The past several years have shifted the way society interacts, learns and works. The workplace specifically has undergone a drastic change as new technologies have increased automation and left many employees and business leaders feeling uncertain of what’s to come. For training professionals, understanding the current landscape of employee development and the road ahead is crucial to building a future-ready workforce.
Future L&D Trends in Corporate Training
As 2024 rapidly approaches, there are three big trends we can expect to see in learning and development (L&D).
1. The Skills Trinity: Generative AI, Emotional Intelligence and Growth Mindset Take Center Stage
Organizations wanting to take advantage of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools will place increased emphasis on training employees to leverage those tools for increased productivity and task-specific assistance. In turn, generative AI will continue to flatten the learning curve of many technical skills. The focus will shift to a broader set of skills around prompting, validating and refining AI outputs. In effect, people will need to learn to collaborate with machines.
But skills for collaboration with machines won’t be the only collaboration skills in high demand. New capabilities afforded by generative AI make those uniquely human skills even more important, and a more critical part of L&D programs. Emotional intelligence skills like empathy, self-awareness, self-regulation and self-motivation will be critical to how people work together alongside advanced technologies. Together, humans will need to be critical thinkers, ethicists and imagineers who leverage these new tools for the overall betterment of the organization and society at large.
The third cluster of uniquely human skills employees will need to develop falls within the domain of growth mindset and agility. People will need to get comfortable being uncomfortable in a state of constant disruption as technology continues to advance. A learning mindset — one that is curious, experimental and eager to take on new challenges — will be key to navigating 2024 and beyond.
2. Courses Evolve Into Dynamic Content Configurations
Many L&D “courses” resemble their school-based counterparts, designed as static, linear experiences to drive learners toward a predefined outcome. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a “course,” but the challenge is that courses take a significant amount of time and cost to be built and then updated and refreshed. With the half-life of skills and knowledge shrinking due to accelerated innovation, courses need to keep pace, resulting in ever more resourcing for them to maintain relevance.
The oft-cited phrase “resources not courses” refers to the need to connect employees to content that is focused to their need in the moment, as opposed to driving them through a full course. While it’s not a new concept, it will have new meaning in 2024 in a workplace augmented by generative AI. Think of resources like Legos: modular components that can be easily assembled, disassembled, and reassembled into unique configurations based on specific learning contexts. This means a single unit of content might be accessed by an employee with a specific need in the flow of work, or that same content unit might get deliberately sequenced into something that resembles a course for a different need. And when one resource becomes outdated, it’s easier and more efficient to swap it out with something more relevant when content is created with modularity in mind.
For example, take a seasoned manager who needs to deliver critical feedback to a direct report. The manager may not need a full course on delivering feedback, but instead can access a bite-sized resource in the flow of work. This manager could leverage an AI assistant to help find the right resource and receive personalized guidance on how to approach that challenge. At the same time, new managers might engage with that same resource as part of a more intensive, cohort-driven learning experience focused on building a comprehensive set of skills for delivering feedback, with different framings and scaffolds around that resource that make it relevant to the needs of a new manager. Over time, that same resource could become part of many configurations of content, contextualized for specific needs and easily swapped out for a new resource if that content becomes outdated.
3. Learning Increases Its Footprint Across the Organization
The COVID-19 pandemic, economic volatility and the proliferation of generative AI technologies have made it challenging to build sustainable learning programs. Purchasing of L&D tools exploded during the pandemic to support an overnight shift to fully online learning and to quickly upskill teams on remote work. An economic downturn combined with software bloat from pandemic spending saw many L&D teams tightening budgets and cutting non-essential tools. But as 2023 draws to a close, L&D teams seem to have found their footing, allowing for greater strategic clarity on how they will generate impact across the organization.
New ways of creating and delivering content, the ability to better align the right modality of learning to the need, and a greater sense of urgency to accelerate on-the-job learning will fuel this growth and impact of L&D efforts. One segment especially likely to see increased attention will be front-line workers. Whether it’s sales associates on a retail floor, line workers in a manufacturing plant or front desk agents in a hotel, these segments of the organization can have a massive impact on the bottom line of a business due to both the sheer number of workers in these roles and their direct contact with customers or other critical business processes. Those uniquely human skills like emotional intelligence and growth mindset in addition to skills related to productivity, wellness and mindfulness will be critical for the success of these workers and the business operations they support.
