Rethinking Workplace Training for In-Role Competence

When it comes to employee training, most firms have lost sight of the bigger picture. Outside professions and trades, workplace training and development has, in many cases, regressed to ticking a box. Given the global talent shortage and the need to upskill 90% of the UK workforce by 2030, employers must wake up and invest in training that genuinely improves employee performance in their roles.

The Crisis of Workplace Training

Too many firms have viewed workplace training as a cost to be actively managed down, not just in cash terms but also in “lost time” terms. In doing so, they have lost sight of the objective. They measure training completion and not employee in-role competence. As a result, employees often report that they don’t have the skills to do the job, attrition is increasing, service standards are falling, and maintaining – let alone improving – workplace productivity is a challenge for many white-collar employers.

Learning and Development (L&D) are not represented at the top table, except by proxy with the Head of People or HR. This simply reinforces the level of importance firms now place on employee learning and development. If it were truly important, there would be a C-suite owner. Case in point, a growing number of firms have a Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Director. Regardless of your D&I views, it feels (and obviously is) wrong that D&I is prioritised above learning and development. But that’s the reality.

Back in the day, employers genuinely invested in the development of their employees. In fact, as a member of Generation X, I recall that my parents placed a lot of emphasis on employers who would “properly train you.” If you were lucky enough to land a role with the local bank, for example, and provided you kept your nose clean, you were going to receive excellent training and the development of life skills and specialist role and sector skills that would form the foundation of your working career.

A Tick-Box Approach: The Limitations of Traditional Training

LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report 2024 offers valuable insights into the evolving landscape of workplace learning. A key takeaway is that skill building has become a pivotal factor in organisational success. Companies are increasingly looking for ways to prioritise aligning learning programs with their business goals to maximise their impact.

Upskilling employees and supporting their career development are also top priorities. This focus on employee growth is not just about retention; it’s about fostering a more engaged and productive workforce. The report highlights that providing learning opportunities is the most effective strategy for retaining employees, addressing the growing concern of employee turnover. In fact, 90% of organisations are concerned about employee retention, and providing learning opportunities is the number one retention strategy.

Beyond retention, learning also plays a crucial role in enhancing employee engagement. Seven in ten employees say learning improves their sense of connection to their organisation, and eight in ten employees say learning adds purpose to their work.

The report also identifies the top five goals for driving business impact through L&D learning programs:

Aligning learning programs to business goals.
Upskilling employees.
Creating a culture of learning.
Helping employees develop their careers (up from number nine in the 2023 report).
Improving employee retention.

The data behind these findings comes from LinkedIn’s extensive dataset, which encompasses billions of data points from 900 million members worldwide. This wealth of information allows for a deep understanding of workplace learning trends. The report underscores the growing importance of investing in employee development as a strategic imperative for long-term organisational success.

However, the report also highlights a crucial (and continual) blocker that still hinders L&D: aligning learning to business is still a new muscle for L&D professionals. Many are still preoccupied with “vanity metrics”, such as employee satisfaction or the amount of training delivered (regardless of efficacy).

The Strategic Imperative of Employee Development

The solution is simple. Go back to first principles. Forget about counting training hours, happy sheets, completion data, and short-term post-training assessment/tests (that curiously everybody passes) and, instead, start measuring employee in-role competence and improve it.

The trouble is most employers have no idea how to meaningfully measure employee in-role competence. Chances are they would be forced to rely on output data, which, while perhaps representative, doesn’t answer the question and therefore doesn’t provide the insight L&D need as to where to provide training, development and support.

The answer doesn’t lie in the provision of training. I notice now that there is a vast array of free-to-air training content on any number of workplace skills and subject matters. And given you can use Generative Artificial Intelligence to curate your training content on pretty much any subject, the issue cannot be the shortage of training material. Spending millions on curating “sexy-looking” training is missing the point. After all, the reason the previous training didn’t work wasn’t because the content wasn’t “sexy” enough, it was because the employee failed to learn it, retain it, and translate it into in-role competence.

When I attend international exhibitions and trade fairs on learning and development, I am astounded by the fact that very few vendors are promoting learning solutions that quantifiably improve the in-role performance of the employee. As unpopular as this may be, most are talking about variations on the theme of how to deliver theoretical training. When I speak to senior operational leaders, like COOs and functional heads of departments in large employers, when they have attended these events, they come away bemused and disinterested in ever attending any such event again. And these are the very folks that should be embracing L&D and collaborating with them to actively improve individual employee workplace competence.

The Barriers to Effective Learning and Development

What employers actually want from L&D is an improvement in the in-role competence of the employee and for it to contribute to the overall improvement of the business’ economic performance. Training consumption is a requirement but is a subset or step on the road to improving in-role competence. It isn’t of itself the objective. It is therefore the wrong “target”.

And if we look at the evidence that has been around for over 100 years, more than 60% of what is trained is forgotten by the employee in just 24 hours. No employee, regardless of how smart they are, can put into practice training they have received and not retained. Few firms invest any real credible effort in ensuring knowledge retention. Even if they did and could guarantee that every employee learned everything they were trained, they would still, likely, see only a limited improvement in in-role competence.

Employers don’t meaningfully measure in-role competence and therefore it makes training against it very difficult. Also, most workplace training is theoretical in nature, which is unhelpful, as the desired outcome is inevitably not theoretical in the majority of roles. What is required is that the employee needs to “convert” or “translate” that theoretical training into learnt competence.

The analogy I use here is riding a bicycle. If you arrived from Mars and had never ridden a bicycle, you could get a manual, perhaps watch a video, read some stuff, whatever suits your learning style, and learn the theory of bicycle riding. You could even take a test/exam (to be clear, this is a theory test) and perhaps score full marks. But as soon as you walk outside and pick up a bicycle for the first time and attempt to ride it, chances are it will end in disaster! This is because, like workplace competence, riding a bicycle is a learnt competence, not a theoretical exercise.

Thinking about workplace training, it takes time to learn to apply theory, which hopefully you have actually learnt and retained, and apply it to real-life scenarios. More than 70% of our workplace learning comes from peer-to-peer learning, which is a problem when most firms are, to varying degrees, working hybrid.

At the time of writing this article (September 2024), on average, employees in the US are working 3.1 days in the office each week, and employees in the UK, just 2.7. While many employers are publicly and privately working hard to get employees back in the office, every day spent working from home is a further reduction in the effectiveness of peer-to-peer learning.

So, we find ourselves in the midst of a global talent shortage and workplace training failing to deliver against business requirements. At a time when employees’ ability to learn from their peers is seriously reduced because of hybrid working, what then is the answer?

AI-Powered In-Role Competence Optimisation

Curiously, the answer lies (at least partially) in Artificial Intelligence. But not in the way many might think, i.e., to replace humans in the workforce entirely. That strategy is already facing backlash from consumers who favour personalised experiences over digital-first approaches. We’re talking about using Artificial Intelligence to treat employees as individuals, identifying knowledge gaps (the foundation of competence), and then discreetly and efficiently helping them close those gaps and apply their new knowledge effectively in their roles.

But let’s not stop there. Let’s collaborate with those functional leaders and those exasperated P&L owners who are desperate to improve productivity and performance, and “point” the Artificial Intelligence at drivers of value destruction in the workplace. For example, if a particular job family are making mistakes and these mistakes are destroying value, have the Artificial Intelligence focus on defining and optimising the competence required to eradicate those mistakes, or framed more positively, perform the role optimally.

If we pause to consider how professions and trades people train the next generation, it couldn’t be much further away from how most corporations train their white-collar employees. Not only is the training continual but so is the assessment, and that assessment is competence-based, not theoretical. That isn’t to say in both professions and trades there aren’t formal exams; rather, these are milestones and markers that a level of competence has been achieved. If you consider how employers in these sectors recruit experienced staff, it very frequently involves interviews where the candidate is required to actually demonstrate competence. Certification is often a requirement, but more of a control mechanism than anything else.

A Call to Action for Employers

Corporations need to look to how professions and trades continually invest in the authentic training and development of their employees. There isn’t a race to the bottom in terms of cost or time, and the objective isn’t a box to tick that training has occurred. It is philosophically and culturally a completely different mindset. It works, and it is an approach that is equally relevant in corporate life. And now the technology exists to ensure that it is easy and cheap in terms of dollars and time for employers to adopt a continual assessment and development strategy that is individually focused and related to in-role competence.

The time has long passed for L&D and functional leaders to rebel against a lowest-cost-to-deliver training strategy and embrace a sustained commitment to employee in-role competence optimisation. The employers that tick boxes and “save money” are likely to increasingly find themselves on the wrong side of Glassdoor and similar employee feedback platforms. They may struggle to recruit and retain staff, and their competitors may outperform them. Regardless of your business model, I have yet to meet a CEO who wouldn’t want to lead a business where every employee was demonstrably competent in-role and gently supported to remain so, even as the business and marketplace changes.

Elephants Don’t Forget are global pioneers in leveraging Artificial Intelligence to enhance employee in-role performance. We partner with top-tier brands worldwide, helping them optimise their employees’ competence to excel in their roles. Our clients, who already have established learning management systems, knowledge bases, and specialised training materials, partner with us because they understand that training is not the end goal; it’s about achieving in-role competence.