How was it for you?

How heart-warming and refreshing it would be to review the L&D year without a single mention of the ‘E’ word. The economic ‘insert-the-euphemism-of-your-choice’ has dominated, nay monopolised, every facet of the news agenda over the past 12 months. An unspoken yet unbroken media pact has ensured that every article and programme has referenced it, focused on it or shoehorned it in somehow. Like Henry Ford’s infamously monochrome motors, you could talk about anything, provided it was the economy.

Wonderful though it would have been, L&D hasn’t occupied a parallel paradise. As you well know, our profession’s been as affected as any other. We’ve obsessed about making the case for investment in L&D, proving the ROI of L&D, connecting L&D to the business, et cetera, ad nauseum.

In Charles Darwin’s bicentenary year, we’ve all been rudely reminded of the laws of the jungle.

The picture hasn’t been unremittingly black. Traditionally, when the going gets tough, the L&D budget gets cut, frozen or stolen, with the emphasis on the counting of beans not the sowing of seeds. However, unlike the last euphemism, there’s considerable anecdotal evidence that many organisations haven’t panicked into a Pavlovian slash and burn response.

Naturally, there are nuances. As Lee Martin, MD of Toojays Management Training Consultancy, says: “There’s no doubt that private companies have reined in their spending, taking work in-house, whilst the public sector’s remained more insulated.”

Graham O’Connell, head of organisational learning and standards at the National School of Government, agrees with this topline ‘game of two halves’ analysis while pointing to some underlying subtleties. “We’ve certainly focused more on customised commissioning rather than buying off-the-shelf, as well as taking a more joinedup, organisation-wide approach, pooling resources, to save money and reduce duplication. By collaborating on centralised programmes, we’ve found we can increase the potency of our training at a reduced unit cost.”

Certainly, cross-sector, there seems to have been a significant impact upon buying decisions: how they’re made and how long they take. No one has wanted to appear imprudent. From the private sector, Urvashi Desai, head of HR at IPD Ltd, believes L&D has become “more selective, more creative, less blasé, focusing more on business impact, internal dialogue, employee engagement and challenging the status quo. None of which are bad moves”.

This resonates with Chandana Sanyal, L&D manager within a local authority and lecturer at Middlesex University Business School: “Having outsourced so much in the recent past, we’re coming full circle by bringing more work back in-house. This is partly due to cost. Three years ago, I could buy a good tailored training course for around £500. Now that’s doubled. No wonder that, in the current climate, I’m bombarded by sales calls.”

Possibly one of those on the other end of the line, Tim Holden, MD of HR and training consultancy Fluid, has certainly witnessed a gear-shift. “People can’t afford to train, partly due to funding cuts but also because they can’t justify the lost opportunity cost of people sitting in a classroom.”

In 2008, L&D consultancy accounted for approximately half of Fluid’s turnover. This year, that’s reduced to a third. “Most of our work is now generalist HR. Although recruitment and induction programmes have obviously seen less demand, we’ve seen increased interest in performance management.” In a sluggish labour market, companies have recognised, now the music’s stopped, the need to get the best out of those left sitting on their chairs.

Much of what training has been commissioned seems of the ‘bitesize’ variety, says Sanyal: “Particularly for seniors, we can’t waste time on icebreakers. All interventions have to cut to the chase.” However, Holden worries that, if the bitesize chunks become nibbles, they won’t provide much nourishment: “One still needs an overarching strategy, with cohesion across interventions and sufficient follow-through.”

O’Connell points to other methodological developments, particularly the growth of social networking. “Linear e-learning is in decline,” he believes. “Instead, we’re seeing the ascendancy of more dynamic and flexible tools – Google, blogs, wikis – which are bottom-up, individual-led yet collaborative.”

For many, the appeal of such ‘Martini learning’ is its accessibility. According to this year’s Towards Maturity Driving Business Benefits report, the top driver for e-learning is not cost but the need to improve the quality of the learning experience, followed by other factors such as increasingly scattered workforces, more home-working and concerns over corporate carbon footprints.

For Martin, any increase in e-learning is due to the need to do more with less: “Web 2.0 technology, such as podcasts and webinars, enables you to engage multiple users for the price of one. You reduce the cost without compromising the need to develop staff.”

And employees still seem to expect development. Desai says: “One might expect expectations to decrease during a downturn, but this hasn’t been the case. Fewer monetary perks, or opportunities to move, appear to have increased people’s demands for development and thus impacted on our in-house L&D team’s workload. At the same time, we’ve seen growing calls from managers to justify the worthiness of what we’re doing because they’re also under pressure to deliver.”

Which, inevitably, brings us to ROI. Interestingly, while HR has become evermore fixated with the issue, my spies tell me the wider business community hasn’t. “Yes, we need to show the business benefit of what we do,” observes O’Connell, “but I think there’s growing scepticism around ‘Level 4’ measurement. People are questioning whether it’s worth the effort, particularly as the L&D function needs to focus its efforts. Companies are hanging on to the philosophy but letting go of the detailed measurement.”

So are we beginning to question the ROI of calculating ROI, recognising, to quote Einstein, “that which counts can often not be counted, and what can be counted often does not count”? Recent research by the University of Portsmouth Business School indicates that of greater use than ROI are ‘return on expectation’ (ROE) measures, “establishing upfront the anticipated benefits of HR interventions and then assessing how far these benefits have been realised”.

Talking of expectations, Tony Nelson, director of high performance consultancy BrQthru, highlights one further theme of the year: the impact of the euphemism upon leadership and trust. “Recent emphasis on short-term gains with little concern for the longerterm implications – for example, banker greed and MPs’ expenses – has had a wider impact. People don’t automatically respect those in authority and now question leaders before investing their trust. This poses a real challenge for employee engagement, and thus for L&D. We have a key role to play in building employee trust, based upon values-based leadership.”

So, looking to the future, what else should be on the L&D ‘to do’ list? Sadly, inevitably, much depends upon the ‘E’ word. There seems little consensus on when we’ll see a recovery and what shape it will be: L, U, V, W or bathtub. It’s a veritable alphabet soup.

External training providers tend towards the more pessimistic end of the spectrum. “L&D won’t see much impact from any recovery until the end of 2010,” says Martin. “It will take time to filter through”. Holden concurs: “Some sectors will improve but, overall, 2010 won’t shape up as a great year for L&D. Certainly, things will get tougher for the public sector, regardless of the colour of the government”. Nelson also points to continuation of the public/private divide: “The former’s about to be credit-crunched, whereas we’ll see previously deferred buying decisions in the private sector being made. There will be more hard investment, but in a very business results-focused way.”

For Sanyal, the picture is again more subtle: “Some parts of the public sector will remain high political priorities and so command continued L&D investment and the need for new provision.” And O’Connell points out that “in previous recessions, L&D’s been amongst the first to be cut going in, but one of the first to be freed up coming out. There are certainly considerable pent-up L&D needs, particularly in the private sector. There’s usually a time-lag in the public sector. The smart L&D manager, regardless of sector, should already be getting his act together, arguing his case”.

This view is supported by recent research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, flagging up the need for L&D both to develop a deeper understanding of the business and to focus upon business sustainability, having the courage to challenge if short-term gain takes precedence over longerterm corporate well-being.

But we will need to practise what we preach by ensuring our L&D endeavours are similarly future-focused. Earlier this year, I interviewed Robert Terry of ASK for TJ; he counselled us to “focus on the behavioural change marathon, not the educational sprint”. All learning has to be a continuous flow rather than a timelimited, management-imposed solution. Just as marriage is more than the wedding, learning’s more than the training event.

According to Terry, “90 per cent of all training interventions designed to improve performance don’t achieve their objectives due to the failure to transfer and apply new learning rather than the shortcomings of the learning experience itself ”.

All work-based learning has to have a business purpose, and L&D professionals have a duty to hard-wire all we do to the wider organisational context. As Nelson says, “it’s crucial that L&D shows business-savvy. As the world comes out of hibernation, we need to wake up first”. For Holden, it’s about “proving the quantifiable impact of all that we do – falls in absence, increases in productivity, rather than woolly ‘it made people happier’ stuff ”.

Perhaps it also requires L&D to show primary loyalty to the business not the function. In 2010, it’s clear we will need to focus our efforts, not wasting time, money, resource, blood, sweat or tears on something that the business doesn’t value. We should be our own devil’s advocate, challenging what we do before the business can. Even if you feel you don’t need to fix whatyou’re doing because it ain’t broke, at least reframe it so that it’s seen to address those new corporate priorities.

‘Credibility’ is on many L&D commentators’ minds and lips, and certainly the credibility of any message we deliver will be largely judged by that of the messenger. I’d argue that business impact will increasingly be less about title, position or reporting line than mindset, influence and skills. As our functions shrink or face ever more pressure to deliver, we may well see greater recognition of the benefits of L&D but also greater scrutiny of its, and our, calibre.

A recent study of CEOs by IBM suggests that, if we’re seen as credible, senior managers are less likely to require hard evidence of our worth. While not, alas, the final nail in the coffin of ROI, it certainly implies we should invest as much effort in developing relationships and communicating persuasively as chasing facts and figures.

Similarly, before thinking about changing the world, we should think of changing ourselves. For O’Connell, “going forward, we need to be smart – totally smart – running the L&D operation as a business. We also need to be totally flexible: able to hold an intelligent conversation with the CEO one minute and a training designer the next”.

Such gymnastic stretching is identified by others too. Sanyal suggests that, to truly deliver, ‘L&D’ should be reinvented as ‘workforce development’, “because our role is as much about deployment, retention, the remodelling of jobs, as training delivery”, while TJ’s own L&D 2020 research project indicates that boundaries between L&D and organisational development are destined to blur further.

As we advance in other directions, we ought to monitor that we’re not, to flip General MacArthur’s famous quip, simply retreating. Last year’s CIPD L&D survey, according to my reading, identified greater involvement in the tactical elements of our job than a decade ago, with 46 per cent of respondents citing training delivery as one of their three main activities, compared to only 26 per cent naming OD/change management and 27 per cent strategic discussions and building relationships with senior managers.

Most practitioners agree our role should become more ‘guide on the side’ than ‘sage on a stage’, particularly given the irresistible rise of social networking and thus more sophisticated blended learning. “Rather than force-feeding learners,” summarises O’Connell, “we should offer up learning in ways people want to consume, by going where the energy is.”

So perhaps our role becomes less knowledge manager and more social capital liberator. Certainly, I believe learning, unlike training, to be an inherently natural activity, one that it’s near-impossible to avoid or block. Therefore, if we have decreasing control over what people learn, perhaps we need to find out what is being learned and leverage it. As TJ’s L&D 2020 work argues, informal learning brings with it the need for us to both create the conditions in which it can thrive and structure its use.

While we ought to harness the power of e-learning and social networking, so making learning more engaging and accessible, few predict the fall of face-toface delivery. “The days of the away day or week-long leadership programme may be dead,” says Martin, “but, even in the age of Web 3.0, we’ll still need, and benefit from, face-to-face training courses. At least until Generation Z become our CEOs.”

For me, the blend may finally well be nigh but we should beware geeks bearing gifts. In design and delivery, we should never overemphasise the technology at the expense of the learning content and intent.

Now, none of these predictions are particularly new or radical. The current euphemism, however, provides us with that once-in-alifetime opportunity to avoid the knowing-doing gap and turn the long-talked-of into reality. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent... It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” I have it on excellent authority that, when writing these words, Darwin was thinking specifically of the L&D profession. It’s a jungle out there and the animal that doesn’t learn, dies.

I leave you with my own humble parable. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be eaten. The moral of the story? It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better start running.

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