenge and be helped to overcome the challenge themselves. It may be a fundamentally different approach to what has ‘worked’ before, or what you think has worked before. But shifting to this collaborative mindset will be a chance to prove the incredible impact that effective L&D can have on a business.

Start measuring the shift

Previously L&D teams have shunned measuring impact because it’s hard to do when they’re focusing on looking at learning needs, and the solutions to solve them, at face value. By digging down into what is truly needed, L&D can start to get on the right track to measuring value.

For instance, if an employee asks for training on a certain topic, then the conversation should focus on desired performance outcomes and what is happening now, not simply learning objectives and providing a course that meets them. A data-savvy L&D professional would take this one step further and seek out the data that proves what’s being discussed is actually a problem or not and help enable the solution to be built from there. This also helps employees to feel like they are being listened to and supported on their journey.

Embracing the change

It may seem like a lot of work but the core of this exercise is simply embracing a new perspective. Making these changes will lay the groundwork for empowering employees to develop and experience bespoke resources that speak to their work, their challenges and their ambitions. Then, they will be able to see that what’s offered helps them with their primary needs: doing their job better and faster and truly improving their prospects.

Getting and proving the results will help increase the credibility of L&D, confidence in the team and the knowledge that what you’re doing will make a difference to employees and the company in the long run.