When COVID-19 set in at the beginning of 2020, many organizations put their training on ice, hoping that it would soon be over, or simply not believing that virtual, digital or online solutions could ever match the effectiveness of face-to-face events.
But some organizations took the plunge and leveraged challenges posed by the pandemic to catalyze a learning and development transformation; revolutionizing their approach to competence development, making it more scalable, more cost-effective and more impactful. Looking back from the vantage point of the final quarter of 2021, we see five distinct building blocks driving a highly successful transition from a content-heavy, event-based training paradigm to performance-focused, blended learning journeys adapted to the needs of both the business, and the learners.
Take the leap to a learning journey design paradigm
One of the most immediate and obvious effects of the pandemic was the limitation of classroom training. Anyone who has followed the trends in L&D in recent years will be familiar with terms like “blended learning” and “learning journeys” even if exact definitions may vary. Even before the pandemic, many L&D professionals spent many years making valiant efforts to transition to a more process-oriented design paradigm. Yet the inertia of decades of event-based training mental models often forced them to settle for essentially event-based designs with a little anemic “pre-work” or “post-work” pasted in.
The pandemic forced our hand. Overnight, we had to re-calibrate. Hanna Anderberg, former vice president of learning and development at Orkla ASA, puts it bluntly: “We realized early on that if we were going to succeed in this new environment that the pandemic had served up we would need to do more than take our classroom training and put it on Microsoft Teams; we would need to think entirely differently about our approach to instructional design.”
At Orkla, the need for developing refined leadership skills was growing simultaneously as a changing global economy created additional leadership pressures. There was no choice but to revamp a well-established flagship leadership program as a fully digital experience. The all-new “Orkla Leadership Compass” leadership training program is a selection of short virtual classes dedicated to skill try-outs and practice, developing the leanest-possible knowledge and conceptual foundation in advance through video tutorials and discussion threads on the digital learning platform. Orkla took this first lesson —to take the leap — deeply to heart, and went all in. They let go of outdated event-centric instructional design models and created a performance-improvement focused learning journey design.
Leap with strategic aforethought
The typical L&D program portfolio in a large global organization contains dozens of programs, any one of which could be a candidate for transition to a virtual design. A key question is: Where to start? Which leap is the right leap? Where we have seen the greatest and most dramatic success among clients across the globe is when a high-need, strategically vital initiative was chosen for investment as a transformation target.
Wary L&D professionals may have been tempted to experiment with entirely virtual learning with a relatively low risk lesser priority target. The myriad programs that constitute a modern L&D portfolio represent a range of value-propositions. Some programs, for example, serve principally a staff benefit value proposition — they are offered because employees perceive them positively, but transfer of learning, or even learning itself, are not important.
Likewise, there are often many L&D programs deployed because they satisfy regulatory and legal exposure concerns. These low-risk, lower priority programs can make a tempting and safer target for beginning to experiment with purely virtual designs. But there are usually a small number of strategically high-priority L&D initiatives where the value proposition is to accelerate adoption of change and strategy execution. Transfer of learning into new workplace behaviors is imperative.
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There are two reasons to take the leap to virtual design with these highest priority, strategically vital L&D initiatives. The first and principal rationale is that this sort of vital offering cannot wait for calmer economic times. The need for such L&D transcends the temporal COVID-19 upset. A second reason is that these initiatives that have a behavior change imperative demand a learning journey approach.
New skills and application of new mindsets transpire only over time and with continued practice and feedback — the very dimensions that are at the heart of performance-oriented learning journeys. We have witnessed the manifestation of an implicit third reason as well: An opportunity for the L&D function to demonstrate its resiliency and responsiveness with a high-visibility endeavor.
Create a technical ecosystem to support your transformation
The transformation to a more journey-oriented instructional design construct with less focus on classroom training requires a digital ecosystem to support it. As early as 2017, in the article “A New World of Corporate Learning Arrives: And It Looks Like TV,” Josh Bersin made a case for several categories of corporate learning technologies ranging from more administrative LMS platforms to more experiential LXPs. Since then, many platforms have developed new functionalities blurring the lines between categories.
The truth is, it is unlikely that one single learning platform will serve all learning needs of an organization across the broad range of L&D value propositions. But what is clear is that a truly performance-focused learning journey requires a platform that can host, deliver on a schedule and monitor a series of action-oriented application assignments where participants can try out, reflect on, leverage feedback, refine and eventually master new skills.
For decades, L&D professionals have recognized and bemoaned the stark reality that once trainees have exited from a classroom intervention, the translation of any new learning into new workplace performance is out of their reach and essentially beyond their control. When program participants leave the classroom — virtual or physical — the L&D professional has little or no idea what the learners have done with their new knowledge and skills, or if the training is having any worthwhile impact.
What could not be seen could not be managed. But with an LXP, the L&D initiative can be stretched to reach into the workplace, engaging participants and their managers in application experiences; with digital tracking for monitoring. Importantly, the post-classroom veil is lifted, and L&D leaders and other stakeholders can see what is being transferred. The LXP both enables the stretching of the transfer elements of training, and creates a real-time record of it so that it can be directed and redirected as needed.
Marianne Ekstedt, head of talent management at commercial vehicle giant Traton Group recalls how she used technology to keep their strategically important management excellence program on track when the pandemic kicked-in: “As the pandemic ensued, we could see that our managers and leaders were struggling to keep the business and their teams on the rails. The learning transfer platform became a lifeline to help us see what was going on and adjust the program content and tempo to meet the changing needs of the learners.”
Set new standards for success and prove that it works
The shift from a traditional, event-based training paradigm that focuses on learning to a blended journey paradigm designed to support performance improvement and business impact has to be accompanied by a new set of standards that ensure success. Traditional event-based training designs set the bar of success at “people liked it and learned something new.”
This is not to say the L&D community has not been interested in measuring performance improvement and business impact — it was just always such an uphill and confusing struggle to do it. But tracking and documenting impact on business-linked behavior change is where you will have to set your sights in order to close the loop on your L&D transformation. Show your stakeholders that a performance-focused blended learning journey can deliver superior levels of impact for less resources, and you will find that the wheels of your L&D transformation are truly greased.
Note the experience of the Orkla Leadership Compass mentioned earlier. As Anderberg moved this highly successful and strategically important program to a fully digital experience, she knew the new incarnation would need to stand up to scrutiny if it was not going to simply fall back to its original event-focused design when the pandemic was all over.
Certainly, the cost-efficiency side of the equation was plainly an advantage; the removed travel, venue and accommodation costs of the classroom-based version savings were substantial. But could a fully virtual leadership program deliver an equally rewarding learning experience for the participants? And more importantly, could it deliver the same or better levels of training transfer and business impact?
The answer, as it turned out, was yes, it could, and yes, it does. As Anderberg puts it, “By irrefutably demonstrating that this high-performance learning journey approach really works we were able to win over not only the sceptics in the L&D function but actually the whole business.”
Importantly, by the time Anderberg put together the final report to present to her stakeholders, she already knew the new iteration of the program had delivered results because the automatically generated LXP data enabled monitoring and driving success as she went along. She was able to present clear evidence that the new fully digital leadership program delivered higher levels of training transfer and more business impact for less resources and with little diminution of the overall participant experience.
Nurture a movement
The observant reader will have noticed the first four steps on the road to an L&D transformation have been largely structural — shift to a learning journey design paradigm, focus it on one or more strategically important initiatives, support it with an enabling technical ecosystem and evaluate it to tell the story.
However, an L&D transformation — just like any other transformation — is cultural as well as structural, and it will take a village to see it through. Cecilia Garpe, learning manager for global sales within the iIndustrial technique division for Atlas Copco, recalls her efforts to get her colleagues on-board: “It was the end of 2019, and I had just completed a certification training about designing learning journeys. I remember I really wanted to redesign one of our key sales programs. While I certainly managed to win the support of my closest and most important stakeholder, there simply wasn’t a sense of urgency in the broader organization. One could say that the existing program was a bit too good. Not that it couldn’t be improved and be more impactful, but it was appreciated enough that there was no impetus to change.”
The impetus Garpe was looking for arrived in the beginning of 2020, when Atlas Copco’s L&D function needed to quickly move to a digital delivery mode in response to COVID-19. Like Anderberg, Garpe saw her opportunity and rose to the challenge closely watched by her manager and colleagues. It was not long before her approach gained more supporters as good results started to emerge; good enough to be recognized with a Brandon Hall Excellence in Sales award in 2021. But Garpe and Anderberg, and no doubt many of you, will need to look ahead toward the state of L&D post-COVID-19.
Participants and their managers who see virtual performance improvement journeys as a novelty will have to be led to see that we have turned a corner in the evolution of the learning organization — that L&D is not just about learning and acquiring knowledge, credentials or digital delivery of content. It is about changing our expectations for continuous change and ongoing refining of our behavioral repertoires. The unique achievements we have made under the duress of a pandemic need to become a routine way of doing L&D business.
The COVID-19 pandemic levelled diabolical challenges on a global scale. Yet, through all the tragedy and hardship, for many it has been a time for renewal and to reevaluate priorities. For those of us working in the professional L&D community, it has been a steep and sometimes bumpy learning curve. Remember that first Zoom class? But, it has also been an opportunity to try new approaches that would never have been considered in normal times. We hope and believe that the wins for performance-focused learning journeys will become the “new normal” going forward.
