To get cut-through with reskilling and upskilling, learning and development programs need to be designed with employees’ context-of-use in mind.

Picture this: you’re the Chief Learning Officer for a large organisation and have been tasked with addressing a range of critical skill gaps in your workforce. You find a seemingly suitable learning platform and invest thousands of dollars in it, spend hours preparing an internal marketing campaign, and then, when it comes to the roll-out period, no one signs up. What went wrong?

“Investing in a platform is not investing in your people,” says Rod Farmer, Expert Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company. “You’ve thought about the tool before thinking about the desired outcome or impact.”

Before diving into your platform of choice, you first need to ensure you’re designing learning experiences that align with employees’ context of use, he says.

In a recent episode of AHRI’s new podcast, Let’s Take This Offline, Farmer outlined how HR and L&D professionals can do this. Here’s an excerpt of his advice.

1. Contextualise your learning

HR needs to move towards contextualised upskilling and reskilling instead of always defaulting to self-paced learning, says Farmer.

“The global average for self-directed digital learning, from opting in to completing the program, is 13 per cent. That’s a huge amount of wasted capital and emotional energy.”

When learning feels independent from the job at hand, and when it’s not curated for the individual employee’s needs, it’s often deprioritised or, worse, ignored.

“Also, upon completion, there’s very little recognition or reward. We can talk about things like micro-credentials and badges, but, at the end of the day, people just want to apply something in their day-to-day job and be recognised by their managers for it.”

To get on-the-job learning right, it’s critical to first understand the individual employee’s context of use.

“Who are they interacting with? What are the actual set of activities and steps they need to perform to do that job? When you tailor learning to that, that’s when you get a lot more cut-through.”

“The global average for self-directed digital learning, from opting in to completing the program, is 13 per cent. That’s a huge amount of wasted capital and emotional energy.” – Rod Farmer, Expert Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company

2. Three kinds of learning 

The holy trinity of learning, in Farmer’s view, is formal, social and on-the-job learning. 

“We’re very good at formal, but the problem is that we went from face-to-face, classroom-based learning to saying, ‘Let’s just go digital.’ We didn’t consider the social, peer-to-peer and on-the-job element.”

In Farmer’s view, apprenticeships are a fantastic way to capture the peer-to-peer and social elements of learning.

“You want to give somebody something that’s just a little bit harder than what they’re currently able to do, supported by the right structures, people, enablers, content and technology, to enable them to get to that next level of performance.”

3. Demonstrate ROI on learning and development

To show a return on investment in L&D, demonstrate impact and scale, says Farmer. 

“To do this, start small. Be very clear on the outcomes you’re achieving. Have people celebrate their learning outcomes and learning activities. That will build belief that these new ways of working are worth further investing in.

“I go from company to company… and they talk about L&D cost-cutting, and they’re very real concerns. But when I ask if they’re able to equate the learning outcomes to commercial performance and organisational benefits… the answer is typically ‘no’. 

“If you can’t track it, if you can’t measure it, if you can’t link it to benefits, if you can’t show how you’re going to scale it up systematically, it might be challenging to warrant additional funding or to safeguard your existing funding.”

Present this investment in language that budget holders will resonate with, he adds.

“Organisations that invest in upskilling and reskilling see a 2X improvement in retention rates. So if [an organisation] improved retention rates by just two to three per cent, it would save more from implementing upskilling than it would from dealing with churn, with a 30 per cent margin.

“In other words, the cost of churn – the productivity lost, rehiring an employee, recruitment costs, products coming to a halt, cultural issues – is far greater than implementing an upskilling program.

“You have to demonstrate the benefits and then use the maths to say, ‘This is mission critical. It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s fundamental to driving our triple dividend: social benefits, cost-efficiencies and growth.’”

Want to hear how Rod Farmer puts these insights into action? Listen to his podcast episode below, where he shares a practical case study.

A version of this article was originally published in the April/May 2024 edition of HRM Magazine.