Most companies boast about their continous learning culture and how the employees are upskiled and cross skilled. And to ensure that they setup a L&D department.
But in this day and age how relevant are these L&D departments? Learning has changed by leaps and bounds in the past few years. From the youtube to the udemy to the coursera of the world, learning has changed drastically.
No more are employees dependent upon a book, or a website or a half knowledgeable internal employee to give sessions. No more learning is offline or timebound. The certifications are also online, the preparation material is readily available and the certification credentials and batches are much more shinier and can be produly displayed on CVs and online profiles.
When the learning has changed so much, have the L&D departments able to keep pace with it? The answer is emphatic No. People running the L&D are often not aware of the real learning needs, most of the times there would be a resource crunch, new ideas either don’t exists or aren’t taken up. Most companies think of L&D as an appendix rather than an integral part of the eco-system.
The level of thought, funding, time, resources that are needed to be allocated aren’t usually provided. And yet the companies want magical results from their L&D departments and from their employees after attending those mandatory sessions.
The easisest way to fix the situation is to get rid of the L&D department and instead outsource it to the professionals like Udemy, Pluralsights where employees can learn what they really want and have the flexibility of learning schedule. In long term this could turn to be a much cheaper option. For tracking, targets and goals can be set for employees but what they learn, how they learn, when they learn should be left up to them.
If due to the size of the organisation or other reasons L&D is kept then they need to be made more autonomous, and more funded. They need to perform better than the platforms outside so that employees see real value in attending the sessions and doing certifications and are gaining something that can’t be easily available outside. More skilled resources should be hired to run this department, better teachers and presenters should be onboarded. And people who have the real need for L&D or can provide inputs of how the learning can be tailored should be involved in running the department.
We respected our learning institutions (schools, colleges) and our teachers because we were provided learning that we ‘didn’t have, couldn’t do on our own or couldn’t find it easily anywhere else. The working professionals usually know a lot already and the value add for L&D has to be significant enough for them to leave their regular work and attend the sessions.