Learning & Development (L&D) Trends: Start Planning for 2023 with Insights from Your L&D Peers
SweetRush Inc.
Businesses partner with SweetRush to change behavior and improve performance.
🗓️ As 2022 comes to a close, many of us—particularly, L&D professionals and leaders—are planning for 2023.
🔮 And, what better way to forecast the future and plan your L&D strategy than to reflect on the past and the present?!
📖 As shown in our annual Trends Report, 2022 has been an exciting, transformative year for learning and development trends (and the workplace), specifically the following areas:
🗄️ When combing through the data from L&D leaders and professionals and compiling the Trends Report, four themes emerge:
#1: Let’s Talk About Employee Skills
🧞Employee skills became a front-and-center leadership priority for all executives in 2022 (not just L&D). Executive leaders want to know how to identify, analyze, and assess skills to ensure they hire, upskill, and reskill people to build the businesses and cultures they want.
Many organizations focused much of the year on employee upskilling, reskilling, and skills-based talent management.
The most in-demand employee skills for 2022?
As Culture Consultant, Dané Johnson, MBA, PCC from SweetRush Transforming Leaders and Culture (TLC) explains: “Resilience is the prerequisite to adaptability and agility. Under conditions of ongoing change and transition, resilience helps us preserve emotional energy and remain open to possibilities.”
Do you see those skills changing in 2023? Let us know in the comments.
Find out more about employee skills in Section 1 and more insights from John Cleave , Danielle Hart , and Tiffany Vojnovski within the L&D Trends Report.
#2: The Evolution of L&D
In 2022, learning and development was central to business strategy, as L&D leaders strategically partnered with other leaders within their organizations. This new moment felt revitalizing as opportunities emerged to make significant, company-wide positive impact through L&D strategy.
Of those surveyed, 62% of L&D professionals agreed that L&D would be focused on rebuilding or reshaping their organizations in 2022, according to LinkedIn’s 2022 Workplace Learning Report.
Our prediction was that using learning to attract and retain employees across the organization would come into sharper focus for all practitioners in L&D as The Great Reshuffle continued.
Was that true for you? Do you see those skills changing in 2023? Share below.
Find out more about this new moment as well as insights from Andrei Hedstrom and Emma Klosson in Section 2 of the L&D Trends Report.
#3:Human-Centered Learning Experience Design (LXD)
Learning experience design (LXD) and content creation were also major focuses in 2022.
What was the number one content creation challenge for L&D leaders? Heightening learner engagement and experience. L&D leaders also saw room for improvement in multidisciplinary collaboration.
For many organizations across industries, virtual collaboration continued to be a challenge.
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Leadership Development for Bayer
When SweetRush partnered with Bayer to create Rise & Thrive, a habit-building program for leaders, we challenged traditional thinking around leadership development by taking a human-centered design approach.
Leaders are busy and discriminating learners; they won’t benefit from long webinars, generic content, or training that’s out of date and irrelevant. The program meets leaders where they are with bite-sized, engaging, and meaningful content that provides plenty of opportunity for virtual collaboration.
Why “go big” when you can think small?
Centering around actionable micro-habits—that take as little as 30 seconds to put into practice—Rise & Thrive is having a massive impact on leaders and how they are inspiring, balancing, and empowering their teams. Of the leaders who tried the program, 94.7% recommend Rise & Thrive to their peers and 84.5% say they gained new tools.
Any lessons learned in LXD for you this year? Share in the comments.
Learn more about Bayer’s Rise & Thrive, the top 10 content creation challenges, and insights from Hanan Harb Sahourieh , all in Section 3 of the L&D Trends Report.
#4: Top Learning & Development Challenges & Opportunities (“Challenge-tunities”)
“What are the top challenges in your learning organization that need the most love?”
When L&D professionals and leaders answered this question, two challenges/opportunities rose to the surface in the Trends Report:
🤔 #1 — Providing engaging learning experiences
🤔 #2 — Creating a culture of learning while competing for learner attention
Creating engaging learning experiences was also featured as a top challenge in human-centered LXD as well (showing the importance—and difficulty—of learner engagement all around)!
Immersive Technologies Present a Solution
One major way that learning & development is addressing these “challenge-tunities” in both content and engagement is through immersive technologies.
When it comes to immersive learning and the brave new world of learning in the metaverse, Adrián Soto predicts the following: “The next step is the potential to replace instructor-led training (ILT) with VR-ILT in some cases and give the instructor the ability to control variables in the room.”
When asked if L&D leaders should care about/join/build the metaverse, Adrián shares, “Accenture built its own corporate metaverse because they have a lot of employees, they need to attract a lot of new hires every year, and all of them need to excel at collaboration remotely. Clearly they saw building a metaverse as a path to meeting these business needs—and they’re a technology-centric company, so it makes sense for them to be at the forefront of this.”
How did you and your organization respond to challenges in 2022? What “challenge-tunities” are missing? Please share in the comments.
Find out more about learning in the metaverse, insights from Erin (Krebs) Green on coaching and mentoring, and more challenges and opportunities in Section 4 of the L&D Trends Report.
How You Can Help Define L&D Trends for 2023
📣 While it’s great to learn from your peers, here’s your chance to inform your L&D peers going forward…
✍🏽 Take the survey for 2023’s Trends Report here. Share your insights from this year (and predictions for the future). It will only take around 5 minutes to complete, and we’ll send you a copy of the report as a thank you for your time.
🤝 We need YOUR input. Let’s keep evolving our L&D craft, together. We appreciate you. 💚