A Comprehensive Guide to Learning and Development in the UK

The UK is in the midst of a skills shortage. As technology develops and the nature of the economy changes, companies are looking for key skills, and failing.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised to "fire up the training of all UK workers. If there's one thing we know that will drive innovation and accelerate productivity, [it] is having skilled workers."

While the government and education sectors work on key policies, organizations must also commit to upskilling and reskilling their teams. And that's where learning and development programmes now have a greater role to play.

Learning and development, commonly referred to as L&D, is the process of upskilling an employee through training courses, development programmes, eLearning, and personal growth opportunities. They are the learning interventions that drive an employee’s career development.

In this article, we’ll explore what learning and development is, explain the benefits of learning and development, run through some key L&D challenges, and show you how to create a successful L&D strategy that benefits your employees and your business.

Smart learning and development is really the most effective tool you have to help your company close critical skills gaps.

What is learning and development?

Learning and development encompasses everything a company does to foster its employees’ career growth, from acquiring new skills to developing effective communication and emotional understanding. Historically, organisations have conceived of L&D as formal training courses employees complete during working hours.

Today, learning and development also takes place through the blog posts learners read after hours, the advisory committees they join, and the knowledge and expertise they volunteer to share with peers. We have dedicated learning management systems that deliver training at key moments on an individual level—not just in conference rooms or through long presentations.

Learning and development is not just great for employee growth; it contributes to business success as well.

Benefits of workplace learning and development

Learning and development is the best way to attract new talent and retain existing employees by providing them with continuous opportunities for professional development. When done right, L&D can also help you boost employee engagement and job satisfaction, develop leaders within your company, promote a values-based culture, and control hiring and onboarding expenses.

1. Attract and retain talent

According to LinkedIn Learning’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report, 90% of organizations say learning and development is their top employee retention strategy. Companies with a strong learning culture have 57% higher retention rates, and 70% of employees say that learning improves their sense of connection to their workplace.

Companies that provide great learning and development opportunities are, then, more likely to attract and retain talent than companies that don’t. When employees learn new skills and discover new opportunities in their workplace, they feel the company is interested in helping them grow and are motivated to stay.

Besides, hiring new employees is expensive both in terms of time and money. According to Oxford Economics, it costs £30,000 to replace an employee, while it takes 28 weeks for a new employee to reach optimum productivity. Learning and development programmes can help save precious resources by catering to employee development and lowering turnover.

Source: 2024 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn Learning

2. Address specific skill gaps

When employees don’t receive necessary or relevant training, this can create skill gaps. It can frustrate and demotivate employees who aren’t able to excel at their jobs. That’s where learning and development interventions can fill these gaps.

The UK skills shortage is so profound that the government created a cross-functional body—Skills England—to address it. It's tasked with addressing everything from lacking digital skills to future-proofing the British economy.

For organizations, a training needs analysis—where L&D assesses current performance and business objectives to determine which courses they need to prioritise—helps to identify and address specific skill gaps. Even young, tech-savvy companies may be short on key skills such as customer communication, negotiation, and basic statistical analysis.

The sooner you identify these skills gaps, the sooner you can build training content to close them.

3. Develop leaders within your company

Learning and development programmes can support employees as they move into managerial and leadership positions. Advancing the careers of existing employees—who are familiar with your business objectives and invested in your company’s success—can be more beneficial than searching for new, external candidates.

Especially in current work environments with flat structures and increased collaboration, interpersonal and mentoring skills are crucial for future leaders. Help them improve the necessary mix of technical and interpersonal skills with L&D opportunities.

There's also the potential to develop leadership skills outside of management positions. L&D teams can find subject-matter experts to help train and develop their peers. This is a great way to develop a collaborative learning culture without everything revolving around promotions.

4. Increase employee motivation

Here's a worrying statistic: up to 40% of the typical workforce is made up of "quiet quitters." These are the low-motivation employees who would rather leave, but continue to show up. They take more sick days, give less effort, and can reduce the happiness and motivation of others around them.

On the other hand, employees consistently say that learning opportunities and promotions are among the top motivators at work. And 94% of employees say they would stay longer in a role if it invested in their development.

High-quality training leaves employees feeling "highly valued and empowered" by their employers, which naturally motivates them and focuses them on their key goals.

5. Reinforce organisational values

L&D isn’t just about developing the core skills people need to excel in their roles–training programmes can be curated to offer content that supports company values and culture.

For example, if an organisation values teamwork, humility, and having a growth mindset, it can create content on specific codes of conduct that show employees how they can embody those values in the workplace.

This is an often-ignored area of L&D but one with great potential. In a survey of nearly 100 HR professionals, a majority of respondents said that less than 40% of employees could recite the core values of their companies. If employees don’t even know their company’s core values, they can’t apply them, and it negatively impacts employee experience.

6. Give your business a hiring advantage

In 2023, a whopping 88% of companies said that they struggled to find the talent they needed. Even if the talent wars aren't quite at the levels we saw during the Great Resignation, it's still a significant challenge for most businesses to hire effectively.

As we've already seen, employees value good L&D programs. Which makes your L&D approach a hiring tool alongside perks and leave packages. Just as employees are more likely to stay with a company that values their learning, they're also more likely to join one that offers meaningful development opportunities.

Key challenges in learning and development

L&D is too often a struggle, even for smart, modern companies. Programs start out with enthusiasm and the best intentions, just to fizzle out or get replaced wholesale 12-18 months later.

We'll examine the secrets to building a best-in-class L&D strategy shortly. But first, let's discuss some of the main reasons they fail.

1. Lack of executive buy in

Let's start at the top. Because in far too many cases, L&D leaders don't have the support and resources they need to succeed. Typically, founders and C-Suite executives love the idea of a good learning and development program, and getting off the ground isn't too difficult.

But, to generalize, executives tend to believe:

1. L&D is easy. Just host a few workshops and find a good guest speaker for our annual kickoff.
2. It's cheap and fast to build courses. Or perhaps worse, that you can just buy a content library and share a link with the team. Job done.
3. You don't need help.

In reality, a successful L&D program needs advocacy and evangelism from the top, and accountability from managers and other leaders. There must be an acknowledge that learning is core to the company culture, and an expectation that everyone participates.

Otherwise, you quickly arrive at our next key challenge.

2. Low course completion rates

The industry average for course completion rates is between 20-30%, which comes as no shock to experienced L&D leaders. This is for two key reasons:

1. It takes too long to launch new courses; and
2. When you do, they quickly become outdated or irrelevant.
   

Team members are almost always excited to learn skills and subject matter that help them achieve in their roles. But once they see that the content is only tangentially relevant, or only partially relates to their current experience, they tune out.

And that's further exacerbated by how quickly and comprehensively their needs evolve.

3. Skill requirements keep changing

In a fast-paced environment where business transformations take place quicker than we can keep track, current skills may not be relevant in just a few months. So creating relevant course content is an even greater challenge.

Today's employees need to be conversant (if not fluent) in AI prompting, digital communication tools, and data analysis—almost no matter their role. There's also a (justifiably) increased emphasis on DEI training, resilience, and other soft skills.

The challenge here is to build courses that evolve quickly and easily to these new demands, while also covering the core technical skills needed in each role.

4. The hybrid work environment

In a survey of 1,000 L&D leaders in the UK, 33% said that moving from in-person to online training is the single biggest challenge in training employees.

The sudden and sweeping shift to remote work in 2020 meant that training had to be quickly digitized. Today, most companies have some portion of the workforce remote or hybrid, and these team members need L&D too.

The key difficulty is in adapting courses to provide the best learning experience for each circumstance. A 100% remote learning program may not be sufficiently engaging for most employees. But if you rely overly on in-person training, you're sure to exclude some learners, and see a disappointing number of no-shows at each session.

5. Maintaining enthusiasm for learning

Ask almost any employee to their face, and they'll reliably state that learning and professional development are near their top priorities. But as the pressures of their roles build, and other responsibilities grow, the excitement for new courses wanes.

L&D leaders need to find ways to keep people engaged, hungry, and passionate about learning. This can come through gamification, social learning, and friendly competition, among plenty of other techniques. We fervently believe in collaborative learning strategies that emphasize teamwork and team growth. When employees work for and rely on each other, they go further together.

How to create a successful L&D strategy

The rewards an impactful L&D strategy can bring are clear and numerous, including:

• Higher performance at the employee and business level
• Longer staff retention and better engagement
• Easier onboarding and faster time-to-value for new employees
• Stronger team culture and unity
• Reskilled employees who can be redeployed to new tasks
• A future-proofed company, ready to face new challenges as they emerge

So how can you build a strategy that actually gets results? Here are seven best practices.

1. Start with high-impact onboarding

Onboarding is the perfect starting point to introduce new hires to your learning and development initiatives and make a great first impression. Whether it’s training on company values and tools, or connecting with other new hires, onboarding makes new employees feel connected and supported.

Plus, research shows that onboarding experience has a direct impact on productivity, engagement, and retention. Onboarding becomes even more important for a remote workforce where new hires are building connections through a screen. Here are some tips for delivering an engaging onboarding experience as part of your L&D strategy:

• Give new hires a head start by sending reading material and onboarding videos before their first day. For instance, send an introduction to company history and company values.
• Once new hires start, ease them in with role-specific training so they’re clear on job expectations and duties.
• Introduce them to tools they’ll be using and share how the tools enable employees to do their best work.
• Use knowledge-sharing software like Scribe or a company wiki where learners can easily access information.

2. Align learning and development with business objectives

87% of organisations agree that aligning their learning and development programmes with their business objectives is critical. Yet only 13% are ready to take action on developing this connection. This means the training material they spend precious resources creating doesn’t equip employees with skills that’ll help the business grow.

To better align your learning programmes and business objectives, start by clearly outlining the business objectives your company wants to achieve in the next quarter or year. Get buy-in from stakeholders by talking to them and making sure they agree with the business objectives. As a next step, you can refine existing content and create a long-term plan for future content so it’s relevant and useful in helping employees contribute to organisational success.

Tying training courses and subjects to core business outcomes also makes training more relevant to employees' work and ensures that by learning, they're also more likely to meet and excel targets.

3. Adopt a bottom-up training needs analysis

Employees know best which skills they need to better perform their jobs. In a bottom-up approach to training needs analysis, employees declare their own learning needs by requesting specific courses through a learning needs tool. It's far more effective than setting learning needs and goals from the top down, without employee input.

A collaborative learning platform lets learners request training needs, and encourages their peers to upvote their favorites. This both helps to surface unexpected (but important) training requirements, but also ensures that programs are closely in touch with what excited and engages learners.

4. Create a collaborative learning and knowledge-sharing culture

In a traditional set-up with a top-down approach, information is siloed, and companies risk losing that valuable institutional knowledge when an employee leaves.

Employees learn best through collaboration and knowledge sharing with one another. With an AI-enhanced authoring tool, internal subject matter experts can quickly and easily create courses for others. Peers can comment on and react to the training material, which helps managers assess which courses are useful.

Build an effective peer feedback loop within teams where employees engage in continuous learning through discussions and iterations on training material, keeping it fresh and up-to-date.

5. Design dynamic learning journeys

A reported, six in ten working-age adults in the UK don’t have the skills they need to thrive in their jobs in the next five years. These skills won’t appear overnight or by sitting through a single training course.

Focus your learning and development efforts on designing continuous learning journeys for employees so they can apply what they learn right away.

The 70:20:10 framework for learning suggests that 70% of learning takes place through on-the-job experiences, 20% from peer interaction, and 10% from formal education. Yet, this has largely remained a theoretical rule, with a majority of training focused on a formal one-way programme delivery.

It’s time to put the framework into practice. Or, as a Forbes article suggests, implement a new 3-to-1 model, which means offering three on-the-job application exercises for each formal learning event. Use this model to design better learning journeys by tapping social learning initiatives that include interaction with course material through gamification, quizzes, videos, and peer discussions.

Most importantly, get feedback from team members on how interesting and engaging they find each course to be. Tailor learning paths to ensure that people actually want to follow them and develop in their careers.

6. Lean on the right learning technology

Your learning and development efforts are wasted if you don’t leverage technology to distribute training material. A learning management system (LMS) helps you create, manage, and deliver training content to your employees without the weeks and months of effort it once required.

An LMS acts as a centralised home for your courses and offers many benefits—it boosts learner interaction, knowledge retention, and employee satisfaction. To maximise these benefits, choose the right LMS software based on your needs and the features important to you.

An LMS is a huge investment, so make your selection carefully by considering factors such as SCORM compliance, management capabilities, reporting and analytics, cost, and the integration capabilities of the software.

7. Focus on employee well-being & engagement

The effectiveness of your learning and development strategy hinges on your employees. You want them to be in an optimal state to learn so they’re ready to soak up the training material you poured precious resources into.

Learning needs to be a safe and enjoyable exercise, otherwise any excitement you build will quickly burn out.

Here are some ways to maintain this focus on well-being:

• Build wellness programmes into your L&D, like yoga and mindfulness workshops.
• Make learning easy and accessible with the help of microlearning, which means delivering training in bite-sized chunks employees can effortlessly engage with.
• Train managers to better support team members with empathy and compassion.

UK businesses need tailored L&D programs

Even for high-functioning teams, the modern workplace is a more individualized space than perhaps ever before. Employees have their own work habits and learning styles, and effective learning and development accentuates these to full effect.

In practice, this requires a tailored, flexible L&D program built with the right tools. It should incorporate your particular company culture while making space for employees to learn as they do best. This doesn’t mean L&D leaders fade into the background—they take on the role of guide and help employees align learning to their goals and skills gaps, resulting in a naturally higher return on investment from training activities.

If that's your intention, the tooling is vital—starting with the right LMS. To see how you can incorporate decentralized, customized courses for all learning needs and abilities, grab a free demo below.