I mentioned last week I would have a go at responding to the unanswered questions in a session I attended at the CIPD Festival of Work.

Here are the first few which I want to address and my thoughts about them.

We have an issue we call “the cobbler’s children” – our L&D colleagues are burnt out with arranging everyone else’s learning and forget about themselves. How do you engage L&D colleagues with their own learning?
We always told new managers in the Fire Service that their first step should be backwards. The temptation to dive in, and ‘do stuff’ because everyone else was doing it was really tempting. But that wasn’t their job. They were responsible for everyone at the incident and this is partly true for with L&D teams. Step back and understand the context you’re working in, the sector, the professional requirements, the technological, social and cultural spaces you’re in. Step back and THEN work out what you need to learn..

I’ve recently inherited L&D with limited prior experience; what basic skills and strengths would you recommend I look at developing to build a strong foundation?
I’m really reticent in providing advice for questions like this. Not knowing your background, skills, experience, etc, it is INCREDIBLY difficult to highlight what you need. I’ll see references and recommendations for courses and classes from other people but your best course of action is to go and speak to a dozen other professionals, explain your situation and find out where YOU think your gaps are.

Any tips for forging time and selling the value of researching new L&D offerings over fire-fighting the need to “fix” perceived problems dictated by SLT?
What are the SLT REALLY looking for? Is it cost savings, completions, performance, improved customer experiences? Find their hot button and look at what alternatives might be available to solve those business problems. Spending time to create an effective solution seems a no-brainer, especially when doing what you’ve always done hasn’t necessarily ‘fixed’ things in the past.

What kind of skills can I develop to help encourage buy-in from senior leadership to support our business’ L&D needs?
Like the earlier response it’s REALLY difficult to list these without knowing the context! I do recommend that brokerage is a new skillset and approach for L&D. This means negotiating the appropriate solutions which may not – in many cases – be learning related. It will include skills like business acumen, a performance focus, systemic thinking, and a performance consultative style which isn’t a) what businesses expect, or b) what L&D is skilled in.

We are in a world where employees Bring Your Own AI (BYOAI). What skills should L&D develop to make sure we are current and in the best place to inform the organisation to make intelligent choices?
There are two parts to this. The first is to make sure that you have a sense of what the tools can do. This is important because it will extend on a regular basis and change the way you think about them. Secondly, go and find out which tools people are using. They’ll have GenAI LLM tools on their personal devices and it’s likely – if not probable – that some of your teams and colleagues are using them vociferously.

What would you add? I’ll look at more questions next time.

#CIPD #FoW25