Essential Skills For Learning & Development Professionals

With the emergence of high-end technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital revolution, there has been a tremendous transformation in today’s digital era. All modern organizations are leveraging the need to drive the waves of digital disruption. For this, they need to hire employees who are adaptable to changes in the workplace learning environment. Today, when learning professionals lead the position to support transformation, most of the L&D functions are fighting for their existence.

It has become significant to shift from creating learning events to imparting an experience that boost knowledge competency and workplace productivity. Outlined below are some of the desired skills that help L&D professionals to future proof their career:

1. Think Innovatively: Before you create and provide an e-learning solution, it is important to Interact with huge number of audiences, apart from stakeholders and subject matter experts. Meet them in their work environments, to understand more about their workflow and strategy. Be answerable to open-ended questions to identify how they address challenging situations.

As a result, it enables L&D professionals to think innovatively, adopt unique approach and deliver impactful solutions that boost learners’ motivation and efficiency and workplace.

2. Revise & refresh content: This step involves brainstorming to understand the question and reframe it before offering a solution. Various tools used for reframing include:

• Asking several ‘whys’ to explore the root cause of the problems.
• Designing a matrix to analyze the problem from different angles. For instance, you can reframe a workplace safety issue through different lenses of users, culture, equipment and more.
• Including detailed inputs is also significant to get better insights of the process.
• Finding the ‘cost of doing nothing’ helps to encourage stakeholders as well as address the real problem.

3. Be a problem-solver: Once you reframe the questions, next is the step to brainstorm the solution. Learners need to think like performance hackers and focus on driving the desired training results. An example of performance hacking includes the use of SharePoint for curated content rather than designing complete e-learning suites or designing chatbots instead of delivering product training.

4. Do proper planning: As an architect creates spaces, L&D professionals also populate a network of resources, platforms and tools to drive optimal performance and productivity. This step is not about controlling content delivery, but also improving the overall workflow in the learning process.

5. Build a prototype: A prototype in the form of a chatbot is created to improve human interactions during an e-learning program. Bots act as virtual agents that support effective communication between the learners and organizations leading to improved engagement and retention.

6. Embed fun element: Different kinds of apps are designed which support organizational workforce to learn smartly and more efficiently. Games improve the overall learning uptake, as they add the fun element, leading to better engagement and collaboration among the learners. Failing in the game helps learners to discover and work on their weak areas, thereby improving the overall workplace performance.

So, discussed above are some of the desired skills that learning professionals can adopt to leave a strong impact towards the success of an organization. In addition, these skills help to deliver e-learning solutions that future proof career growth of modern workforce.