For the past three years, disruption was the only constant in a company’s life, tech or otherwise.
First, there was the pandemic, with its surge of remote workers and supply chain disruption, where tech companies were perfectly positioned to turn the crisis into an opportunity.
Then we saw geopolitics and war take center stage, and another wave of uncertainty hit businesses, only this time, the situation also disrupted the tech sector.
From all-time highs in the final days of 2021, tech stocks have plummeted to all-time lows in November 2022, seeing their value decrease by over 90% in some notable cases.
Lay-offs and hiring freezes in tech have begun to pop in the news feed with higher frequency, with Twitter, Lyft, Meta, and other household names jumping on the bandwagon.
From stock market darlings, tech companies have lit the fire under recession talks.
To make matters even more complicated, tech workers are already prone to be diagnosed with mental health conditions like anxiety & depression.
The current context will most likely impact them even further.
The year 2023 is anticipated to be one of the most challenging years for the L&D leader working in tech.
Not only will you need to continue to upgrade your company’s skill bank, but you will have to do so while under tremendous pressure.
For example, cutting costs and dealing with a fluctuating and demotivated workforce that mostly you can’t reach because they work remotely.
For this white paper, we’ve talked to industry leaders and gone through mountains of data to determine the pressure points most likely to impact the L&D strategy and the ability to deploy it successfully across the entire organization.
These problems are not trivial and easy to solve; their solutions are not tools but entirely different ways of thinking and acting together with better tools.
Working differently with the wrong tools will get us nowhere, and working the same way with better tools might push us a little forward.
History teaches that there are opportunities in every crisis and that hard times don’t last forever.
And while nobody wishes for more difficulties in life, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt quote is worth remembering: “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.”
So the only question is: will we steer the boat or let the sea guide us?
Robert Blaga, November 2022
In the following five chapters, we go through the significant pressure points that L&D leaders in technology companies need to face in the coming year.
The main problems and causes were determined by interviewing learning & development professionals and scrapping the internet for information on the economic, geopolitical, social & psychological issues threatening tech companies and their employees.
The proposed solutions mostly come from research papers, case studies, and expert opinions of people we’ve interviewed.
When trying to understand what works, we decided to formulate each pressure point and its leading cause as a “problem statement” to solve:
# How can we decrease the cost and increase the efficiency of our learning and development initiatives so that we can keep adding value during a recession?
# How can we ensure our employees are ready for the next rapid shift in market conditions?
# How can we help people focus on development when they struggle with isolation from working away from their peers and anxiety from the negative news cycle?
# How can we develop our employees when their managers rarely do?
# How can we protect & grow the company knowledge base by building a learning culture without a physical office?
This approach allowed us to tackle the problems more fundamentally and reframe the “doom & gloom” of 2023 into a more positive outlook.
Each chapter describes the problem, the root causes, and some possible solutions (strategic, tactical, and tools) in enough detail to make it manageable for L&D leaders to implement these recommendations on their own. However, if you need some extra help, you can reach out at contact@teamlearning.ai.
Today’s main concern of business leaders is inflation and the looming recession.
The recession has already arrived in the technology sector, with technology stocks plummeting to all-time lows.
For example, Asana, the project management software company, has seen its value decrease by 87% in the past 12 months, and Lyft, the ride-sharing app, by 79%.
Even Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has seen its market capitalization drop by 71%, followed by other large tech companies like Salesforce, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Lay-offs and hiring freezes have followed suit, with Twitter, Meta, Amazon, and hundreds of tech scale-ups announcing drastic measures impacting 10-50% of their workforce.
At the time of this writing, technology companies have cut an estimated 100.000 jobs.
What does this mean for Learning & Development leaders?
Cost cutting comes to learning & development, and so does opportunity
As one L&D leader told us, “we don’t know what else is coming, but cutting costs is coming.”
The apparent lesson of the 2009-2010 economic crisis is that cutting training and development will have adverse effects in the long term.
Still, the less obvious lesson is that most learning market innovations also happened then.
When faced with plummeting budgets, innovative companies didn’t just stop training their people; instead, they looked for innovative solutions to replace traditional classroom training.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and e-learning platforms (LMS) have become the go-to solution for budget-wary L&D leaders during the recession, and household names such as Udemy, Coursera, TalentLMS, and 360Learning were founded in 2010-2012.
It’s only natural that tech companies will look at learning platforms as a go-to solution for their learning needs, as they promise a 10-30x decrease in cost compared to classic learning and the ability to reach remote employees quickly.
However, the new generation of tech employees might find only some online learning platforms particularly exciting.
How tech employees are learning
Tech workers differ in their learning habits compared to any other type of employee.
An estimated 30-50% of their day-to-day job is dedicated to learning.
Technology is an ever-changing field; no employee can write code without researching, googling, searching Stackoverflow, going through public repositories on Git, and asking peers for help.
With their clever use of their tech tools, tech workers have the habit of learning in the flow of work and already do it without needing intervention from their L&D leaders.
So it’s no surprise that when pressed to take e-learning courses or video-based courses, tech employees are less than happy with the outcome and engagement.
When teamlearning.ai analyzed learning data from over 49,000 employees taking classes, tech workers were, on average, 70% less engaged when presented with static content than their non-tech counterparts.
They get what they need when needed, so slides or videos do not excite them.
So what works for tech employees?
The next generation of learning technology: TES.
The cost-cutting solution for L&D leaders is still online learning because of its ability to reach vast numbers of employees at a relatively low cost.
But classic solutions don’t seem to work.MOOCs and e-learning platforms have minimal appeal because of their relatively old technology that allows for primarily static content, which tech workers, with their constant search for the next tech innovation, find less appealing.
When we talked with tech employees and looked at the learning studies conducted in recent years (on a total of over 250,000 employees), what produces a positive effect for tech workers is Training Enablement Software (TES) solutions.
TES combines newer technologies, like collaborative digital whiteboarding, video-conferencing, robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence, into dynamic experiences where people meet online to learn by exchanging ideas and knowledge on specific topics.
Compared to an LMS, TES brings a higher level of scalability and cost-saving due to more automation but engages users much deeper by playing on people’s desire to band together with peers and work towards a common goal.
Some of the core functionalities of TES platforms are radically different than how an LMS or a MOOC works:
Betting on online learning for their remote tech workers in the coming year will bring benefits and alleviate some of the pressure on L&D leaders, but only if the strategy and the tools work well together, keeping into account the specific profile of the tech worker.
One of the difficult lessons of the past two years has been that business agility is no longer a nice to have, no matter what type of business you run.
In the words of Wouter Aghina, the Global Leader of all things agile at McKinsey, agility is
“when you thrive on change and get stronger, and it becomes a source of real competitive advantage.”
Thriving on change starts by preparing people to embrace it, run with it, and find ways to not just cope at the moment but become better in the long run.Learning & development leaders across all industries feel the pressure of deploying a learning strategy that up-skills their employees not just for the known challenges but for the ones they can’t predict.
In March 2020, the number of Google searches on VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) skyrocketed at an all-time high and continued to trend upwards until reaching a peak in February 2022, with the open hostilities that have started in Ukraine.
It’s still at peak level at the moment of this writing, clearly suggesting that VUCA is one of the main concerns of people every.
For the L&D leader in tech, this has an even stronger meaning, as the volatility is building on top of a market that is already rapidly changing and evolving.
Getting employees ready to switch tracks (or build another track from scratch) needs to be ingrained in all aspects of the L&D strategy, from the reasoning behind the strategy to the topics and all the way to a new training approach.
The challenge is knowing how to act faster than ever before
One key difference between a Learning & Development strategy for stable times and one for volatile times is how quickly and frequently you need to adapt it.
Under calm market conditions, a Training Manager can make a 12-months plan and stick with it in general terms.
But when the company faces disruption and needs to change course every few months, only an agile process seems to work: deploy fast, learn, adapt and repeat.
For this to happen, learning professionals need a constant flow of actionable data and insights into people’s know-how and skill level on various topics to make strategic and tactical decisions at speed and scale.Unfortunately, the tools and processes at their disposal are better suited for calmer times when speed and accuracy are not critical.
Luckily, a new generation of tools allows companies to get better insights (more accurate, faster) by deploying artificial intelligence and predictive analytics and looking at data across multiple platforms connected through APIs.
Data-driven decision making
Using data to make better and faster decisions about the learning and development process has seen much traction in companies with a digital-first strategy.
Usually, the L&D leaders at the forefront of data-driven decision-making use a combination of tools and advanced analytics to understand how they need to adapt their strategic and tactical efforts.
Gives information on the impact of L&D interventions sometime after they happened
Source: tools that connect multiple platforms through APIs and analyze trends and before/after changes
Example: after a management program deployed to 120 managers, an L&D team used data from three different platforms (Jira, Slack, Workday) to determine the impact of their program
Forecasts the impact of L&D interventions immediately after they happened
Source: AI tools that collect and analyze data during the training process regarding participation, engagement, mood, and understanding of the material
Example: during an agile mindset training intervention, an L&D consulting team used a TES tool to forecast the probability that participants will put into practice the main lessons (data points included emotional reactions through facial recognition software & talking time through voice recognition software)
Makes recommendations about what future L&D interventions are needed
Source: AI tools that build upon predictive and descriptive insights to come up with a series of L&D or managerial interventions that will likely improve the outcome
Example: there are very few examples of true Prescriptive insights in the L&D field. Some solutions that come close are the “recommended courses” that some content platforms (Udemy, Linkedin Learning) propose based on user interest, but prescriptive can move further by telling the L&D leader what type of intervention would work best for a particular group of people.
Connecting the tools and platforms can bring exceptional benefits for the data-driven company as a whole, especially now that remote work has made the whole working process completely digital.
Getting access to data is only the first step.
Using tools to make sense of the data is the second step, and we see this more and more in a lot of technology companies.
However, combining better insights with the same learning strategies does not bring the benefits that you might expect.
In the words of one L&D leader, “better data without a better learning process is like driving a Ferrari on a dirt road: not much speed and a lot of frustration.”
After looking at dozens of years of scientific data, case studies, and talking with experts, one learning process has emerged as a state-of-the-art race track for this Ferrari: problem-based learning.
Problem-based learning (PBL)
Research into this under-used learning strategy has concluded beyond doubt its superiority in two key aspects:
1. Long-term knowledge retention
2. Application of knowledge
The method is easy to understand yet challenging to master: groups of employees join forces to solve meaningful problems, and they learn from each other, from the challenge, from the immediate feedback (problem is solved / not solved), and from their research.
Compared to self-study (MOOC or e-learning) and lecture-based (classic training conducted by a trainer), PBL outperforms both by a wide margin.
But the benefits go even further:
# Boosts morale due to a sense of accomplishment
# Build social connections & support
# Encourages knowledge sharing
# Builds critical skills
# Changes the attitude towards work-related problems
# Inspires curiosity & connection
The digital tools necessary for building collaborative problem-solving scenarios for distributed teams have existed for a long time, with the foundation of software products that allowed for remote collaboration (digital whiteboards, video-conferencing platforms).
Still, their adoption by e-learning providers has been slow or non-existing.
Most learning tools developed before 2020 lack the necessary features to build problem-based learning scenarios because their software was never designed for this integration and use case (real-time collaboration for problem-solving).
Even more modern LMS platforms struggle to allow their users to generate anything more than static content that is destined to be consumed by a single employee at a time.
Fortunately, during the past two years, a new set of platforms have emerged that were built with real-time collaboration in mind right from the start: audio-video embedded, live synchronicity between training participants, and features to create real-world case studies and simulations.
A platform that does not include this set of capabilities in a meaningful way cannot solve one of the most pressing issues in tech: getting employees ready for whatever hits next.
One of the pressure points we have not anticipated in researching this report was mental health, as traditionally, the learning and development function was rarely charged with helping employees cope with the stressors in their lives.
But with tech workers being particularly prone to isolation due to remote work, the staggering number of people reporting anxiety and depression has increased in recent years (51% by some accounts, more by others).
Mental health issues seriously impact people’s ability to focus and learn, and the L&D team’s efforts can be rendered useless because of this.It’s no wonder that for 2023, the strategic development of the workforce needs to mitigate this type of risk, and the leadership team in charge of the learning function is struggling to find solutions that help employees focus on learning.
The most common approaches we’ve seen are more bells and whistles than a substantial learning process or strategy change.
From the gamification of learning to mental health webinars, it seems learning professionals are searching for quick fixes to the thorny issue at hand.
However, both gamification and two-hour webinars mostly fail in their task.
The typical tech employee is neither inclined nor happy to take part in poorly designed games (as all gamification efforts are when compared to actual games) and theoretical content.
The long-term and more impactful solutions come from understanding what helps mitigate the impact of the negative news cycle, isolation, and burnout.
And the answers to this question come from dozens of years of research into the science of mental health.
We have identified four areas where the learning and development function can act to help employees.
Small learning communities
Rationale:
Data from dozens of psychological studies and interventions across all cultures show that social connectedness is inversely correlated with mental health problems and is directly associated with well-being.
The L&D intervention:
Some companies we’ve talked to use problem boards on their intranet, essentially a page where they publish interesting challenges and invite employees to join small groups and try to solve them.
Why it works:
Regular meetings with people with the same goal, in particular, to solve a challenge or a problem, have increased camaraderie and social support.
This was mainly researched in the tech sector, with numerous studies showing that initiatives like peer programming are very effective in increasing enjoyment, confidence, and the feeling of camaraderie.
Achievement
Rationale:
When people lack the feeling of making progress, achieving something meaningful, or being good at something, their mood drops, and they are in danger of developing depression and anxiety.
The L&D intervention:
Some learning tools that consider this allows the L&D function to set incremental goals for a learning process, depending on the skill level of their employee.
For example, in a leadership course deployed in the tech division of an automotive company, different target scores were set for other people, with more experienced managers having a higher target score than less experienced ones.
Why it works:
Having variable goals for people with different skills is a common practice in performance management. When adopting this practice in the learning process, people find it rewarding to take courses and feel good about themselves.
Most modern learning platforms allow for variable goals, and a new generation of AI tools makes implementing this relatively easy.
Discovery
Rationale:
Sparking people’s interest motivates them to “click next” and brings enjoyment into the mix and an elevated sense of curiosity.
The L&D intervention:
While most L&D interventions we’ve seen were focused on gamification elements to spark interest, more thoughtful designs turn to learn content into journeys of discovery. For example, a case study created by one of the Big Four companies for their managers involved a step-by-step approach where people saw a story unfold based on their actions.
Why it works:
When people become curious about something and begin anticipating the following episodes, dopamine is released into the system and helps counter the effects of anxiety and depression.
Learning platforms that go beyond gamification and allow for rapid development of learning stories are few, but newer solutions have built-in algorithms that make the process easy and scalable.
Meaning
Rationale:
Lack of meaning is associated with increased anxiety levels and a higher chance of burnout across multiple studies.
The L&D intervention:
One of the simplest and most impactful strategies we’ve seen is positioning the learning process so that people instantly understand what’s their tangible benefit of engaging in it. For example, in a negotiation course conducted through Zoom, the facilitator explained the benefits in simple terms, based on historical data: for the buyers, the benefit was cost reduction between 30 and 40%; for the sellers, an increase in profit margin between 15 and 35%.
This simple strategy got everyone on board right from the start.
Why it works:
Telling people what their particular benefit can be by engaging with the learning process creates meaning and positive anticipation. This makes people interested, excited, and anxious to start the course.Most learning platforms start the course with a “learning goal,” but the historical benefit of people taking the course seems to be needed before that.
This was beautifully (and amusingly) formulated at the beginning of a Time Management course in a Romanian company we’ve surveyed:
“People who have taken this course over the past six months have seen a 32,4% decrease in the number of hours spent dealing with other people’s problems. Can you do better?”
Getting employees ready for a complicated, ever-changing world while they battle with their own mental, social, and relationship problems is incredibly difficult.
The first step is to acknowledge that there is a problem.
The second step is redesigning the process to increase camaraderie and feelings of achievement, curiosity, and meaning.
Fortunately, there are already digital tools that allow for the process to be redesigned. However, what’s missing sometimes seems to be the willingness to change, as one of the people we’ve talked to said to us:
“The problem is not the legacy software. It’s the legacy mindset. That’s why online learning has such a low impact.”
Across all sectors, lack of managerial involvement and support is seen as one of the biggest challenges of any learning and development initiative.
This was by a wide margin the biggest reason for unhappiness for most learning and professionals we’ve discussed.
The associated symptoms mentioned by L&D professionals are:
1. After training, managers don’t follow up with employees on what they’ve learned, what are the next steps and how they can support them (77%)
2. Employees are “sent” to training without being explained why (68%)
3. Managers interrupt employees engaged in learning or don’t allow for their participation (62%)
4. Learning needs are not determined or communicated by managers in due time (61%)
5. Managers don’t provide meaningful feedback on the progress done by employees after a learning journey (59%)
What causes these symptoms is up for debate, with both learning professionals and managers making valid arguments and counterarguments.In technology companies, though, since remote work is more common, managers have fewer behavioral data points to work with.
They can see the output but can’t see the process, and this lack of information makes them unaware of problems until it can be too late to do anything about it.
These blind spots, with increased workload and an overwhelming number of meetings, translate into inaction from the manager’s side regarding their employee’s development needs.
Getting managers on board is a difficult challenge, and some learning tools help, but the underlying issue is their work’s culture and context.
That being said, mapping a better process on better tools accelerates positive outcomes, so we’ve focused on finding both.
A better process, better tools
Redesigning the learning process during high turbulence might seem counterproductive, but we’ve seen agile companies pull this off through a series of incremental changes and experiments.
Some classic approaches work also, and there are three categories of interventions that we’ve identified while talking with learning professionals:
However, the ideas we found to have the highest positive impact were indirect, almost out of sight, and turned managers into active contributors without formalizing the approach into a procedure.
These ideas can be split into three categories based on the phase of the learning process where they show up.
Needs analysis phase
The most innovative approaches we’ve seen in this phase are “skill boards” and “collaborative needs analysis.
”Managers are invited to form small teams of 4-6 people and use digital whiteboards and videoconferencing tools to discuss common challenges and competency requirements and formalize learning needs.
Because the process is collaborative, the sharing between managers helps them calibrate their behavior, support one another, and get more interested in employee development. The power of community is again used to focus people on learning.
Once the learning needs are formalized over two-three online meetings, each manager collects the ones that make sense for their team and post them on a digital “skill board.”
This visual database helps learning professionals within the company match teams with similar requirements.
Learning design phase
More modern learning platforms allow for collaborating on content production.
For example, one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers says that their cost of creating content has decreased by $250,000 per year.
While speed and cost reduction are the two main reasons to involve people in creating content together when it comes to managers, this has another benefit: they get invested in the learning process and become curious to know how people have engaged with it.
In a french company we’ve surveyed, involving managers in content validation and creation has increased their overall participation in all learning phases, from preparing their employees before a course to conducting follow-up meetings after.
Tools that allow for collaborative content creation are a must-have in 2023.
Follow-up phase
Once learning is done, tools incorporating newer technologies like predictive and prescriptive AI fare better than classic reporting, like attendance, feedback, and quiz results, to move managers to take action.
For example, one company in the Middle East we’ve talked to reported a higher response rate for emails that gave managers actionable insights (” Employee X will probably need Y because of Z”) compared to emails that only showed attendance and quiz responses.
Training Enablement Software is particularly good at offering exciting and valuable data to managers. Companies deploying TES see better involvement from managers when the collected data is based on AI algorithms.
In conclusion, a good part of what produces better results for manager support and involvement revolves around getting managers together to collaborate for people development and providing them with better and more actionable data.
Even great companies took a hit in their culture department when the great migration outside of the office started back in 2020.
With everybody confined to their screens, the spontaneous sharing of knowledge was made impossible. Even if people actively searched for new knowledge and applied it to their jobs, the context for building on each other’s know-how was missing.
With their remote-first policies, building a culture around shared values and knowledge is even more difficult for tech companies, but the pressure to have one is even more vital.
Three underlying causes make this a significant pressure point for the L&D leader:
1. Rapidly evolving technology needs faster-than-ever integration.
People must be able not just to learn new tools but to get in the habit of actively searching for and sharing information with their colleagues on these new tools.
2. Increasingly sophisticated demands from customers need a faster-than-ever reaction time.
Tech workers need to be able to change lanes fast, and this can be possible only if enough knowledge is shared across teams to allow for a collective response across the entire company.
3. Protecting the company knowledge base in response to a fluctuating headcount.
Because of layoffs, silent quitting, and the general competitive landscape in the tech job market, companies can face not necessarily a shortage of employees but a shortage of knowledge.
It has become notorious the example of Twitter, where after firing lots of employees, it started calling them back just a few days later when realizing those employees had knowledge no one else had.
Faced with the pressure of maintaining and growing the knowledge base and instilling a desire to learn and share learning, L&D leaders have fewer options than they might like in the absence of the physical office.
The physical office was doing very well was creating social connections that are so important for building a culture of learning.
But, unfortunately, working remotely can’t support an essential feature of this social connection: spontaneous knowledge sharing.
Some companies are trying to solve this challenge by creating dedicated knowledge-sharing channels on Slack and MS Teams. Some have seen relative success with this approach: employees share things they discover with their peers and ask and answer questions.
Others have taken a different approach, like creating mentorship programs where senior employees can support less experienced ones and turning learning into a collective activity instead of a solitary one.
Mentors for every course
One of the most exciting initiatives in a large manufacturing company was assigning mentors for every training course in their curriculum.
For example, a high-performing salesperson was assigned as a mentor for participants in a Sales Course. As a result, people could ask questions, meet with him, and exchange information.
This allowed both the mentor to feel rewarded for their expertise and for the juniors to experience a culture of knowledge sharing, encouraging them to share what they know with others.
Some learning platforms allow mentors to be assigned to learning groups and even help identify such mentors from previous takers of the course. Such tools make building a learning culture easier for the L&D function.
Knowledge boards
Tools like Slack and MS Teams might not be perfect for building a culture, but they allow information to spread rapidly across the entire organization.
One company we’ve researched used its internal communicator to publish daily knowledge bites and followed people’s reactions to them. When one bit of information received more comments or likes, they turned it into a learning challenge, inviting people to contribute to its further development.
The response was very positive, and one manager in the company commented on this:
“It’s probably a human trait to brag about how much you know in front of others because that “know-how” channel is the most active channel in the whole company.”
A collection of learners
Finally, the last approach that helps companies build a digital learning culture is to change the scope and the formal learning process from employee-centric learning to team-centric learning.
In most cases, the entire digital learning and development process is built around the individual: LMS and MOOCs are “single-player” tools, and even those platforms that advertise collaborative learning only offer forum-like collaboration.
Encouraging employees to share their know-how synchronously with their peers is not enabled in the generation of tools launched before 2020 because this kind of collaboration was not on the map until then.
Training Enablement Software was designed for that, with its audio-video, whiteboard, and small groups approach. It’s well suited for creating the habit of sharing and building on each other’s ideas.
For example, in a management course deployed through TES in one of the Big Four consulting giants, managers had to meet online for 45 minutes and find the best way to give feedback to four hypothetical employees.
What followed was a genuinely engaging session where participants presented their points of view, solved the challenge together, and continued to exchange information even after the sessions were done.
The team behind this report has worked for over two months to gather data, interview people and compile the findings into a digestible form.
We would like to extend our appreciations to all those who have contributed with their input, and a special thank you to leaders from the following companies, that took some time to talk to us extensively:
Continental
Deloitte
London Stock Exchange
Michelin
PwC
Sematext
UiPath
Reach out if you need help in uncovering the hidden gaps in your online learning process that might cause a lower impact and a higher than expected cost.
contact@teamlearning.ai