Personnel developers as trusted guides

An international survey by the Corporate Leadership Council reveals that around two-thirds of respondents see the role of personnel development (PE) as having no effective impact on business results, because the measures do not match actual needs and because the company’s challenges are not addressed in a timely manner.

The pandemic has accelerated the need to acquire new skills and competencies. As a result, the role of HR developers becomes even more central than before. Investing in employee development in the workplace would thus have to be a must-do of corporate strategy. According to Mc Kinsey, however, the budget for qualification measures fell during the pandemic for 21 percent of respondents (in Germany, according to the degreed study, even 41%).

How does Learning & Development manage the balancing act

between more precise content in the face of rapidly changing needs and at the same time less budget?

Personnel developers must move much closer to the strategy and the situational needs of the company’s employees. In the future, personnel developers will have the following two main roles:

Learningabler

 

Trusted Guide

As learning enablers (or technological gatekeepers), they create suitable spaces and provide methods, formats and tools to ensure that knowledge gets to where it is needed quickly and efficiently.

The even more important role is that of the trusted guide or learning curator.

Trusted Guides are human filters, they are competent, trustworthy people through whom we can get fast, competent and straightforward help, who support us in obtaining and verifying relevant information.

How do we find relevant information that really helps us in the increasingly dense information jungle with manageable effort? Who can really help us?

The Learning and Development department must become the first GO-TO address for these challenges.

Personnel developers can act as trusted guides directly on topics for which they themselves are passionate, or indirectly in the empowerment of other internal trusted guides.

In this context, internal Trusted Guides should have authority over content

and with the support of the methodology specialists in the Learning & Development departments, recommend content that can be drawn from different situations and create settings and learning paths that meet the needs of the target groups and enable social exchange

On the one hand, these can be experts or, in particular, leaders. Successful leaders create trust and framework conditions through open spaces and networks so that employees can take responsibility for shaping the company’s development.

Inflexible prefabricated learning programs are insufficient

Inflexible prefabricated learning programs, which are planned and rolled out for two years in advance after a one-year development period, simply no longer meet these requirements.

In addition, 100% suitable content is not always available on the market, and sometimes adaptation is required. To produce the content, you often lack the resources, the time or the skills.

Curation becomes increasingly essential

In the future, curation will therefore become increasingly essential, as the focus will be on merging existing content with new experiences. Or, in other words, on the personalization of knowledge, i.e. the adaptation of content to one’s own needs, the needs of a department, a company, an industry in the open knowledge mindset (freely available and editable knowledge). 

The market needs more flexible learning platforms for this purpose

which are not only concerned with searching for and collecting their own content – and subsequently producing content – but also with filtering, organizing and enriching it with other content, i.e. curating. Open Sesame and Microsoft Viva are already moving in this direction, but their potential is far from exhausted.  

We will therefore need a combination of agile, supportive learning technology and a new functional understanding of L&D departments supported by trusted guides in order to meet the current and future challenges of learning & development.

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