Most businesses are acutely aware that they could do a better job at providing good learning options for their teams. And most of them are having a hard time making any change happen. 

Solving ‘the learning problem’ is harder than it sounds. Here are the most common challenges that I think employees, leaders and HR practitioners are faced with when they are thinking of improving learning options for themselves, in their teams or in the businesses they represent.

1. Lack of clarity on learning needs in the business
2. The content that teams need is not taught
3. No-one knows where to find good learning options
4. Poor course format and design
5. Heavy curation efforts required
6. Transformational learning is over budget
7. Business comes first
8. Low learning appetite in business

Here’s some insight into each of those points.‍

1. Problem: lack of clarity on learning needs in the business

You’ll hear team leaders say ‘I need people to get better at writing’ and most of the time they will leave it at that without making it clear what kind of writing they are looking for. Are they talking about writing notes for the Executive Team or writing data-driven insights that are going to be published or writing posts for internal publication, or posts on the company website?

This example might feel trivial but if you look at it from the perspective of an entire business that is boiling its learning needs down to ‘we need people to get better at writing, coding and engineering’ then that business is clearly not articulating its problem in a solvable way. Generic problem statements call for generic solutions. Businesses need to be more specific about what you need if you really want to find meaningful solutions, and sometimes they’ll need help from the teachers who actually teach those skills to figure out what they need exactly.

2. Problem: the content that teams need is not taught

Sometimes people will need to be trained in a skill that is not currently being taught in the business world. This can happen when skills are so new that no teacher has yet figured out how to teach it e.g. teaching prompt engineering for AI in art or writing. It can also happen for skills that are hard to teach in a way that is accessible to businesses e.g. teaching Alexander Technique, which is a form of mindfulness that is usually taught in hands-on sessions. 

You’ll hear team leaders say something like ‘no-one teaches what my team really needs’.

If experts in the business are able to teach this skill, then teaching will either happen on the job or those experts might sometimes get asked to build a formal course either themselves or with the support of learning designers. If no-one in the business is able to teach this skill, things get a lot more complicated. The business can either mandate an external learning designer to build this course out for them, assuming they find reliable external experts to do this with. Or it has to rely on teams learning through reading and trying things out.

The thing is, sometimes those non-existent learning options actually do exist. It’s simply that people don’t know where to find them.

3. Problem: no-one knows where to find good learning options

You’ll hear people say ‘I’m sure this is taught by someone, somewhere. I don’t have the time to look for a good course. Even if I did, I wouldn’t know where to start looking’.

After years in school and university where learning options are not only listed on a curriculum but also compulsory, you can’t expect people to suddenly know exactly where to find learning options on their own. Most people have neither the time nor the skills to go course-hunting. 

Businesses have tried solving this problem by giving their teams access to lists of pre-selected learning options that they can access either through a company-branded learning platform or through the platform of an independent learning partner (e.g. LinkedIn Learning). Like university curriculums, in a way. The quality of the learning options that are on those platforms is variable and I have yet to find a business where employees are satisfied with the options they have.

Note: in some industries in the US (i.e. mostly Tech) it seems like some businesses are moving away from this model of learning platforms and giving their employees a budget to spend on learning options that they find for themselves.

4. Problem: heavy curation efforts required

Businesses who solve the ‘findability’ problem by buying access to independent learning platforms with many courses then often find themselves confronted with a curation problem. Many of those independent learning platforms want to serve as many customers as possible so they host thousands of courses e.g. LinkedIn Learning gives clients access to 17,600+ courses. 

Instead of spending time and effort to find courses, teams find themselves spending time and effort curating the options that are made available to them. You’ll hear them say ‘I have access to thousands of courses on the platform. It would take me more time to figure out which course to go on than to actually take it.’ And if they do go through the effort to find courses that seem like a good fit, those courses often end up too generic to actually teach them anything useful.

HR practitioners that make and curate a company-branded learning platform for their business also have a curation problem. You’ll often hear them say ‘I receive five emails a day from L&D providers trying to sell their products. 99% of the time, those products are irrelevant to what we do. I ignore all of those emails now, they’re a waste of time’.

5. Problem: poor course format and design

Even when courses do exist and the business has found them, they often aren’t a good fit for the business world. They’ll have been built with non-business audiences in mind. Or they are taught badly e.g. through monologuing videos that listeners are stuck listening to for 60 minutes. Just to give you an idea of how bad this can be, I’ve heard of a team that ended up hacking the company learning platform so that it would show a module as complete on their profile because they thought it was a better use of their time compared to simply taking the learning module. 

You’ll hear leaders say ‘we need impactful courses with a short-term return on investment. Instead they are tedious and ineffective.’

Learning designers often follow old course-making principles. Sometimes it’s because it’s the only way they know. More often than not, it’s because they are submerged with work and choose the easy way out and/or because they have been given a budget and a timeline that doesn’t give them much freedom to be creative. It’s also worth noting that learning designers are rarely content experts: they need business support to build a good learning experience, and the business unfortunately tends to let their day job take precedence over learning projects.

‍6. Problem: transformational learning is often over budget

Many businesses use inexpensive generic training that is good-enough to teach a few things to people. Transformational learning is specific to an audience and often requires more time and energy from the teacher-creator. It is more expensive and often over budget.

If a team member has found a transformational learning course that fits their development needs perfectly but is above the budget that they are entitled to for learning, they’ll have to ’make a case to [their] manager before they can spend the money’. The success of that endeavour is highly dependent on the learning culture in the team, what the return on investment looks like, how tight the budget is, and the requester’s negotiation skills.

Demonstrating that a course provides a quick and big return on investment definitely helps the case but this is another tough nut to crack. Most businesses don’t know how to measure return on investment for learning. They tend to measure the success of their learning endeavours with KPIs that don’t say much like ‘number of hours people have been learning for’ or ‘student satisfaction’ as assessed immediately after the end of the course. Measuring how much of an impact a specific course has had on someone’s work in both the short and the long term is hard!

Finally: learning and development budgets are always one of the first budgets to be cut when the business is going through a cost-cutting exercise, along with travelling and marketing.

7. Problem: business comes first

Business generates revenue. Learning does not. At least not in the next quarter or often not by the end of the current financial year. 

This means that learning will get put on the back-burner as soon as something more pressing or that is seen as more important happens on the day job. This happens at all stages of the learning journey: people don't take the time to discuss what learning they want to do with their manager, people don't sign up to courses because they don't feel they can afford spending the time on learning, sometimes people don't show up at the course and almost all of the time people don’t have the headspace to apply any newly-acquired learnings in their work once the course is complete.

The thing is, there’s always something happening in the day job that will feel more important in the moment. Many colleagues have said ‘I’m already working way beyond my hours, I really don’t know where I’d find the time or the energy to go on some courses on top of that’.

This is also true for HR practitioners. You’ll hear them say that they would like to spend more time on learning but that other HR activities are taking up their time e.g. recruitment or payroll.

8. Problem: low learning appetite in business

This is the root cause of all problems. 

So many times I have heard colleagues say a version of this: ‘honestly, I’ve done loads of e-learnings and workshops. They’ve never made any difference, it all felt like a waste of time. I’ve given up on more formal courses. Now I just learn on the job.’

Once someone has had enough ‘bad’ experiences with formal learning, they will become disinterested in any kinds of formal learning. Maybe the course content was irrelevant to them. Maybe they were never able to embed any of the things they’d learned into their job. Maybe the timing of the course was bad and they kept thinking they should go back to their day job. 

It doesn’t matter why. What matters is that many people have been put off by formal learning.

Helping them fall in love with learning again will take time, money and a human connection. Time because genuinely transformational learning doesn’t happen overnight. Money because a $50 e-learning will give you exactly that amount of value in return. Human connection because we all want to learn from teachers whom we trust to teach and coach us at a pace and in a manner that works for us. We are not machines. Learning modules that try to cater for too big an audience don’t actually cater for anyone.

Once you solve that problem then you’ll find that all the other ones suddenly become much easier to overcome. When someone really wants to learn something that is unquestionably relevant to their current role, they will go out and find the course they need themselves, budgets will be unlocked and time will be found in the diary. 

The real way to unlock all of this is to reignite people’s passion for learning.

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Photo is an extract of a photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash