How to Create a Winning Learning and Development Strategy

Companies are facing skills gaps of epic proportions. The growth of artificial intelligence alone has meant that 1.4 billion people worldwide will need significant training to reskill. And 75% of CEOs say that skills gaps are their biggest growth blocker.

Hiring can’t overcome these issues in isolation. 62% of companies say they can’t find new staff with the necessary skills, while 63% report that young team members are leaving too quickly to be replaced effectively.

As L&D professionals, we have a responsibility to create a business environment that employees want to be a part of and that helps them grow. A successful learning and development strategy creates a values-based culture that motivates and engages employees, ensuring that the entire team is aligned towards core business goals.

In this article, we delve deeper into the key elements of a good L&D strategy including how to incorporate collaborative learning, on-the-job learning, and formal training into your L&D initiatives. Plus, we show you how to shape your plans—from aligning training with business goals, measuring impact, and leveraging tools such as an LMS to scale your learning and development programmes, we’ve got all the resources you need right here.

What is a learning & development strategy?

For too long, companies have viewed learning and development as a “nice to have” — a perk or added bonus to sell during the recruitment process. But as any experienced L&D professional will tell you, there’s too much planning, preparation, and monitoring required to take such a passive approach.

A learning & development strategy is a formal plan to upskill and reskill employees (and often customers) on an ongoing basis. Your strategy should:

• Set out the goals, KPIs, and company objectives you’ll reach with L&D
• Identify the existing state of play, including any known skills gaps or potential future risks from a lack of employee training
• Ensure that employees’ professional growth aligns with corporate objectives
• Assign and explain key roles and responsibilities, including learners, managers, subject-matter experts, and L&D administrators
• Include a clear timeline to evaluate the strategy itself, and the progress you will have made

As with any other corporate strategy, you need to show a clear business case and the steps you’ll take to reach your goals. Most importantly, this all needs to be formally written down and reviewed by executive leadership.

Learning and development programs are an investment and require resources, so having the sponsorship of your founders and company leaders is critical.

The elements of a successful L&D strategy

A good organisational L&D strategy should focus on harnessing employee development through continuous training and upskilling. By providing your team with further learning opportunities, they’re given the chance for professional development while simultaneously enhancing overall business performance.

Just as crucially, your learning program should help the organisation achieve its key goals. Whether that’s revenue growth, sustainability, profitability, or long-term employee retention, create training programs that drive towards key business objectives.

Key elements for organisations

A good strategy for learning and development offers more than just an opportunity for your employees to grow. A clearly defined strategy also reaps a number of benefits for your organisation.

• It helps companies attract and retain talent within the team. A recent survey by LinkedIn found that corporate learning and development opportunities are seen as essential for 76% of Gen Z, 61% of millennials, 56% of Gen X, and 55% of baby boomers. Sixty per cent of UK job seekers consider career development a vital part of their job search. Drive retention by offering and promoting learning opportunities on a regular basis.
• It motivates workers and increases employee engagement. Eighty per cent of respondents from Udemy’s Workplace Boredom Study said that learning new skills makes work feel less dull and makes workers feel more engaged. Improve employee engagement by promoting a continuous learning culture in your organisation.
• It increases performance and improves the quality of work. Keeping your team up-to-date with relevant industry information and skills increases the likelihood you’ll hit your organisation’s business targets. In one study, 83% of Gen Z workers said they wanted to learn new skills so that they could perform better in their jobs.
• It improves your company’s brand. A work environment that prioritises learning programmes and professional development opportunities helps your company shine. With a strategy in place, your company’s learning culture will position you as an industry leader known for producing top-notch talent in the field.
• It creates a values-based culture. Creating a culture based on strong values is becoming increasingly important for organisations. More and more employees want to work for companies that align with their values. L&D programmes are a great way to reinforce company values, particularly in a world where workforces are becoming increasingly dispersed.
• It becomes a competitive advantage. All of the benefits above help you stand out in your industry. It’s not just that you’ll perform better or hire more easily, but you’ll do these things better than others. And the more you develop proprietary skills that nobody else has, the more you can differentiate your organization from the rest.

With the benefits of having a structured learning and development strategy in place, let’s take a look at the steps needed to shape your initiatives.

Key elements for employees

For an L&D programme to be successful, it needs to fill skills gaps as well as harness a culture of constant professional development. An all-encompassing learning and development programme should include a mixture of:

• On-the-job learning—this refers to any activities that aim to develop the skills and competencies of employees in order for them to effectively do their job. This could include self-instruction training that is accessed directly by learners on their own time through LMS platforms or manuals. Other examples include shadowing, mentoring, and onboarding training.
• Collaborative learning— this is where employees share their knowledge and expertise, teaching and learning with one another. It enhances the learning experience by capitalising on each employee’s skills, ideas, and institutional knowledge. Learning platforms that combine an LMS with collaborative learning to make the process intuitive and enjoyable. Rather than rolling out reskilling initiatives for thousands of employees, companies can use collaborative learning techniques to encourage employees to set their own learning goals based on their own aspirations and developmental priorities.
• Formal training—this refers to more traditional, one-way learning activities, usually in the form of face-to-face training courses or workshops. Very often, learners earn certification at the end of their training if certain objectives are met through tests or assignments.

9 steps to shaping your learning & development strategy

Creating a strong learning organisation starts with developing an effective learning and development strategy. Through their ACADEMIES framework, McKinsey outlined the 9 crucial steps HR and L&D teams need to follow in order to implement their own strategies.

1. Align with business strategy—An L&D programme needs to complement the company’s overall business strategy in a timely and cost-effective manner that strengthens the company’s values. A change to L&D is also a good opportunity to directly implement a business strategy. For example, if an organisation is prioritising digital transformation, it can centre its training programmes toward achieving it.
2. Ensure co-ownership between business units and human resources—For a learning and development strategy to work, it must have buy-in and ownership from all stakeholders within the company. Say an organisation’s learning needs suddenly change due to the introduction of new technologies. The L&D programmes need to quickly adapt to the new situation, which involves sign-off and input from different teams and individuals. This could include the chief experience officer (CXO), HR, and business-unit heads.
3. Perform a bottom-up needs analysis—Many companies fail to conduct a thorough needs analysis that focuses on what skills gaps employees themselves have identified as a barrier to achieving the company’s goals. If employees need a deeper understanding of a certain area, you need to assess where the team currently stands. If you find skills gaps, use those assessments to inform your L&D interventions.
4. Design learning pathways—The concept of corporate learning has moved away from long classroom sessions with little to no follow-up. Employees' learning experiences should be a continuous learning path. This leads to more effective learning experiences through things like fieldwork, digital learning tools, social learning, and short workshops.
5. Execute and scale-up—L&D initiatives can be costly and resource-heavy. You can keep the cost of new programmes down through smaller-scale pilot projects. Depending on the outcomes of your launch, the programme can then be rolled out on a larger scale. In the long run, this works out to be more cost-effective while also ensuring a more effective learning experience for the team as a whole.
6. Measure impact—The success of an L&D strategy should be measured using three key performance indicators (KPIs). The first is business excellence—how aligned are the L&D initiatives to the company’s business priorities? The second indicator focuses on learning excellence—are the programmes changing people’s behaviour and performance? Finally, look at operational excellence—have the programme’s investments and resources been used efficiently?
7. Integrate interventions into HR processes—L&D should be closely linked to HR processes like recruitment, onboarding, performance appraisals, and promotions. L&D programmes can also complement performance appraisals and help managers identify gaps, opportunities, and development needs. Companies with a strong L&D component in the onboarding processes ensure that new employees have the resources needed to succeed in their new roles.
8. Use 70:20:10 learning—This framework is based on the idea that 70% of learning takes place on the job, 20% through interaction and collaboration, and the final 10% is reserved for formal learning activities. Considering keeping this framework in mind when developing your learning strategy. Be sure to include interventions across all three areas.
9. Choose the right learning technology—Technology’s role in L&D is crucial. Some of the most effective learning platforms are next-generation LMSs and mobile-learning apps. These cloud-based platforms allow L&D teams to make prompt changes and additions without unnecessary complexity.

With these steps in mind, you can create your own learning and development strategy, which also incorporates the following elements:

• A set of goals and metrics—Define your organisation’s goals, priorities, and vision and how your L&D strategy will help realise them. Once these are defined, what metrics will you use to define the success of your programme?
• An L&D inventory—Look through all of your L&D materials and assess what needs to be added, removed, or improved upon.
• Addresses employee skills gaps and needs—Outline a list of skills and capabilities required for every role in your company and assess the employees currently working within them. Do they meet the requirements you’ve listed? With this knowledge in hand, you can design your L&D programme to fill any gaps and help your team reach their desired outcomes.
• An LMS that caters to all of your L&D needs—Find a learning management system that works within your budget and satisfies all of your L&D programme’s requirements. Be sure to follow this checklist when considering an LMS.
• A plan that includes your KPIs—Understand which KPIs you’ll be using to measure the success of your programme. Find the best methods for evaluating your training programmes and a method to collect them using your Learning Management System.
• A formalised approach to impact measurement—The aim of your L&D programme is to improve employee performance over time. Be sure to have a formalised process for measuring the impact of your training courses and verify your programme is aligned with business goals.

L&D strategy examples

Let’s see some of these ideas in action. Here are three companies that built learning and development strategies to match their particular company structures and cultures.

Croud — Global learning tailored to creatives & clients

International creative agency Croud has more than 2,000 learners across several corporate entities. It needed a program malleable enough to work for its diverse workforce, but also centralized and manageable by a few L&D pros.

Senior Resource Manager Emily Simou explains, “as a creative agency, we are more likely to have neurodivergent employees. So it's really important that we’re able to share content in a number of different formats to cater to how people might need to consume information.”

Croud’s L&D program includes more than 230 distinct paths to suit a range of learning styles, and more than 1,500 individual courses. These were added quickly and easily with the help of internal subject-matter experts, and employees can manage their own learning as suits them best.

Croud was even able to built its own branded space for clients, to help onboard and train them where necessary.

Read the full story here.

Simplyhealth — Agile compliance training at scale

Succeeding as a fintech in the healthcare industry requires a commitment to compliance and regulatory training. With more than 900 employees needing regular upskilling, Simplyhealth needs a smart, dynamic training delivery system.

It chose to move from slow, inconsistent in-person training to a more effective digital experience. This has meant:

• Faster onboarding for new employees
• Better tracking to ensure that everyone receives the training they need
• Easier collaboration between instructors and subject-matter experts
• Over 1,000 courses live on their platform, with more than 80% of employees logging in monthly.

"The digital learning aspect has also empowered people to take their learning into their own hands,” says Talent & Development Specialist Louisa Beer. “This is helping us to build a strong learning culture where people feel engaged and motivated, adding to the overall employee experience.

“We now have a tool that enables us to know that people have received the right information to do the job and protect themselves from a regulatory standpoint.”

Read the full story.

Yousign — Scalable sales enablement

Sales enablement is a common L&D need, and a great focus to build a strategy around. Continuous sales training has a clear business value, and done well can lead to serious results.

Before building a concerted strategy, Yousign ran into familiar issues:

• Ad hoc sales trainings with a lack of standardization
• Busy experts with little time to train their peers
• As a result, low engagement with materials

Senior Revenue Enablement Manager Estefania Rodriguez Merino can deliver effective training to a scaling revenue team on her own. "I can't create all of the courses, but I still manage content distribution because I have the expertise to find the best way to get the message across to the teams successfully, as well as ensuring that our courses meet our brand guidelines.”

The collaborative nature of Yousign’s training means that team members can give input and make updates on the fly. "Learners are constantly sharing feedback with one another. They’re always refining the information available, to the point where they regularly help me update the training."

The result is 90% of new salespeople validating their trial periods and staying with the company, and higher target attainment levels across the board.

Read the full story.

Build the ideal L&D strategy for your organization

Learning management systems like 360Learning, make collaborative learning a reality for modern organisations. You can build and grow skills in real-time, through distributed ownership, using peer-based learning to engage and excite team members.

The difference between this integrated, inclusive, customised approach—and the difficult processes we’ve become accustomed to—is night and day.

Learn more about how collaborative learning can help you and your teams thrive. Get in touch with one of our experts!