I posted on Tuesday about how fewer than 20% of L&D pros believed they were very effective at upskilling and reskilling, onboarding, or business change. It inspired lots of comment on LinkedIn, especially about what makes ‘very effective’. One position put forward was that we might believe we are effective at what we do; we only saw the result for very effective.

Not knowing the standards that people are measuring themselves to is problematic if you want to design effective learning. What might be one person’s great is another’s ‘meh’. I’m having plenty of conversations with people in the learning space about what kind of support might work in the future and it’s even harder to design for effective when the problems are undefined, fluid, and emergent.

Take the phrase ‘operational effectiveness’ for example. Does that mean the ability to perform on a transactional basis, or is it more than that? Does that mean building capacity into systems and processes to support people who are stretched and stressed? It might do and the groups of people wanting people to operate more ‘effectively’ will all have their own perception and expectation of what effective means.

So what are learning people to do? Be ABSOLUTELY clear about what the real problems are.

What are the problems keeping you engaged right now?

What are the situations and circumstances which are proving difficult to work through?

Is it all about reskilling and upskilling and what does that really mean?

Is it really about proving your value, or more fundamental about demonstrating you can measure what impact you’re having?

Is it really about hybrid working or a lack of strategy in how you’ll be approaching learning to support that way of working?

Is it truly that learner engagement is tough or a need to understand the culture of learning which exists in your organisation?

Is it a channel management issue, or are you not tapping into communities and networks who already know how to do things differently.

I’m really keen to hear what the real problems are that you have right now if you work in learning. I’ll be running a learning clinic in September and would be keen to hear from people about what their real problems are.