What Is
Learning and Development (L&D)?
Definition and Strategy

We’re here today to discuss how companies make their workforce more competent and motivated to complete their tasks. You’ll meet with various strategies you can deploy for this purpose and see who are those heroes doing that. Learning and development consists of two words that seem closely related, but let’s look closer and distinguish them.

Combining these two processes together, you make yourself and your employees work more efficiently while becoming more motivated for that. The need for recognition and personal growth is an extremely strong motivator, stronger than salary. Thus, corporate learning and development are a great part of success. As you will find out, upskilling the worker costs several times less than finding the new one. Combine it with enhanced motivation, and you’ll see how your enterprise will flourish!

So it begins!

It is a set of practices aimed at increasing the skill level of people working in the company and, consequently, a job position of a person proficient in corporate education management.

Incompetence is one of the deadliest sins in the corporate environment. That doesn’t mean, however, that some of us are born more competent than others. Rather, the answer is in how to increase the competencies of everyone involved. That’s the essence we’ll explore here. The learning and development training involves various activities elaborated on and managed by L&D specialists. There are various areas of improvement: from core competencies, involving those that directly create value for the company, to the efficiency of the management and communication in it.

We’ll see each of these areas later.

In the L&D definition, we’d better start with an example.

Imagine that you have an army in a large real-time strategy game. You need to protect your base, gather resources, and overcompete all your enemies. In addition to building, expanding, extracting, and training new units, most games enable you to gather a specific resource, knowledge, and use it to increase your units’ powers or even go to more developed eras. Actually, it’s quite close to how it works in real business, despite you should remember that it’s much more complex.

The importance of learning and development is the same as the knowledge accumulation in such games. Your employees grow in their productivity, increase their productivity with each “level-up” and, therefore, create more value, remaining more satisfied. However, here you cannot measure knowledge directly; only by using metrics such as task completion rate, turnover rate, and employee satisfaction.

It’s important to pay attention to these metrics. Now, we’ll explore relevant strategies.

We have several competency fields, each of them showing some area of human activity. Each of them requires a different approach and skillset, so it’s possible to reach proficiency in most of them. Various learning and development strategy examples work with these areas, increasing knowledge and possibilities in these. According to Fayek & Omar's (2016) article, there are six of them, and that’s enough to reach notable progress.

To figure out an L&D strategy, explore each of these segments thoroughly. Ask questions and gather feedback from your colleagues. You can use the well-known four stages of competency to evaluate the skill level, no matter to which competency area it corresponds. See the reference scheme below that was elaborated in the 1970s by Noel Burch from the Gordon Training International training center.

Let`s explore each stage:

So, you don’t have anything like the tangible resource called “Knowledge” you can measure as belonging to your company. But you have many various types of knowledge and various metrics that enable you to actually evaluate how knowledge-rich you are. At the end of this article, you’ll see how learning management systems (LMSs), such as our own, help you in measuring them. Now, let’s see them.

With these numbers and approximations in mind, you can track the plan completion and edit it when necessary.

So, you need a plan that will work again and again, being updated and edited regularly based on metrics and feedback. It will increase the accumulated knowledge in your company and transform it into an efficient and healthy workspace with educated and engaged employees.

If you think everything above is familiar but cannot remember where you heard that, you’ve possibly remembered the human resources industry. Yes, L&D is part of this industry, as it deals with the most precious resource of a company: people. Still, it’s so different from other practices, such as hiring, onboarding, and allocating, that should be overviewed separately. In addition, it’s our business, so it’s certainly the most important for us!

But, let’s not rush to judgment. Let’s see some numbers.

While it’s all the same large field of people and workforce management, corporate education and skill development is quite a specific part. You can explore various types of HR tools and software in the article linked above, and see that L&D tools include a fraction of them. Learning management systems (LMSs) and, to a certain extent, talent management systems (TMSs) work as platforms to share knowledge, engage learners, and assign tasks for reinforcement and performance tracking.

According to the 2021 LinkedIn report, more than 60% of L&D specialists consider it as the key activity of the company that should be directly supervised by the executive team. It also shows that employees are 2 times more eager to stay at the company with robust HR learning and development activities and opportunities to grow. Lastly, it’s very trendy: almost 80% of young specialists born in the 1990s believe that education is the key to a career.

According to the latest studies, only 20% of employees are engaged at their workplaces and more than 80% aren’t satisfied there. Improving the situation will quickly move you at the top-level companies from the employees’ point of view. L&D is among the most viable and powerful methods to change the situation, increasing engagement to more than 70%.

Both searching for new employees and upskilling the existing ones aim to rally your company and ensure its efficiency in working together. We can seek more numbers and reveal that, according to the Workable resources, the average cost to fill a position is about $15,000, including all waste and expenses. Meanwhile, according to the recent Training Industry Reports, the yearly cost of employee upskilling is only about $1,200. Saves can be much larger, up to more than $30,000 per employee.

So, if we compare HR and L&D, we’ll see that the latter is the best practice not only to ensure the competitiveness of your teams but also to save costs and ensure a healthy work environment.

Our world is full of machines that improve people’s lives. Our industry isn’t different. We have a lot of learning and development software on the market, and so we’ll end our article by depicting some of them. They have similar core functionalities, enabling you to maintain a knowledge base and enhance employees’ skills, but their inclinations may be different, so you’d better choose one based on which options you need the most and how much you’re ready to invest in L&D.

When developing a learning and development program, choose the LMS that fits you best, based on whether you need a fully customized app, a learning experience platform, a bunch of AI tools, a large learning base, or something else. That’s the last element in your puzzle and by combining the proper learning tool with the well-developed strategies, you’ll obtain the best result!