Back to Basics: Impactful and Frictionless Skills-Based L&D

Many L&D leaders are starting to shift their function’s role toward enhancing the employee experience while also addressing the challenges that hinder their workflows and personal growth.

To follow in their footsteps, we should prioritize efficient solutions focusing on skills-based learning that minimizes the time people spend away from work, allowing for improved performance and career development.

In this article, we explore what has helped Josh Novelle, VP of People Experience and Insights at HSBC, make a planned and demonstrable impact in his various L&D senior leadership roles and the role of L&D in helping our organizations shift to skills-based learning.

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Taking L&D interventions back to basics

Returning to basics involves aligning your learning and development strategy to your organization's business goals.

To get back to the basics, we need to step back and evaluate whether our activities benefit our employees, stakeholders, and the organization at their specific pain points. If your learning experience isn’t making the desired impact, retire it, and move on to the next one that does.

“So, it’s just trying to keep things super clean, easy, and basic,” Josh Novelle, VP of People Experience and Insights at HSBC.

Next, you should also look to the protection piece—do your learning experiences add value to your organization by boosting or defending revenue? For example, compliance training doesn’t improve revenue but instead defends it.

Learning the language at the table

We all want a seat at our stakeholder’s table, but to get there, we need to focus on performance by understanding our hypothesis and speaking their language.

Your hypothesis is the performance problem you are setting out to solve for your employees and organization, backed by the data and indicators highlighting the pain points you’re setting out to impact.

“And that’s what I would say 99% of our stakeholders are operating on when they come knocking on our door,” Josh Novelle, VP of People Experience and Insights at HSBC.

However, a common concern among many L&D departments is that we don’t have a seat at the table. If we genuinely want a seat at the table, we need to bring value to the conversation in the language of the organization’s financials.

By speaking the language of your stakeholders and understanding your hypothesis, you can design and deploy learning experiences that solve the business problems your stakeholders are seeking your help to fix.

The key to agile L&D strategies

To get your team and stakeholders on board with skills-based L&D, testing and iterating various models that fit your needs is an excellent place to start.

Truly impactful learning and development is working with your team to answer the question of how you can solve business pain points together. One way to effectively collaborate is to address and solve a single problem. You can also boost stakeholder engagement by talking about business metrics of success instead of L&D ones.

“Never wed yourself to a single way of doing stuff because the world will change around you,” Josh Novelle, VP of People Experience and Insights at HSBC.

If you know the real business problems your stakeholders need to solve, you can really reduce friction in employee workflows by designing solutions that take people away from their work as little as possible.

The role of L&D in shifting to a skills-based organization

L&D’s function in helping to transition to a skills-based organization represents a significant and evolving effort but comes with a wide range of impactful benefits.

“To make skills-based work holistically, it has to be the language of absolutely everything through every single HR process around the world,” Josh Novelle, VP of People Experience and Insights at HSBC.

As many organizations are realizing, the key to shifting towards becoming a skills-based organization is that we don’t have to turn all of it on today. However, we must commit by including it in our vision statements—we do have to go that far today.

By moving toward skills-based learning, L&D has a golden opportunity to engage with our stakeholders who are now speaking our language, and we can head into mapping, assessing, and bridging the development and skills gap more efficiently and quickly.

4 expert tips for boosting your L&D leadership journey

Here are four expert tips to enhance your journey as a leader in learning and development.

1. Read company reports: Familiarize yourself with your organization's annual report or end-of-year board paper. These documents provide insights into the company's goals and external measures of success, like stock value or public confidence, which can guide the development of skill-targeted learning solutions.

2. Integrate technology for skills-based learning: Leverage emerging technologies and tools in learning or talent management that align with skills-based and performance-oriented learning. Utilize generative AI for various purposes like assessment, polling, or skills mapping.

3. Build organizational savvy: Focus on effectively managing your L&D profile within your organization. Ensure you're recognized for your desired contributions, gain appropriate exposure, and create a positive buzz around your initiatives while maintaining integrity.

4. Deploy quick and practical learning solutions: Don’t hesitate to develop and implement straightforward, efficient learning solutions. Leverage available resources to rapidly design and deploy these solutions, test them, and retire them if they’re ineffective.

Get further insights into this topic in Josh Novelle’s episode on The L&D Podcast: L&D Leadership, Making Impact and Skills-based Learning With Josh Novelle.

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