The world is changing fast, but are you? Do you know where the skills gaps are in your organization? Do you know how to fill these gaps? Most importantly, can you make the necessary changes quickly enough to succeed?
Learning at Speed is a practical book which brings together the best from lean and agile methodologies to show how they can be applied to learning and development (L&D) to improve individual and organizational performance. This provides a people development framework which can be used to deconstruct a learning strategy and optimise each element for improved results. It shows how to identify learning barriers and possible solutions, leverage company data to understand learning needs and how to assess the most effective learning resources and delivery channels.
Crucially, Learning at Speed shows how to track metrics that matter, get the most from your budget and how to build a business case to get stakeholder buy-in. Understanding how to continuously upskill and reskill a workforce at speed will ensure that organizations can stay ahead of the competition. Supported by templates, worksheets, case studies, examples and practical advice, this book is the practical guide that shows learning and development (L&D) professionals how to achieve this.
Discover a learning and development strategy that’ll help your business thrive.
Learning and development (L&D) is a major part of any modern business, with an estimated $350 billion spend. But, ironically, L&D itself has plenty to learn. Nobody knows how to adapt as effectively as a successful startup, which is likely to understand the unbelievable pace of change in today’s professional landscape. If you’re not constantly learning, adapting, and reskilling, you’re going nowhere fast.
That’s why the author of Learning at Speed, Nelson Sivalingam, looks to startups for inspiration for how L&D can most effectively adapt. In this book, you’ll discover what successful L&D means in the modern workplace, and how you can begin to create a learning ecosystem that allows your business to thrive – fast.
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Learning and development departments are like startups – and can fail for the same reasons.
What makes a business successful in the modern, post-Covid world? A side hustle selling hand sanitizer or video conferencing tools? Well, maybe, but the better question is, What attitude does a business need today? Because there’s one common trait that unites successful modern businesses, regardless of which sector they operate in: the best businesses today are the fastest learners.
It’s not just a Covid thing. We live in a fast-paced environment that’s changing at an exponential rate, both in the world of work as much as in daily life. Today’s workforce will need different skills in the future – even in as little as five years’ time. But how can you make sure your business is equipped to help its employees learn at speed when you don’t even know what they should be learning?
The answer is through learning and development – the department that has long been there to upskill or reskill your workers. But there’s just one caveat: to be truly effective in such fast-paced times, L&D itself needs to change too. It needs to think with the agility and growth-driven mindset of a startup. And not just any startup. Many startups fail, after all – and one of the key reasons for their demise is a cautionary message for L&D professionals.
Do you remember Quibi? Briefly, in late 2020, it was big news: a brand-new mobile streaming service with an almost $2 billion budget. Its specialty was short-form videos that users would pay to watch. Why did Quibi fail? Because it was solving a problem that didn’t exist. It sat awkwardly between free social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok, and paid streaming services like Netflix. Nobody really wanted or needed that particular gap in the market to be filled.
Many L&D teams fall into the same trap. One survey found that a staggering 75 percent of managers weren’t satisfied with their company’s L&D. According to another survey, just 12 percent of employees actually applied the skills they learned through training.
It doesn’t seem like L&D is solving the right problems with its $350 billion global spend – that’s enough to fund 175 Quibis, by the way! Fortunately, the solution is to do more with less, through what the author calls lean learning. This is a whole new approach for L&D, and it’s ruthlessly focused on getting fast, measurable impact. It’s inspired by successful startups, and it could transform the way your workers learn new skills.
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The first step of effective L&D is to find the problem that needs solving; then, plan your strategy.
Lean learning is a mindset. Its three main principles are action, continuous improvement, and outcome.
Action means it’s vital to act with speed. Things change so fast these days, and companies don’t have time to sit around developing perfectly calibrated, minutely detailed resources. It’s often more important to deliver a solution now – even if it’s initially flawed.
This brings us to continuous improvement. In the lean mindset, L&D means constantly improving based on feedback, so you can iterate closer and closer toward the best possible solution.
How do you know what the best solution is? By measuring the outcome. Lean Learning entails knowing exactly what result L&D wants, so you have concrete evidence for its success.
So, what’s step one for a Lean L&D team? Think back to Quibi’s big mistake – the first thing you need to do is find a problem that actually needs solving.
Say you’re an L&D professional at FiveADay.com – a fictional company that sells fruit to businesses. You get a request from sales: they’d like some training because they’re not hitting their targets. The classic L&D solution would be to say “OK” and send the team to a training course. Problem solved, right? Sure, if the problem is just that sales has asked for a course. But what about the business’s actual problem – those missed targets? Wouldn’t it be better to drill down and find out what’s going on there?
For instance, maybe the staff are perfectly good salespeople, but they don’t know enough about the product they’re selling. In that case, what L&D actually needs to provide is a resource about product knowledge – a different solution altogether. You might need to talk to the salespeople directly to find out exactly where things are going wrong.
Now, you can put together what the author calls the Learning Canvas: a simple diagram which maps out your L&D strategy. Write down the problem you’re solving, and your customer – in this case, the sales team. At the center of your diagram, put in your value proposition – more sales, for example.
Around the value proposition, map out your solution to the problem. This includes the specifics of the extra knowledge the salespeople need to have, as well as the key resources they’ll need in order to gain this knowledge. Also note the stakeholders involved and, vitally, the metrics you’ll measure to determine your scheme’s success.
At the bottom of your diagram, estimate the costs involved, and specify the desired outcome – a specific percentage increase in sales conversion, for instance.
Once you’ve planned that all out, you’re in a great place to begin solving the problem.
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The aim of L&D is to give the right person the right learning resource at the right time.
The next big question you’re probably asking right now is, What sort of solutions are we actually talking about here? If the answer isn’t training courses, then what is it?
The truth is, the sky’s the limit.
One solution category is open learning resources – things that already exist online, which could have great impact for your team with minimal outlay on your part. Are you tapping into the specialist publications in your industry? Do you make the most of how-to guides that already exist for the software and platforms your team employs? And do you encourage workers to subscribe to useful podcasts, blogs, and newsletters?
Then there are collaborative resources, which encourage knowledge sharing. Google has a network it calls “g2g” through which employees train each other. It’s a great way to take advantage of the expertise that likely already exists within your organization. Consider online wikis too – they’re a great way people can help each other out. And if you do want to make use of a training course, ensure that it’s cohort-based so there’s a team of people who can support one another through the learning experience.
There’s also something a little more old-fashioned: coaching and mentoring. By finding the right people within your organization to step up and coach or mentor others, you can help inspire people to improve.
That’s a lot! There’s a whole library of potential resources – although maybe a library isn’t the best analogy, as they tend to be static places. What you really want to do is cultivate a living learning ecosystem that is constantly updating and adapting and improving.
It’s crucial to have a variety of resources because different people need different things. There really isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to a subject as complex as learning. If you look at employees’ past careers, you’ll likely get a much better sense of what they already know and where they might need help. Plus, of course, you can ask them! A “pull” approach to L&D means being worker-led rather than the “push” approach of dictating what they need to know. Overall, you’ll need a balance of push and pull solutions.
So, you need to give the right resource to the right person. But there’s one more “right” you need, and it has to do with timing. For maximum impact, make sure your learning solutions happen at moments that matter. This is usually when people actually need the knowledge – that’s when they’re most likely to understand its value. In other words, the “aha moment” comes at the point of use, just like with a new product.
If you do all these things, your learning solutions will likely have an impact. But don’t just take our word for it. It’s vital that you measure, measure, measure. Learning should have a direct, quantifiable impact on your business – whether it’s an increase in sales, an uptick in productivity, or simply a bunch of positive feedback forms from happy workers. It’s through measurable results and constructive feedback that you can further improve your learning resources and ensure things are even more effective in the future.
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Learning solutions don’t have to be comprehensive – start with a “minimum valuable learning” product.
Nobody gets it perfect the first time – and that’s as true for you in the L&D team as it is for your staff.
That’s why it’s important to update and adapt your learning ecosystem as you get feedback and measure its impact. And it’s also why it’s OK to start pretty simple – with a minimum valuable learning product.
This phrase is also rooted in the world of startups. A minimum viable product is the first iteration of many innovative products – think of Airbnb’s founders sticking up a photo of their loft room on a sparsely designed website. If you have a version of your product that’s good enough to communicate and deliver its central offering to people, set it free and start gathering feedback! All of its imperfections – and any shortcuts you’ve taken – can be iteratively improved and ironed out as you learn more and more.
Minimum valuable learning is exactly the same idea. Given the fast-paced nature of work today, your business probably doesn’t have months and months to wait before workers learn new skills. Instead, you need to act swiftly. A poorly lit instructional video made on your phone might not look as great as you’d like. But if it contains the information people need, it’s probably worth getting that done in a single afternoon. Down the line, you can finesse it further when you know how its content needs to improve too.
There’s even a way to calculate what will be the most useful and impactful resource to develop. Rate each potential learning resource on a scale of one to ten in the following categories: Impact – how helpful do you think this resource will be? Confidence – how confident are you that it’ll deliver? And ease – how simple is it to put together and roll out this resource?
Multiply those three numbers, and you’ll have a score out of 1,000. Prioritize the highest scorers first, and you’ll be on your way to delivering maximum impact as soon as possible.
But, as you’ve learned, that’s just the starting point. Keep monitoring the effect of your new resource, and each time you get feedback, incorporate that into an update.
Every iteration of the resource should bring it closer to achieving learning-challenge fit. You’ll know you’ve reached this stage when your resource improves your business’s performance the way it’s supposed to – when the learning resource fits the challenge it’s designed to solve.
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Let startup concepts like sprints and marketing inspire you to learn at speed.
Just like a startup, an L&D team needs to consider which problems it’s solving, deploy solutions quickly and efficiently through a minimum viable product, and improve itself iteratively using metrics and feedback. But there are a couple other things L&D can learn from startups, which we’ll explore in this final chapter.
The first is the sprint – another term you’ve likely heard from tech. A sprint is when you set aside a period of time to focus on achieving a particular outcome – say, developing a new product – as quickly and effectively as possible. But you can do a learning sprint too.
Assemble a team of people who’ll be able to develop the resource you’re after. The sprint master will take the lead in keeping the team on track, and the L&D team will work together to create the solution. The challenge owner is the person who best understands the problem’s details; they’ll keep the team on track toward their goal. Through constructive collaboration and iterating through solutions, a learning sprint can be an especially rapid and effective way to put useful resources together.
One last thing L&D can borrow from startups? Marketing techniques. This might sound odd at first – you’re not actually trying to sell anything, after all. But it’s still all about messaging. As mentioned right at the start, People are cynical about the effectiveness of traditional L&D – and often with good reason – so it might take some work to win them over to your new approach.
You could even think of it as a rebrand. Maybe the way that you communicate L&D to workers needs a complete overhaul. Think about your L&D brand values and story, and even come up with a brand name. This will help you tell a persuasive story about the work you’re doing.
You can also try influencer marketing. You don’t need to go viral on Instagram – you’re targeting employees, after all. But you can learn from influencer culture. There are bound to be figures in your organization that other staff members look up to and respect. Get them on board with your L&D resources – whether it’s through a video message, an email, or the occasional comment on social channels – and you’ll be well on your way to changing perceptions for the better.
And there you have it! Learning and development needs to learn a thing or two these days – and startups, the ultimate experts in learning and growing at speed, have a lot to share.
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L&D needs to adapt itself to the ever-changing modern world of work – and it can do so by taking cues from successful startups. An agile, lean approach to L&D prioritizes speedy solutions; these can be iteratively improved after a fast rollout, which connects the right resource to the right people at the right time.
Here’s a final piece of actionable advice. You know that Lean Learning only works if you’re measuring the results. Exactly how you do that will depend on the specifics of your business and the challenges you’re solving – but here’s a way to guarantee you’re heading in the right direction: aim for a triangulation of both quantitative and qualitative measurements.
Quantitative measurements refer to hard numbers like revenue growth, customer satisfaction, or profitability. Qualitative information is the sort of feedback you get through interviews and surveys, and it’s just as important. Make sure your team members aren’t just hitting their numbers – they have to be enjoying their work too.
Doesn’t offer much of a novel concept. Merely applies agile lean (with quantitative and qualitative thru feedback kpis) approach to learning and development.
Very interesting read. With a background in sales and marketing I'm relatively new to the L&D world so this adds knowledge and context to a lot of the political and work culture issues I'm currently facing within my organisation. Examples given throughout the book are relatable to me as I have come from a corporate background, however current colleagues of mine have always worked third sector and may not find a lot of the contents examples relatable. However the theory is transferable in my opinion to charity/third sector. Did this book answer all my questions? Almost. Having said that, it worked being light touch. Did it wet my appetite to shake things up in my current organisation? Absolutely! This was an excellent read for new entrants into the industry and for those who have found things have gotten a little stale around their L&D department.