Here’s what L&D gets wrong about skills training

Us L&D folk are pretty great – but we don’t get everything right! 

Skills training is a particularly tricky area. We all want brilliantly skilled employees, but we don’t always know how to get there. Maybe we’ll throw an elearning course on the LMS, or get an expert trainer in to lead a workshop and hope for the best.

In other words, the focus is on the training. After all, isn’t it our job to design and deliver great training experiences?

Well, partially. But if we’re laser focused on the training, what about the skills part?

The content trap: why it’s not enough

In theory, you could sit your employee in front of your elearning courses for a full month. Imagine how many learning hours they’ll rack up! Imagine how skilled they’ll be after consuming so much of your juicy content! 

And yes… they sure are spending a lot of time engaging with your learning content! Learner engagement is through the roof, your CEO hand-delivers a medal to every member of the L&D team and your business breaks the stock exchange. Right?

Well… as we all know, content consumption isn’t the same as learning, and learning isn’t the same as developing real skills and capabilities that stick in the workplace.

Learning ≠ skills

Learning and capability aren’t the same.

Learning is the process, while skills are the outcome of that process. 

Learning is the knowledge acquired, while skills are the knowledge applied.

A major mistake L&D professionals make is nailing the learning part and calling it a day, without taking time to reflect on whether or not your learners are displaying the skills you wanted them to achieve.

But if your people are just endlessly learning and acquiring knowledge, how can you be sure that they’re actually doing something with that knowledge? How do you know that their learning has converted into skills? Were you just delivering content for the sake of content, or did your learning lead to real change?

Why skills-first thinking is the future of L&D

The modern workplace is pretty complex. Instead of Role A needing Skill A, and Role B needing Skill B, the lines between roles and the skills they required have become much more blurred.

Typically, L&D has worked by identifying a role and designing training for that role. Sounds simple, right? Well, yes – and actually, it’s much too simple for the way most businesses work in reality. When we consider that much of that training will then be measured against vanity metrics, it suddenly throws ‘the way we’ve always done things’ into question.

Skills-first thinking flips it all on its head:

• It focuses on real-world impact, measuring what people can actually do and not just what training they’ve completed or attended
• It bridges the gap between learning and performance, better aligning with business outcomes and impact
• It enables personalised development, acknowledging that each learner has unique needs, and even employees doing the same role don’t necessarily need the same skills training
• It promotes inclusivity by valuing what people can do, not just their formal qualifications or background
• It future-proofs the workforce by investing in versatile, transferable skills, rather than rigid roles or credentials which might become obsolete

Instead of neatly mapping X role to Y skill, skills-first thinking acknowledges that many skills (particularly soft skills) span a wide range of roles and specialisms, and everyone can benefit from developing their performance in these areas.

Building a skills-first learning ecosystem

What we’re not saying is that you need to scrap your role-focused training. Each specialism within a business will need role-specific skills – after all, your salespeople don’t need an in-depth knowledge of SEO, and your developers probably don’t need to learn about employment law.

What we are saying, then, is that a skills-first approach helps you refine and enhance your learning culture for a bigger impact. This modern approach allows you to identify the specific capabilities people need to succeed in their roles today, while also building the transferable skills that prepare them (and your business) for whatever comes next.

It may feel like a radical overhaul is in order, but we can reassure you that a skills-first learning ecosystem isn’t as complicated as it might look. In fact, much of the content you already have will naturally slot into your current strategy – it just needs a bit of reframing to ensure it gets to the right people at the right time.

Here are five easy steps to put skills front and centre in your learning programme:

1. Define your skills framework
   Map the critical skills needed both now and in the future across your organisation’s current roles and functions.
2. Assess skills continuously
   Use LMS data, AI skills intelligence and manager input to get a holistic, real-time view of strengths and skills gaps.
3. Align learning to skills
   Curate and create learning content that directly builds the skills you need, whether this is from your existing content, creating new content or buying in third-party content.
4. Enable personalised learning
   Deliver targeted skills development opportunities based on each person’s unique skill profile (or, if you’re using an AI-based skills intelligence solution, it can do this part for you!).
5. Measure impact on performance
   Track how skills growth translates into role effectiveness, mobility and business impact (again, a good AI skills intelligence solution will do this automatically).
   
   

Where skills intelligence comes in

We may be a little biased, but we 100% believe that AI-powered skills intelligence is the future of workplace learning.

Instead of wheeling out your tired old one-size-fits-all learning programmes, emerging technologies can do the hard work for you, matching individual learners with personalised training plans focusing on the development areas that matter most.

AI skills intelligence is much less disruptive than traditional workplace assessments. Instead of a standard ‘one-and-done’ quiz, employee skills are constantly monitored in the flow of work. The AI technology automatically analyses the presence or absence of certain skills, and provides real-time feedback on a continuous basis. The AI then recommends useful learning content to support development areas.

For example:

Rory is a salesperson who typically ranks in the top 30% of their team. They want to be promoted into a management role, and their manager recommends improving their active listening skills for more successful sales conversations.

The company’s AI skills intelligence solution tracks Rory’s skills throughout their normal day-to-day work (such as in sales pitches, new customer onboarding calls and team meetings) to monitor Rory’s active listening skills over time.

Rory receives immediate feedback about the skills they display in each instance, alongside recommendations for useful active listening resources to help them further improve.

Rory explores the content, and in the next few months, the AI skills intelligence solution reveals that Rory has improved their active listening skills by 40%, coinciding with their visible uplift in engagement with active listening content.

Still wondering exactly how it all works? We’re almost ready to show you our AI skills intelligence solution – and it’s really, really good… sign up below for early updates, or register now for the first public walkthrough on 17th July.