Maximising Employee Impact through L&D: Aligning Learning Strategy and the Employee Lifecycle

The World Economic Forum predicts that two-fifths of the core skills workers have today will be disrupted by technological change as soon as 2027, and that half of all workers’ core skills will need to be updated every five years . 

Faced with that level of disruption, it’s not possible for organisations to hire their way out of skills shortages. The only answer is to embed learning strategies that foster a culture of continuous upskilling and reskilling. Leaders must be deliberate about creating and implementing learning strategies to keep employees upskilled and up to date.

L&D’s mandate is clear. Upskilling and reskilling will need to become a key competency for every organisation. The ones who are best positioned for sustained success are the ones that connect their learning strategy to the employee lifecycle. 

But first, why should organisations attach their learning strategy to the employee lifecycle?   

There are many benefits to anchoring your learning and development strategy to the employee lifecycle including:

• A robust framework: using the employee lifecycle offers a clear framework with multiple opportunities to embed learning, from onboarding all the way to exit. 
• A boost to talent attraction: More than four-fifths (83%) of millennials - who are now a major demographic in middle and senior management - said they would be more likely to choose an employer that prioritised learning and development opportunities. The figure for Gen Z (digital natives born from 1997 onwards) was almost the same (79%) .
• Increased employee engagement: Using learning strategies designed to engage and motivate your people boosts morale as well as boosting capability. 
• A culture of continuous learning: Making sure you have learning strategies for both knowledge transfer and upskilling keeps valuable institutional knowledge in house while updating the organisation’s skillset. In particular, providing learning that upskills employees on tech such as AI gives people the opportunity to keep up with a rapidly changing world of work.
• An agile, resilient workforce: when the foundation of your learning and development strategy is that learning is always ongoing, you develop a workforce that understands change is the only constant, and that lifelong learning is the key to career success.

While the urgency of L&D’s mandate is clear, successful change never happens in silos. Stakeholder engagement and alignment are the keys to anchoring learning and development across the employee lifecycle. And there are multiple stakeholders to engage with at every point.

Learning strategies as part of HR’s strategic agenda 

As a critical function within Human Resources and with existing talent shortages only set to deepen, L&D are well-positioned to help HR deliver on their wider strategic agenda. 

Further, connecting the organisation’s learning and development strategy to the employee lifecycle offers many opportunities to partner with different specialist colleagues within HR. 

For example, a comprehensive, organisation-wide learning and development strategy can: 

• Enhance the company’s employee value proposition
• Underpin Talent Acquisition’s skills based hiring efforts
• Help colleagues in Employee Experience boost engagement, leading to higher engagement and performance.

While getting there requires some general collaboration, the rewards of a tightly aligned, high performing HR function are well worth it. 

Learning strategies as part of the business’ strategic agenda

As we have seen, the business environment is evolving all the time and L&D need to ensure their learning strategies work in lockstep with their business’ needs. Collaborating with business leaders and line managers, and truly understanding what they need their people to be able to do is key. 

Equally, managers must understand their role in developing people. If they don’t give their people opportunities to put learning into action, it won’t land and is likely to be forgotten. This results in a frustrating experience for managers, talent and L&D: people can’t practice what they’ve learned and turn training into skills; managers perceive training programs as an interruption to work and don’t experience the benefits of learning; and L&D struggle to prove the ROI of training, even if it’s been well-received by learners.

These risks can be mitigated, however. Effective stakeholder alignment is a key differentiator between a successful learning strategy and unsuccessful ones. 

Four tips for effective stakeholder alignment while designing and implementing learning strategies

Whether you are collaborating with other HR colleagues or leaders within the business, get the best out of the partnership by:

1. Joint Goal Setting: Ensure you set goals that will serve both L&D’s and other stakeholders’ strategic aims. HR colleagues in Talent Acquisition and Employee Experience may wish to drive a shorter time to hire or a consistently improving Employee Pulse score, for example.
2. KPIs and Shared Metrics: Strongly aligned with joint goal setting are shared KPIs and metrics. Agree, define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) that will accurately measure success and help you understand and communicate ROI.
3. Regular, relevant communication: While there needs to be a balance between delivery and reporting, it’s worth keeping a cadence of high-level communications to senior stakeholders across HR and leadership. 
4. Collaborative Program Development: No joint program will succeed without input from all key functions involved. HR colleagues can help L&D pinpoint where learning interventions should happen, from the tactical, business-as-usual points such as onboarding, to the longer term, highly strategic such as scale upskilling as part of strategic workforce planning. Senior and business leaders can help L&D identify mission-critical skills to deliver on business goals, enabling L&D to map learning strategies to embed them.    

Attraction and recruitment

At this stage in the employee lifecycle, L&D can only offer the promise of a learning strategy that will benefit candidates. However, having a robust, organisation-wide learning and development strategy still offers benefits before talent comes on board:

• Attracts talent, enhances employer brand and helps differentiate your organisation’s employee value proposition.
• Widens talent pools: if the business can see the value of candidates with transferable skills, in many industries sector specific knowledge can be acquired through training and learning on the job.
• Supports a skills based hiring approach.
• Can help reduce payroll burden when partnered with a skills based hiring approach.

Onboarding

The onboarding phase of the employee lifecycle is a key touchpoint for introducing your learning strategy, as well as setting expectations that people have joined an organisation that values continuous learning. Positive, personalised learning experiences as part of onboarding not only signal that someone has made a great choice in their new career move; they also help talent hit the ground running, meaning they can contribute their skills and create value faster.  

L&D can help land their learning strategy faster at this point in the employee lifecycle with the right content and technology. For example: use centralised resource hubs, such as a Learning Management System (LMS) to ensure new hires can find everything in one place and everyone has a consistent experience.  

One learning strategy worth exploring is continuous onboarding: extending onboarding beyond the first weeks, for example with regular check-ins and training at 30, 60 and 90 days.

To ease any administrative burden associated with onboarding, leverage technology that uses AI to streamline and personalise. For example, AI-enhanced systems can help:

• Authenticate identity and certification documents 
• Automatically track and record engagement with onboarding training, such as compliance courses
• Tailor learning strategies to individual skills, job roles, and career goals.

Workforce management, retain and reward 

Learning strategies that help organisations maintain an agile, resilient workforce are a must-have in the current era of uncertainty. Equally, top talent always has options in terms of their employment, so keeping people engaged through learning and growing is a smart retention strategy as well as a key aspect of workforce development and strategic workforce planning.

To keep people consistently engaged and developing, adopt the following learning strategies: 

• Effective learning should be relevant, bitesize, and quickly applicable. Make sure learning is easy and quick to consume, and, ensure line managers commit to offering opportunities to apply the learning in real life.
• Where possible, offer sector-specific learning. Sector-specific content is more engaging than generic training as learners find it more relevant and easier to apply.
• Personalised learning resources keep employees motivated. Of course this is hard to do manually if you have a large workforce, but if your Digital Learning Solution supports personalised learning paths (autosuggesting other relevant content, for example), it’s easier to do at scale.
• Automatically track progress for learner, line manager and L&D; again, if your technology supports it, it can help learners track their own progress, send push reminders to complete training, and automatically update learner records (and share the updates with line managers and L&D). 
• Reward and recognise learner progress with gamification and social proof: a great learning strategy to encourage widespread adoption of a new tool or participation in a change process, for instance. 

Progression, promotion and performance

Once talent is established within the organisation the focus of your learning strategies apart from retention and workforce management needs to be on progression, promotion and performance. And given that learning is so important to millennials and Gen Zs (83% and 79% respectively say they would choose to work for an employer that prioritises learning and development), representing a large slice of the workforce, making sure there’s equal access to learning opportunities is a key engagement strategy as well as a smart learning strategy.

Help your people progress and perform by:

• Making all learning accessible to everyone.
• Enabling them to search, add, and access eLearning resources on any device.
• Offering business-critical content across multiple modalities, specifically, digitally and in-person.
• Offering Learning Needs analysis tools to help them prioritise the most valuable areas of development.
• Showcasing popular eLearning courses and encouraging immediate participation.
• Providing varying depths of content: offer brief bitesize learning updates and in-depth business-specific content as needed.

For someone to progress into the promotion phase of the employee lifecycle, other stakeholders must have oversight on their learning acquisition (namely line managers, talent management colleagues and stakeholders involved in succession planning). The easiest way to enable this is by keeping progress visible and trackable:

• Make sure your LMS allows the recording, tracking, and reporting of both on and offline CPD – or find another method to document it.
• Allow line managers to access data to monitor team progress and performance.

These learning strategies can help accelerate the identification of high potentials for succession planning, and help talent feel in control of their career path within your organisation.

Sunset and exit

The realistic conclusion of the WEF report is that the jobs of tomorrow will look very different from the jobs of today. Therefore organisations must expect to sunset certain roles in amongst the normal employee cycles of retirement, resignation and redirection – although that does not mean the people within sunsetting roles necessarily need to leave the business.

There is still an opportunity for learning and development even at this stage of the employee lifecycle. Fostering effective knowledge retention and knowledge transfer requires a two-pronged approach: 

• retaining institutional knowledge via upskilling incumbent talent
• retaining it via effective knowledge transfer

Upskilling or reskilling incumbent talent

Upskilling or reskilling incumbent talent is usually quicker and cheaper than attracting, recruiting and onboarding new talent. Incumbent talent has the advantage of institutional knowledge and context. 

To retain talent whose specific knowledge is relevant but whose roles are due to be sunset, L&D can offer upskilling or reskilling in:

• technology
• tools
• processes
• responsibilities

Roles due to be sunset can create opportunities for their holders to make lateral moves. If certain people can be reskilled to add value elsewhere in the organisation.

Effective knowledge transfer 

Knowledge transfer and dissemination is important in every learning and development strategy. L&D can help retain mission-critical knowledge by upskilling all talent as a cornerstone of their learning and development strategy, and by promoting knowledge transfer as part of fostering a culture of continuous learning. 

Effectively disseminate knowledge through a cadence of knowledge transfer opportunities. Example learning strategies could include:

• Host in-person, time-bound events such as lunch and learns – or interview internal subject matter experts
• Video the event or interview
• Use AI to provide audio files, transcripts, and written summaries
• Use AI to tag all assets with the relevant skills or knowledge
• Place all assets including the original video in a central learning resource hub

The Cyclical Nature of Learning 

Making sure your learning strategies are in lockstep with the employee lifecycle does not mean abandoning the fundamentals of the learning and development cycle. While the employee lifecycle is a useful anchor for learning strategies, all L&D professionals know there is much more to learning at scale than simply making training available.

There are many different terms for the learning and development cycle depending on the professional context so for clarity we’re going to use the Plan, Do, Review, Adapt  model in this article. 

When connecting your learning strategies to the different phases of your employee lifecycle, remember to:

• Plan: outline what knowledge people need to acquire or transfer at each stage of the employee lifecycle.
• Do: make the learning available, accessible, and ideally trackable for both talent and L&D/line managers.
• Review: continuously benchmark learning experiences and acquisition against expected results, gathering feedback from learners, line managers and any other stakeholders such as Compliance.
• Adapt: if the results are not meeting the expected grade, adapt your learning strategy.

No matter what stage of the employee lifecycle they are connected to, learning strategies need to follow the learning and development cycle to promote and maintain quality of learning. A feedback loop that promotes continuous improvements can bolster learning strategies to deliver engaging, relevant training, eventually building critical competencies within the organisation. 

Upskilling, reskilling and skills based hiring will fast become the new normal in our rapidly shifting business environment – because as the world of work and technology evolve there won’t be enough talent to satisfy demand. 

Navigating this new normal can feel overwhelming for any professional, but for L&D a clear mandate and opportunity exist – continuous learning will be critical for any organisation intent on longevity and therefore embedding learning strategies within the business is non-negotiable.

Connecting learning strategies to the employee lifecycle can enhance talent attraction, engagement, workforce agility and resilience. To get there requires collaboration with HR and business leaders to align with wider strategic goals. To help their organisation prepare for and weather imminent skills shortages L&D should:

• Implement a learning strategy for each stage of the employee lifecycle: attraction, onboarding, workforce management, progression, and exit.
• Follow the Plan, Do, Review, Adapt model to maintain and improve learning quality.
• Adopt joint goal setting, shared KPIs, regular communication, and collaborative program development for effective stakeholder alignment and effective, relevant learning.
• Leverage Digital Learning technology to automatically track progress, co-create content with SMEs, and autosuggest learning content, freeing L&D for strategic planning, collaboration, reviewing and improving.