NEW L&D Industry Report from Towards Maturity: Unlocking Potential

It was fantastic to attend the Learning Technologies conference in London last week for the first time ever. Check out my vlog last week on my key highlights from the conference.

Whilst I was there I hosted one of the Towards Maturity Exchange sessions, a series of informal, face to face, group discussions held throughout the event. Check out the Twitter backchannel through #lt17ex to get a glimpse of the key learnings from all of the Exchange sessions, including mine on “How to create effective learning transfer”.

It was great to collaborate with Towards Maturity on this and engage with the fantastic work they are doing in benchmarking Learning & Development.

I really encourage you to take a look at their latest report “Unlocking Potential” and learn from the top deck organisations in learning and development.

600 learning professionals and 5,000 learners have contributed to this data with Towards Maturity drawing out key insights in a thorough report.

The report confirms that today’s successful workplaces are fast moving, digital and innovative.

Interestingly learning delivery has not changed much in 5 years with 56% still being delivered face to face.

Aligning learning to the business remains as important as ever with 76% of the Top Deck analysing the business problem before recommending a solution, compared to 50% on average.

Technology continues to play a huge role with 96% of responders wanting to use technology to improve behavioural change and organisational performance.

Towards the end of the report, Towards Maturity outline how to unlock potential within the L&D team to create more effective learning programs.

It was great to see in the tips for unlocking business productivity a shout out for ensuring course design enables transfer of desired behaviours into the workplace – because of course if there is no learning support to change desired behaviours then what is the point of it!

Great to see the power of reflection getting a mention too, with 73% of learners making time to reflect on what the have learnt.

To sum it all off Towards Maturity round up what we can learn from the Top Deck, and how they are taking learning experiences beyond merely the start and end of a course, but an experience that has clearly established purpose and alignment to the business, and is integrated back into the workplace with support to boost performance. How great to learn from the Top Deck and #makeithappen in your organisations!

Congratulations again to Laura Overton and the Towards Maturity team for another great publication. The findings I’ve mentioned are just scratching the surface – for a whole host of fascinating figures, check out the full report to learn from the top deck and increase the effectiveness of your learning initiatives.

 

Emma Weber is a recognized authority on the transfer of learning. As CEO of Lever – Transfer of Learning, she has helped companies such as Telstra, Oracle and BMW deliver and measure tangible business results from learning. Emma has also been a guest speaker at learning effectiveness conferences worldwide and authored the hugely successful book Turning Learning into Action. Much more detail around the issues and solutions examined in this article are available in the book – please feel free to download a free chapter.