How to Level Up Your L&D Strategy Using the L&D Maturity Model Framework

In the fast-evolving landscape of learning and development, you need a strategic approach to maintain a competitive edge. Otherwise, you run the risk of being relegated to a support function: always reactive, never proactive.

That’s where the L&D Maturity Model comes in—it’s your strategic roadmap for assessing and enhancing your capabilities, from learning strategy to metrics. This framework outlines the journey from a reactive approach to a fully transformative one, providing clarity on where your L&D function stands today and how to advance it to the next level. 

By adopting this model, L&D, HR, and talent management professionals can achieve a greater business impact, boost learner engagement, and better align with organizational goals. 

Below, you’ll find a curated list of resources to help you progress through the seven critical themes of L&D maturity.

1. Learning Strategy

Creating a well-rounded learning strategy is key to fostering continuous improvement and bridging skills gaps. A defined approach ensures that your L&D efforts contribute directly to business growth and employee development.

Recommended Resources:

1. 📕7 Factors to Consider When Developing a Skills-Based Learning Strategy - This cheat sheet helps L&D leaders prioritize upskilling and reskilling efforts, leverage essential skills data, and scale their strategies. It also includes tips for securing stakeholder buy-in and measuring the impact of your initiatives.
2. 📝2024 State of Online Learning Report - Drawing on industry insights from over 2,500 learners, this in-depth report explores how L&D leaders can bridge persistent skills gaps, maximize ROI, and demonstrate the impact of their online learning investments.
3. 📝2023 State of Upskilling and Reskilling Report - This comprehensive report dives into the critical issue of global skills gaps, identifying major contributing factors like generational turnover and the rapid evolution of technology. Dig into valuable data on how to navigate upskilling and reskilling challenges, leverage AI tools, and stay ahead in an era where demand for emerging skills outpaces supply.
4. 🎧Back to Basics: Impactful and Frictionless Skills-Based L&D - This podcast episode highlights how to enhance employee experiences by adopting streamlined, skills-based learning approaches; with key insights from Josh Novelle, VP of People Experience and Insights at HSBC.
5. 📝The 9 Steps to a Winning Enterprise Learning Strategy - This article outlines the essential steps for developing an enterprise learning strategy that meets both learner needs and business expectations—alongside practical guidance to build a consistent learning culture, even in large, dispersed organizations.
6. 📝Skills-Based Learning: Our 5-Step Blueprint to Make the Shift and Unlock Your Talent - Winning organizations are no longer thinking in terms of fixed roles and responsibilities, and instead transitioning from role-based to skills-based learning models. This blueprint outlines and highlights how this approach enhances agility, supports talent growth, and prepares organizations to stay competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.

2. Leadership Alignment

Without leadership buy-in, even the best L&D strategies can fall flat. When leaders view L&D as a key partner, it creates momentum for embedding learning into the company culture and achieving long-term success.

Recommended Resources:

1. 📕4 Steps to Making the Pivot to Performance-Driven L&D - This ebook breaks down four crucial steps for shifting from traditional learning-based L&D to a performance-driven approach: identify organizational problems, align expectations, engage SMEs with evidence, and focus on employee performance as the key metric for success.
2. 📝How You Can Get Leaders To Truly Value Learning And Development - Why do so many L&D practitioners feel undervalued? This Forbes article by David James explores strategies to gain genuine support and prioritization from organizational leaders, like understanding and aligning with key stakeholder groups to elevate L&D’s perceived value and impact.
3. 📕How to Defend Your L&D Budget to Your CFO - Use these effective talking points to confidently defend your L&D budget and demonstrate impact. This cheatsheet includes strategies for addressing budget constraints, presenting solutions that highlight L&D’s value, and framing discussions to show how learning initiatives drive business outcomes.
4. 📝How to Get Buy-In on a New LMS for Training Your Employees - A simple list of benefits isn’t enough to secure buy-in from your C-suite. You need to specifically highlight how an LMS will reduce skills gaps, improve employee performance, and achieve your organization’s business goals. This article covers all that, and more.
5. 📝Doing More with Less: How to Preserve Your L&D Budget by Proving Your Impact - Safeguarding your L&D budget amid economic scrutiny requires demonstrating tangible impact. This article outlines how to reassess strategies and priorities to show company leadership the value of L&D investments, effectively proving that your team is achieving more with fewer resources.
6. 📝4 Reasons Why L&D Is Crucial for Your Talent Management Strategy - L&D should be an integral part of your talent management strategy rather than an afterthought. This blog article explains how proactive, aligned learning programs support talent development, prevent skills gaps, and boost employee engagement and retention.
7. 🎧The Bigger Picture: Mirjam Neelen’s 4 Tips on Aligning Stakeholders When Pivoting to Performance L&D - Listen to this podcast episode or read our recap of Novartis’ Head of Global Learning Design and Learning Sciences, Mirjam Neelen’s, strategies for building trust, conducting task analysis, and collaborating on 'worked examples' to ensure stakeholder engagement and impactful outcomes.

3. SME Collaboration

Subject matter experts (SMEs) can be game-changers in creating relatable and practical training content. Building a strong partnership with SMEs ensures that learning is grounded in real-world application.

Recommended Resources:

1. 📕5 Top Tips to Win Over Your Subject-Matter Experts - Internal experts are game-changing: courses created by them are for the business, by the business. They’re the only people with the contextually relevant skills to create training programs that will actually impact performance.  Capturing this knowledge is critical to preserving your organization’s competitive edge and avoiding losing precious institutional knowledge. 
2. 📺Driving Impact with SMEs: HelloFresh, Ideagen, and MSCI Share Their Secrets to Success - In this webinar, L&D leaders at HelloFresh, Ideagen, and MSCI reveal their tried-and-true methods for driving long-term SME involvement, collaborative learning strategies, and best practices for quality control and course creation.
3. 📺The Secret to Solving Critical Business Challenges With Peer-Driven L&D - Watch this webinar replay to learn how Bank and Vogues’ L&D Manager, Ashley Emerson, implemented collaborative learning strategies to triple the organization's employee engagement rate, and reduce training costs and onboarding time from two weeks to two hours.
4. 📝10 Pro Tips From Our Learning Community on Engaging Subject-Matter Experts - Who better to learn about peer learning from than your actual peers? We asked experts from the L&D Collective to share their top tips on sourcing and maintaining strong, ongoing SME collaborations. The first step: incentivizing proactive involvement.   
5. 📺How to Work Alongside Subject-Matter Experts to Solve Business Problems - In this episode from our L&D Master Class series, David James outlines the four essential steps to seamlessly and effectively partner with SMEs, including the importance of timing and simplifying the collaboration process to ensure SME contributions are impactful and seamless.

4. Learner Engagement

For learning to stick, it has to engage. High engagement means better knowledge retention, more skill application on the job, and more robust contributions to business growth.

Recommended Resources:

1. 📕Our 6-Step Playbook for Getting Learning in the Flow of Work Right  - A hands-on and practical guide for embedding learning seamlessly into your learners’ daily workflows. Covers how to avoid common pitfalls, using data to identify critical issues and learner needs, and creating just-in-time learning resources.
2. 📺Learning and Belonging: How L&D and HR Can Collaborate to Retain Top Talent - When L&D and HR teams join forces to build a culture of learning and belonging, engagement and retention go up. This webinar discussion gets into the details of recognizing high performance and creating personalized career development paths to help employees thrive and stay longer.
3. 📕The 7 Biggest Roadblocks to Building a Flexible Working Culture - So, you want to build a flexible working culture? This cheatsheet covers how to overcome the biggest challenges to securing leadership buy-in, building trust, promoting peer-driven learning, and supporting teams with asynchronous work solutions.
4. 📝12 eLearning Tools That Can Make Your Courses More Engaging - As simple and straightforward as it sounds: a curated list of budget-friendly tools designed to help L&D teams create captivating learning content and simplify the process of producing and updating assets. 
5. 📕9 Tips to Help You Create Great Training Courses - Most employees aren’t interested in you teaching them, but in the solutions you equip them with. Here’s a list of actionable tips to build engaging training that is built on your learners’ actual needs and caters to diverse learning preferences.

5. Learning Needs

Understanding learning needs ensures that your programs are tailored to meet both individual and organizational objectives. A thorough needs analysis aligns learning initiatives with business priorities.

Recommended Resources:

1. 📕The 7-Step Playbook for Performance-Driven Online Learning - A comprehensive, step-by-step guide that breaks down proven strategies to enhance your online training programs and reveals what's actually working in today's realm of online learning.
2. 📝A Deep Dive into Conducting a Learner Needs Analysis from A to Z - An in-depth article for hands-on L&D practitioners. Performance Analyst and Instructional Architect Guy Wallace illustrates how to successfully conduct a rigorous performance competence and gap analysis using concrete examples from his own processes.
3. 📝Training Needs Analysis: Find Learning Needs the Right Way - A deep-dive article that explains the different types of organizational training needs analyses, and the practical methods to execute each. 
4. 📝"Because I Said So": Why Top-Down Management Doesn’t Work - In many of today’s workplaces, top-down management has a negative impact on curiosity, ownership, and retention. This article explains why fostering a culture where employees are encouraged to question, learn, and take initiative boosts engagement and sustainable growth.
5. 📝How to Identify Skills Gaps in Your Organization - This article explores traditional and modern approaches to uncovering skills gaps, and provides strategies for real-time detection and targeted training to future-proof your workforce.

6. Training Processes

Optimizing how training is delivered and managed ensures scalability and aligns with your business objectives. Efficient processes are the backbone of effective program implementation.

Recommended Resources:

1. 📕The Ultimate Tech Stack for Strategic L&D That Works - A robust L&D tech stack makes all the difference. This downloadable cheatsheet breaks down the four essential tools to enhance L&D efficiency and business performance. 
2. 📝How to Create a Skills Inventory List With AI - For those building out their latest skills inventory, this article compares traditional methods with AI-driven approaches, including recruitment strategies for HR to fill skills gaps.
3. 📝The Complete Guide to Skilling for Employee Productivity & Retention - Whether you’re eager to learn more about skills-based learning or ready to transition to it, this is the resource to start with. The guide covers all the basic concepts and benefits to the skills-based learning approach. 
4. 📕How to Create and Use a Skill Matrix Template - Skills matrices are useful, but its AI equivalent is even better. This article breaks down the differences and results between manual skills mapping and AI-powered skills technology—and includes free tools for executing both strategies.
5. 📝The Ultimate Skills Playbook For L&D - For L&D looking to optimize their skills ontology, this playbook explains the exact processes and techniques to improve the preparation, structure, and documentation of your skills-based learning strategy. 

7. Learning Metrics

Metrics provide a clear picture of how L&D initiatives impact your organization and guide data-driven improvements. Demonstrating ROI secures continued support and resources.

Recommended Resources:

1. 📝Go Beyond Learning Metrics: Our 6-Step Expert Playbook for Proving Your L&D Impact - Your impact goes beyond traditional learning metrics—this article explains how to prove that to your stakeholders and leadership. Take away these expert insights on aligning training initiatives with business performance to position L&D as a strategic partner within the organization.
2. 📝Mastering the Half-Life of Skills through Upskilling - Over the past 40 years, the shelf-life of skills has shrunk from 10 to four years—and keeps shrinking, especially in technical industries. This article explains why and how to futureproof your workforce against it. You can probably guess: continuous learning plays a major role.
3. 📝Skills Audit Best Practices: A Comprehensive Guide for HR and L&D Professionals - A skills audit is necessary and valuable work, but it’s often rushed and poorly executed, compromising accuracy and wasting time. This guide teaches you what to avoid today—and how to do it better in the future.
4. 🎧3 Reasons L&D Fails to Measure Impact (And How to Get It Right) - Many L&D professionals agree: measuring and proving impact is hard. This podcast episode with L&D author Kevin M. Yates addresses how to overcome major challenges in the industry, and which key data to focus on to make the strongest case to your higher-ups.
5. 📝3 Data-Based Ways To Prove Training ROI (+ Free Training ROI Calculator) - This article breaks down three popular methods for quantifying the impact of training on your company's bottom line. Plus it includes a free ROI calculator to support data-driven evaluations and defend your L&D budget.

Taking your L&D strategy from reactive to transformative is a journey that pays dividends in employee growth and organizational success. By tapping into the resources above, you can make informed, strategic moves to elevate your L&D function and reach new levels of performance.

Ready to supercharge your L&D strategy? Book a personalized demo of 360Learning to see how our platform can empower and uplift your L&D team at every stage of maturity.