Looking Ahead: Most-Anticipated Challenges CLOs will Face in 2019

It’s October – the time of year that’s perfect for pumpkin spice lattes, jumping in a big pile of leaves and…planning next year’s training initiatives? That’s right. The fourth quarter of the year is the perfect time to get ahead of the biggest L&D challenges.

For 2019, we expect CLOs will face a lot of the traditional L&D challenges, like:

 

Identifying training needs AND wants from the organizational and employee perspectives

It’s easy to determine what your employees want from training. You can do this through a quick, cost effective survey provider like SurveyMonkey or Fluid Surveys. But understanding what they really need to learn? That’s a whole different matter. Surveys – a prominent method of learning measurement – can’t pinpoint where employees have knowledge gaps or predict those at risk of not being able to apply the training. They’re certainly not robust enough to provide the insights essential for a training needs assessment or arm L&D teams with the necessary baseline data for continued improvement. Until L&D departments experience in more insightful data capture and analysis, they’ll continue to struggle to define what their employees really need to learn.

Click here to learn more about our Snapshot product.

 

Advocating for new or increased budget

Convincing your CFO and other budgetary stakeholders that your department needs more budget is never a fun conversation. It’s made worse by the fact that L&D departments traditionally struggle to demonstrate the impact of training. Executives want to understand how training has saved time and money, improved KPIs and prevented loss and liability. But L&D often strains to connect the dots between training and business outcomes. Until L&D is able to tie these two together through clear, quantifiable data, getting buy-in for increased budget will continue to be a challenge.

 

Finding the right partners

Finding the right partners to move your organization toward its learning goals is HARD. For example, when searching for an adaptive learning tool, L&D departments have to go through series of steps to find the right partner:

• First they have to wade through a lot of marketing jargon to find out what a potential partner really means when they say “adaptive.”
• Then they have to determine if that adaptive platform is a fit for their learning needs
• And they still have to figure out if that provider can execute within their operational framework. This includes things like:
  • Integration – is it really plug-and-play for your specific needs?
  • Content development – including how they handle existing content like video, Captivate or Storyline and even AR/VR, how they integrate with existing or future LMS, LRS Performance Management Systems via xAPI and how they can flesh out the adaptive stack for improved learning efficacy)
  • Data and metrics – is the data easily interpretable, or do they need a data scientist on staff to analyze it?

Finding the right tools and the right application within your learning programs will continue to be a challenge. Providers who are willing to work with you to execute your training vision can help navigate this minefield.

The challenges above are ongoing for most CLOs – same story, different year. But we also envision a few new challenges that CLOs will face in 2019. These are reflective of emerging technologies and workforce demands, and include things like:

 

Embracing AI and Machine Learning

As AI and machine learning inform more of our everyday experiences, L&D will hear more calls for AI-enabled learning systems that can intelligently:

• Improve organizational performance and knowledge
• Root out systemic knowledge deficiencies
• Prevent and reduce costly human errors
• Predict employees engagement and on-the-job performance/success against training KPIs

For more information about AI and machine learning in training, click here or here

 

Instituting measures that will develop a culture of learning

As we increasingly advance in an environment where continual knowledge is imperative for organizational growth, building a robust learning culture will become more important than ever before. We anticipate that in 2019, CLOs will be challenged to find more learner-centric ways of training their workforces, and we think technology – specifically adaptive learning – has a big role to play in this movement. Learn more about learning cultures, discover our tips for turning employees into learners or take a look at our learner-centric product features.

 

Connecting learning with performance management systems

Companies are increasingly viewing learning/training performance, activity and engagement as part of an employee’s overall job performance. In 2019, we anticipate that more organizations will begin searching for ways to integrate learning data within performance management systems to create robust, 360-degree views of employee performance. External performance data that can be fed back into a system’s AI, creates a full feedback loop, which further optimizes the training and the system’s ability to predict those “at risk” of not applying the training on the job. Learning systems that can easily export data or readily integrate with performance management solutions will have a leg up in the market.

What are some of the challenges you anticipate coming your way in 2019? How are you looking for ways to overcome them and build more successful learning? Fulcrum can help and we love a challenge. A short demo of our adaptive technology will quickly show you how you can get ahead of the curve for 2019 and build your training roadmap with more actionable employee data, a learner-centric approach and game-changing AI. Let’s schedule a time to chat.