Company X is a multinational enterprise in the medical device sector and is currently privately owned. However, the future always brings change with it, and so Company X must now begin to examine how a possible change in leadership within the next five years will affect each of its business functions. In the case of the L&D function, personal preferences of the CEO tend to supersede, indeed such control can certainly be to the overall detriment of an organisation (Johnson, 2011). The COVID pandemic certainly gave food for thought and allowances were made, but L&D practitioners must encourage a transition of HRD practices to keep growth sustainable. To this aim, the positioning of L&D within the organisation is key (Beevers et al., 2020).
Currently, L&D activities are spread across three departments, each with their own focus. This makes creating a cohesive and overarching concept difficult. Although most training currently takes place online, some trainers are eager to provide in-person exclusively again. However, according to Barratt‐Pugh et al. (2020) and CIPD-London (2020), the rapidly changing technological environment places demands on the L&D function to evolve practices to become more in line with what the learner needs, namely autonomy of choice of how, where, and when to learn. Indeed, as stated by Bierema (2020), the pandemic has initiated the shift from office working to teleworking. Therefore, this requires more flexible arrangements regarding training. The report by Pugh et al. (2021), although supporting of this notion, also indicates the importance of human contact and hence the continuing value of face-to-face training.
A common theme is also that of the need for L&D practitioners to not only develop new and innovative learning practices, but also to develop themselves (HR-Leaders, 2019). Many practitioners at Company X have no formal background in L&D; development of this cohort would surely benefit both learners and the organisation as a whole (Pugh et al., 2021). What is required here is to foster attitudes which encourage practitioners to evolve, thereby exhibiting a willingness to be brave and adventurous, but also modest about their own importance, in order to develop innovative programmes which are credible and profitable.
A third aspect which Company X must consider when moving forward and creating training programmes which will be needed more than ever in the upcoming years is that of curating content. The immediate need to transfer classroom training to online training resulted in less-than-optimal learning. Trainers realised quickly that it was not possible to simply give the same presentations online and that content had to be adapted. As a paper by Bryson and Andres (2020) showed, the company was not alone in this endeavour. One the one hand, they suggest curating extensive resources to be used by learners in their own time without real-time interaction with a trainer, and on the other hand, intensive resources to be used in conjunction with real-time training. It is important to note here that the learning outcomes of the two types of resources differ; extensive resources should allow learners to understand the topic, whereas intensive resources should allow learners to be creative, critical and analytical to explore themes further.
Which factors specifically affect your organisation, and what else could Company X be doing to prepare for the future?
