One of the scarier things I’ve done in my life is a year-and-a-half long stint taking improvisation classes at Second City, the well-known comedy center in Chicago. I had moved there with family from the United Kingdom, and I had just taken on a new leadership role. I knew I had the right technical skills and experience to do the job. But I was struggling to integrate into a primarily Midwest American culture. I also wanted to get more comfortable thinking on my feet and building stronger relationships. I realized I had to do something different.
I was definitely out of my comfort zone. I grew up in Shanghai, China, where social and political systems — and the unspoken “norms” at work and in life — were vastly different. I had lived overseas for more than a decade before moving to Chicago. I had never been on a stage, and had no idea if I could make a group of strangers laugh. Would they even understand what I would say? I felt like a total imposter even being associated with the vaunted comedy institution, which has trained the likes of Tina Fey and other Saturday Night Live stars.
But I am a learning and development professional, and I knew the importance of recognizing a skill gap in a new situation and taking actions to close it. Looking back, I’m so pleased that I overcame my fear and reluctance and bit the bullet. I learned so much from my ensemble and my own experience that this has become one of the best things I did in terms of investing in myself.
L&D has reached a similar juncture: We’re in a new situation, and we need to do something different. Our employees are hungry for growth and purpose amidst the Great Reshuffle, and companies need to respond and act or risk watching their talent walk out the door.
That’s why organizations need our expertise more than ever. The demand for L&D specialists increased by 94 percent between July and September of 2021 compared to the previous three month period, according to our just-released 2022 Workplace Learning Report.
At the same time, our research also revealed that we have work to do. The report reveals L&D professionals spent 35 percent less time learning than their HR colleagues in 2021. It is not surprising, since a lot of them are overwhelmed by workload, and well-being has decreased. But the L&D function is going through what might be its most consequential transformation to date, and our success depends on whether we can learn the skills that this new world of work requires of us. Are we prepared to take on this increasingly strategic role for years to come?
It will not be easy. But we can start this important work by doing two things: loosening up how we think about ourselves, and going back to why many of us got into this business — to help people do their best work and be their best selves.
At the heart of L&D: Change
I’ve always considered L&D to be a noble business. Over the years I’ve worked with top-notch instructional designers, facilitators and HR leaders whose shared mission is to help those around them be great.
I came to L&D through my experience and expertise in change management. My background might not be traditional, but twenty years of leading large-scale transformation work convinced me that the heart of L&D is our ability to effect and master change.
As we all know, not only are employees hungrier for change than they’ve ever been in our lifetimes, but organizations are also staring down the inevitability of change. I think the acronym VUCA — volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous — succinctly captures the world we’re living in today.
What does this mean for L&D? It means we have the unique opportunity to be the change agents our people want and our organizations need.
I’m not suggesting that the traditional components of L&D — instructional design, facilitation, course curation and more — are no longer important. They are foundational building blocks of L&D, deeply ingrained in adult-learning theories and social psychology. I do believe, however, that these foundations are no longer enough. L&D needs to adopt a change mindset and a systemic way of thinking.
Whatever we do should be about creating an ecosystem where talent, knowledge and skills can effortlessly flow through the organization. That is why I decided to expand LinkedIn’s L&D function to talent development. It more accurately captures our strategic intent and impact on talent outcomes.
I see future L&D leaders continuing to use these building blocks — but deploying them in a new way, ultimately helping employees and organizations succeed in a VUCA world. That could mean connecting these programs to business-critical goals like increasing employee retention, understanding and building the exact skills our organizations need for the future, and helping employees find challenging and fulfilling career paths internally.
What we’re helping change: Careers
Even though it feels as if the L&D world is being turned upside down, I don’t think our industry North Star — helping our people grow and succeed — has changed. The Workplace Learning Report surfaced the top three reasons employees seek out learning opportunities:
- To stay up to date in their field.
- To pursue personal interests and goals.
- To achieve career goals, like getting promoted or pursuing an internal move.
Here’s where I’d start to bring career transformation and business needs together.
First, connect your skill-building and internal-mobility programs.The insights from our new report are stark: Employees who don’t feel their skills are being put to good use are 10 times more likely to leave a job. On the flip side, when companies offer fulfilling growth opportunities through internal mobility, they retain their employees nearly twice as long as their peers.
At LinkedIn, we’re starting to hold ourselves accountable to a career-transformation rate. Broadly speaking, we’re anchoring on how we’re helping employees develop, learn and grow in big and small ways. Employees can experience growth and transform themselves by taking on a new role, learning a new skill, working with cross-functional teams or growing personal networks.
Then, connect your programs’ outcomes to your business’s top priorities.
The Workplace Learning Report found that L&D professionals are primarily still measuring their programs’ success through what I’d call table-stakes metrics: course completions, qualitative surveys and the like.
While that’s important information, we need to push further to connect L&D metrics to business outcomes. That’s the goal of the career-transformation rate we’re piloting at LinkedIn. With time, we’ll be able to show both how we’re helping our employees grow their careers here and how that contributes to our business’s goals around growth and innovation.
And in the process, we change, too
These new efforts will take some reskilling and upskilling of our own. A new RedThread Research survey conducted exclusively for the Workplace Learning Report shows L&D professionals feel the need to strengthen their skills around data analysis, business acumen and leadership, among other areas.
The road ahead for us might at times feel daunting. But in the recent conversations I’ve had with fellow chief learning officers and heads of L&D, I know so many of us are facing similar challenges. I’ve been here before, and I’m sure many of you have too. We have to try new things — even improvise. We might fail, but we’ll certainly learn and grow, and we’ll definitely provide more value to our employees and organizations.
