Learning at Work 2023 with Laura Overton

UNLEASH editor Jon Kennard gets some time with learning analyst and Learning Changemakers founder Laura Overton about her latest research in conjunction with the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development).

The Learning at Work 2023 report aims to give people a sense of learning leaders’ place in the world in 2023 – do teams feel aligned with business needs? Are they being listened to? Do they have the support they need?

With so many data points it’s difficult to pick an angle…

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Jon Kennard: I’m wondering where to start; Actually, I know exactly where to start, I think, which is the fact that 59% of all practitioners surveyed agreed that they can respond in an agile way to the changing skill needs of organizations. Okay. I get that to a degree, but it’s down from 69% in 2021, and I think that’s quite remarkable.

My initial thoughts; my reaction would be that post pandemic, there was a lot of change in business about how they approach skills, but maybe as the knowledge of that experience receded, businesses are reverting, regressing to the mean, going back to their old ways. Which means that they have rejected the need to change to these things because old business is back to how it was before we had this ridiculous global event. Do you agree with that at all?

Laura Overton: Well, I think that this is a conversation that I’ve had with Andy Lancaster (head of learning at the CIPD) many times since the data came through from the CIPD, as he’s obviously been looking at it that from the member’s perspective as well.

A return to old ways of working

And I think one of the things that we both agree on is the fact that COVID-19 and the pandemic, when the last data was gathered, really provided a unique opportunity. It was a time when everyone in business was working towards a common agenda. Everyone had a common purpose. You know, how do we adapt?

How do we shift, how do we change, how do we survive through fundamental changes to our business and to the world around us? So whether you are a CEO or a customer service rep or a learning and development person, we were all focused on a common purpose.

So actually we had a taste of what it was like to roll our sleeves up and be on the same team. And that’s incredibly exciting. But as you say, it’s not necessarily that we’ve regressed, but the world has opened up. There are more options available now. We certainly saw in this year’s study, in terms of how we support learning, we’ve got so many more of the face-to-face options that have opened up to us again, so many more of the technology options that have opened up put so many more different demands on us.

And so our ability to work out what we should be working on and to be able to respond agilely, were considerably constrained. And one of the statistics that we did find was that regardless of where the person was working in the organization, they felt that their workload has significantly increased.

Their budgets hadn’t necessarily decreased, their headcount hadn’t necessarily decreased – which has been a big concern – but the workloads, what was expected from the resources that have been put into learning and development in organizations has considerably increased. So I think people have been pulled and pushed and are re-stabilized.

But, both Andy and I believe that the pandemic gave us a flavor of what it was like to work hand in hand with the business, within the business as part of the business, rather than FOR the business. And, there were certainly some themes that were running through this report where we could see little hints that that’s still still going on, which we were very excited about.

JK: Yeah, definitely. You’ve been doing research not exactly like this, but similar to this, and certainly in this field for so long. So it must be really interesting to see how these kind of trends have changed over the last 5, 10, 15 years, maybe even longer. Another one I’d like to focus on is that 63% of learning and development professionals agree that they work collaboratively across the business.

An upward alignment trend?

We know from years and years of your work that the companies that are gonna succeed are the ones that align to business needs and really embed themselves in the direction of the business rather than be siloed off and doing their own work. Is this statistic positive to you or negative that it’s 63%, you could say, well, a whole third of the companies that we surveyed aren’t doing this, but is this an amount that’s on the increase – are more people doing this and aligning more with the business?

LO: I think that there’s so many things to unpack in that. My comment there, Jon, is; one, it’s a statistic. It is how this sample has interpreted that question at this point in time. It’s not one that we can compare against data and let’s see whether or not it’s shifted, but it’s one that certainly I would like to keep an eye on as we move forward.

We can see that people are much more likely to be, “I was analyzing the problem before recommending a solution.” So that is one way that perhaps they’re being more collaborative. There are others who are also getting more involved in collaboration and encouraging conversation as part of their way of supporting learning within the organization.

We saw that was on the increase as well, and that could also be an interpretation of how people are becoming more collaborative. So are they more aligned? I couldn’t answer that from the statistic. Would I like more people answering that question? Of course I would. But how are they collaborating? Is there definition of collaboration getting more people to engage with them or are they engaging more with the business’s agenda?

With all of these statistics and anybody who writes a report, they have to put a lens over the top of this data. So we share this statistic, but we’re not giving a definition of key interpretation.

But we’re saying, actually, this is something for us to dig into. Let’s explore why some people aren’t and why some people are. What does this actually mean? What are the benefits? And let’s triangulate it with other studies.

And certainly there are many other studies, and the ones that I’ve been involved over the last 20 years actually show collaboration in a particular way correlates back to business impact. So of course, I’m interested in this particular statistic, but I think it’s one that we need to be sharing with the community like we’re doing today, saying, what does it mean to you? When does it work? When doesn’t it work?

Why might some people be pushing ahead with more collaboration and some may not? Is it the skills agenda? Are we collaborating more with succession planning and talent? So I love it when a statistic stimulates conversation…