A Career in Learning and Development: 10 Must-Have Skills to Make It Big in 2020
Are you ready to help close the skills gap at your organization and boost profitability like never before? And do you have the right skills to aid your employees’ learning and development journey? In this article, we list the essential hard and soft skills you need for a winning career in learning and development in 2020.
The World Economic Forum reports that 79% of global CEOs are “extremely” or “somewhat” worried about the availability of requisite skills among their workforce. As a result, learning and development has assumed critical importance in the current business landscape. A career in learning and development could make you a pivotal part of the company’s growth trajectory.
The World Economic Forum also estimates that closing the skills gap through learning and development could add $11.5 trillion to the world’s GDP by 2028. That’s why it is essential for learning professionals to acquire future-ready skills and support large-scale employee development across companies – and this entails 10 specific skills.
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The learning and development function has come a long way in the last decade. It no longer involves merely providing domain-specific training to make employees more productive in their current areas of specialization. Today, the world of learning and development encompasses a variety of elements that enable the end-to-end development of the workforce.
From soft skills training to diversity and inclusion, from behavioral change to mindset transformation, it is all in the hands of a company’s learning and development professional.
Expectedly, the career requirements to become a learning and development expert have also changed. Apart from a technical understanding of the subject, you must also be familiar with the basics of human psychology, digital technologies/tools, and change management to explore a career in this field.
And success in this field can have an impressive payout. The average salary of a learning and development manager in the U.S. is $65,937 per year. Add to this an additional bonus and commission received on learning and development outcomes, which is an extra $17,526.
Career growth opportunities in learning and development are also excellent. Top performers have the potential to win a seat at the C-table, with most Fortune 500 companies now onboarding a chief learning officer.
So, what are the skills you need for a successful career in learning and development in 2020? Let’s dive right in.
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A learning and development career requires a smart combination of hard and soft skills. Soft skills play a critical role in one’s ability to aid workforce learning and development.
Some of the key soft skills you need in 2020 include:
1. Empathy with learning clients
Learning experts are often tasked with pinpointing the exact needs of their “client.” The learning client within an organization could be a group of interns, a specific department, such as sales, or individual employees in senior positions.
A learning and development professional must be able to empathize with the client and discover learning needs that learners may not know they had.
For example, the sales team might require training sessions to boost sales revenues. On the surface, a session on selling best practices could seem enough. But through empathy-led conversations, you may discover that the sales reps aren’t conversant with the product’s value proposition, which is holding back communication with the customer.
This can help you modify your training strategies and create a specific, personalized program for these sales reps.
2. Superior communication skills
Learning experts must regularly communicate with various stakeholders across the organization to pinpoint upskilling requirements, obtain buy-in, and eliminate bottlenecks. Frequently, they must talk to employees/employee groups about their skills gaps, and how they can be addressed.
Therefore, a learning and development professional must be interested in and equipped to hold meaningful conversations about key issues.
What’s more, a diverse and multigenerational workforce means that you need to adapt to different attitudes, perspectives, and approaches when communicating with others. This makes self-confidence, communication, and heightened empathy essential skills to have.
3. Teamwork and conflict resolution
In the course of their career, learning and development professionals will often have to resolve conflicts or find common ground with stakeholders with conflicting interests.
For example, a senior employee may be tasked with a mission-critical project with a stringent deadline. But stakeholders from a different discipline may have asked the employee to prioritize cross-skilling for that quarter.
As a learning and development manager, you would have to step in and resolve the issue. You may have to speak to all stakeholders involved and find out what can be deprioritized.
Similarly, teamwork is a vital part of designing employee development strategies. It is only by working with multiple stakeholders that you can formulate a learning plan that addresses every business need as well as the employee’s targets.
4. Innovation/change readiness
The field of learning and development is rapidly evolving, and experts are expected to keep up. From the introduction of learning management systems (LMS) in the early 2000s to the proliferation of mobile learning, self-learning for career progress via MOOCs, and now the learning experience platform (LXP), the industry has witnessed several changes.
The priorities and perspectives of adult learners have changed as well. Beyond just job-related training, people are now eager to obtain cross-disciplinary skills and strengthen their employability.
As a learning and development professional, you must understand and guide learners/organizations through these change waves, maximizing the outcome from each new opportunity. Innovation-readiness will also aid in problem-solving, helping to meet tricky targets and formulate out-of-the-box learning strategies.
5. A Shoshin mindset
Shoshin is a soft skill derived from Zen Buddhism that could prove instrumental for your learning and development career. The word Shoshin essentially means “the beginner’s mind,” indicating one’s openness to new ideas and possibilities.
Equipped with a Shoshin mindset, you will be able to identify compelling solutions, articulate clearly why specific learning solutions might be ineffective, and listen carefully to the voice of the employee. Shoshin is particularly useful when adopting new technologies, as it ensures that you begin with a blank slate, without any attitudinal impediments or past dependencies.
6. Strategic vision and foresight
This is among the top soft skill requirements for any professional today, and it applies to learning and development careers as well.
Foresight can help to assess past patterns and predict how your ongoing learning strategies could work out in the future. It will allow you to anticipate roadblocks on the way and deploy preventive/corrective actions if required.
Take a simple example of a freshly graduated software developer undergoing soft skills training. From previous experience, you know that this specific role has traditionally relied on hard skills. The software developer may become overwhelmed by the demands of interpersonal communication after two months of the course.
To address this, you preemptively build a community of past learners who have taken the course and have obtained the certification, allowing the young employee to gain from more experienced peers.
As the example suggests, foresight goes hand in hand with strategic vision, so that you can take the appropriate corrective action.
Learn More: Top 8 Best Practices for Employee Cross-Training
In addition to empathy, communication, teamwork, foresight, change-readiness, and a Shoshin mindset, you also need the necessary hard skills to execute your learning vision effectively. This boils down to the following four hard skills:
7. Instructional design
Instructional design was always a foundational requirement for aspiring learning and development professionals. And it continues to be highly relevant, especially in the early stages of your career.
Instructional design is the ability to conceptualize, create, and deliver products/experiences that inform the learner. This hard skill spans instructional videos, infographics, PowerPoint presentations, animations, and a host of other visual formats.
There are several models and industry standards for instructional design, as well as platforms such as Adobe Captivate and Articulate 360 geared to generate instructional content. This skill is also commonly known as e-learning authoring.
8. Adult learning technologies
Adult learning technology is a rapidly growing market, with several learning channels for you to choose from. Investing in the right channel can be game-changing for companies looking to upskill/reskill their workforces within a short period.
An understanding of adult learning technologies, how they work, their pros and cons, and implementation processes can help you further your learning and development career.
Some of the most popular adult learning technologies in use today include open-source/paid LMS, blended learning (which has a human element), micro-credentials, incentivized learning via digital badges, etc. Learning experts must know all about these possibilities and shape the best-fit technology roadmap for workforce development.
9. Human behavioral science
While communication and teamwork may appear to be enough, “hard” knowhow of behavioral science and how it applies to human development is essential.
Employee learning and development is determined heavily by neuroscience and behavioral science. Traits such as attention span, memory formation, and personal habits play a critical role in how human beings imbibe and retain knowledge. By applying behavioral science theory, you can help employees overcome the forgetting curve and make sure that your learning investments yield the desired results.
Apart from neuroscience, there is a specific field called the science of learning and development, which offers useful insights into the learning process across various stages of an employee’s personal and professional development.
Rooted in psychology, this hard skill can help you outline effective strategies that factor in the human variance in learning experiences – particularly useful when combined with the study of adult learning technologies.
10. Learning KPI management
Learning KPI management is a branch of business analysis and basic data science, which equips learning professionals to monitor, measure, and track key performance indicators (KPIs).
Learning KPIs can vary widely from company to company, even from one team to another. Hard skills in learning data management and KPI analysis will help to pinpoint the most relevant indices to measure learning progress.
KPI skills are a useful tool in your learning and development career, as you can use KPI dashboards to steer learning strategies in the right direction and obtain buy-in from senior leadership.
KPIs convey the benefits of learning to non-HR business leaders in a tangible format, clearly demonstrating its role in the overall organizational pathway.
Knowledge of interpreting and analyzing data to assess, for example, where individuals drop out in courses can support the skill of foresight you need to develop to prevent such situations further.
Most learning and development tools available in the market today generate a plethora of data points, which can be analyzed with the requisite skill set.
Events to Advance Your CareerIn addition to having the right skill sets and meeting the requisite eligibility criteria, forging meaningful relationships with industry peers can also give you a leg up in your learning and development career.
Fortunately, social media platforms such as LinkedIn provide an exciting forum to exchange ideas with the world’s leading learning professionals.
This paves the way to gain referrals for future positions (LinkedIn even has an “ask for a referral” button). Interestingly, nearly half of the hires at small businesses happen via referrals, reports LinkedIn. This means that the right connections can give you early access to learning and development career opportunities as they open up in your professional network.
You can also check out learning and development events held throughout the year to build even more connections:
- Australia – Learn@Work Expo 2020 is held by EduTECH, bringing together leaders in workplace learning and adult learning technologies across the region. It is an annual event, part of the EduTech 2020 Congress Learning Streams.
- U.K. – World of Learning Summit is scheduled for May 15, 2020, in London. It explores the various technology and strategic tenets of workplace learning and is now open for registration along with the full event agenda.
As you can see, there are a range opportunities for professionals eager to explore a career in learning and development, from online courses and on-site training to digital tools and networking events. By keeping an eye on the ten skills we discussed, you can kickstart a meaningful and lucrative learning and development career, taking your organization to brand new heights.
Are you interested in pursuing a career in learning and development? Why, or why not? Tell us on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. We are eager to know about your views!
