The State of Workplace Learning in ANZ

Launched with a webinar this week from Laura Overton and the AITD – the new Towards Maturity benchmark report “Unlocking Potential in Australasia” has officially landed.

The report looks at the state of workplace learning in Australia and New Zealand vs. the worldwide “Top Deck” (companies that achieve top results with their learning strategies).

120 learning professionals from 101 organisations in Australia and New Zealand contributed to the Australasian sample.

The results suggest that “organisational culture, leadership and employee engagement are the top three HR challenges for Australasian businesses”

The priority for Australasian L&D leaders it would seem is to modernise learning, and improve efficiency and agility.

93% of L&D Leaders are hoping technology will help them with this.

It’s clear from the findings that down under we are big thinkers, we strive for the best and hold high expectations for how technology can help us. However less that half in the region are achieving their goals.

It was great to see that 65% in ANZ agree that learning initiatives support the goals the business needs, but we need to be careful in that only 29% are working with the business to define metrics for improvement.

It was interesting to see that 60% of ANZ organisations expect Managers to be responsible for their team’s development – however in the webinar Laura did flag that this is a tricky area. This has got to start from the top. If we’re not modelling effective processes with managers and showing them a good learning journey with support for creating change in the workplace then they are not going to be encouraged to support their staff.

There are many more interesting findings in the report – get yourself a copy HERE.

Thanks to Laura and the team at Towards Maturity for doing great work in the world of benchmarking. I highly recommend getting involved if you can.

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.