2023 employee benefits & workplace predictions: Learning and development approaches

Executives are continuing to try to grow their companies by closing the skills gap and integrating in-house learning programs. However, the future of learning and development might be within technology to allow for accessibility and data driven learning.

Here’s what industry thought leaders think will take place in the world of learning and development.

Tangible skill data and business value results

Learning and development (L&D) teams have certainly had a busy year in 2022 and that will continue in 2023. With the hybrid workforce seemingly here to stay, more learning professionals are turning to digital learning as a way to keep the entire workforce up to date. That can only be a good thing for accessibility (anyone can access learning at a time and place that suits them), and also data. 

L&D leaders have an unparalleled opportunity to gather data through digital learning, to give a dynamic overview of the skills being built in their workforce. Overlaid with HR and recruitment data, this can be used to determine skill supply versus skill gaps and spot opportunities when L&D can help the business deliver its goals (through ensuring the right people have the right skills). Like when the rise of the Internet created unrivaled opportunities to become more targeted with marketing and sales, thanks to consumer data, the same thing is now happening with the employee experience in workplaces.

As L&D becomes more data-driven thanks to the wealth of data created by digital learning systems, it changes the skill set for L&D itself. In 2023, I expect to see more L&D teams introduce data analysts, data scientists, and business intelligence to their teams. This might be a dedicated person, or depending on resources, they might upskill existing L&D team members. It’s an exciting opportunity for L&D, because having access to data and the people to analyze it will give them more of a voice in strategic conversations. This might finally be the year where L&D doesn’t just get a seat at the boardroom table but drives it, with tangible skill data and business value results.

Janice Burns, Degreed Chief People Officer

Invest in new ways to create content

As we exit 2022, it’s time to admit that the “YouTube for Education” vision promoted a few years ago in Learning and Development never appeared — and never will. Instead, it’s time to find another way forward for creating compelling business training materials.

I am referring to the “Netflix for Training” vision for user-generated content. As video and editing tools became freely available five years ago, we told ourselves in L&D that subject matter experts within companies would be inspired to create training content, giving their organizations a huge amount of organic, accurate and entertaining digital training content that their colleagues would want to use.

In this vision, the content would be generated via a new class of L&D tool, the Learning Experience Platform (LXP), where Netflix or YouTube-style smart algorithms would match great content for users hungry for enlightenment and knowledge.

But that production wave never really happened. It’s a puzzle, as the logic seemed correct. When you look at what corporate education experienced in terms of the user experience in the last 10 years, it’s not that different from what news or entertainment consumption has experienced — we seem to prefer short content we can share and consume on the go, etc.

I’ve worked for great companies that tried to make this happen. We made the best tools available and the best widgets we could for these new corporate creatives. But those SMEs just didn’t come forward. They responded by saying, “Meh: tell me why I should do this again?

As a result, we’re in a situation where people use YouTube for quick tutorials on how to make omeletts properly, yet the corporate training sector remains encumbered with a lot of great, highly-functional learning platforms that are dry and dusty in terms of actual use. The learning content we have — even on LinkedIn Learning — is basically what we had 10 years ago before the user-generated fever dream began.

That means as a sector, we’re at a point in which we need to start thinking seriously about how we will create content. The plain truth is we need to go back to investing real cash money in a market that is increasingly less willing to invest money in content creation.

Antoine Poincaré, Vice President of The Climate School

Expect the unexpected

If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is to expect the unexpected. Strategies for managing talent have had to become more agile in response to rapidly evolving business, workforce, and societal expectations. In 2023, this increased agility will be put to good use. Amid increasing economic headwinds, businesses will be more discerning about their investments, while prioritizing learning and development (L&D) to appeal to workers in a tight labor market and increase business performance over competitors.

Historically, L&D approaches have prioritized broadly applicable, classroom-based learning in response to established business needs. In 2023, L&D programs will increasingly be anticipatory and built around the individual. They will use data and analytics to identify emerging learning needs, create adaptive learning pathways built around the individual, integrate more seamlessly into the flow of work, and focus on business and human performance.

David Rizzo, National Managing Principal, Talent, Deloitte US