With technology changing everything at a lighting speed, L&D departments in the organizations need to match this speed to survive and succeed in the current fast-paced business environment. The challenges for the L&D community are multifold ranging from adopting most impactful learning strategies that appeal to the changing tastes of the workforce, upskill themselves demonstrate ROI and to adopt constantly to the changing technology and leverage it to benefit the organizational objectives.
In this blog, I have put together the top five L&D challenges for the year 2018 based on the inputs and experience of working with the e-learning industry so far.
1.Creating business impact as opposed to delivering learning
The present-day learning and development team needs to refocus on creating measurable business impact rather than just creating learning content. This can be enabled by aligning the learning objectives with the business objectives and involving all the concerned stakeholders to participate in building the organizational learning strategy. While this is a difficult feat to achieve but L&D teams should find the resources and tools to enable it and constantly pursue the leadership team to get involved in strategic learning initiatives.
2.Engaging learners
Engaging the learners is considered to be one of the biggest challenges for the learning and development teams since the times of traditional classroom training to the use of modern technology in training. No learning strategy can guarantee a hundred percent learner engagement but the L&D teams should constantly experiment with newer technologies like gamification, game-based learning, microlearning, m- learning, interactive videos etc to enhance the engagement among the learners.
3.Customising Training to a multi-audience
The present-day learners are consisting of people from different geographic locations, age etc. These learning modules should be able to satisfy the objectives of the wider audience here. For example, the millennial may be very much interested in small games and gamification which may not enjoy the equal success in an elder age category of learners.
Not all training strategy will work with the Millenials. Millenials are so much exposed to the technological growth that they are mostly connected to the world of internet and multimedia.
4.Measuring Online Training Success
To measure the effectiveness of online training or elearning i.e. measure the ROI is another big challenge for any organization.It becomes difficult for an organization or an L&D team as there are no established methods or ways to perform the function. While learning analytics tools can give a complete dashboard of the learner’s performance and can be included for the purpose of benefits in ROI calculation, calculating the cost itself is a herculean task.
5. Limited Budgets
According to the survey conducted by Optimus Learning Services, 40% of the respondents rated limited budget as the biggest challenge for L&D team in 2018. While budgets can become a limiting factor but are not the overall deciding factor for any learning initiative. Usage of data analytics tools can help the L&D present their budgets in a more effective manner based on the past data analysis.
For any L&D team, this blog can be handy to know what are the common challenges that globally the L&D professionals are facing and how to overcome them. Are you facing similar challenges in your organization?
Feel free to share your views and comments.
