Curious about learning and development and HR trends for this year? Well then you are at the right place. I reflected on my own 2023 work experience and searched and analyzed seven plus industry reports including Gartner top five priorities for HR leaders, the learning 2023 workplace report and different Harvard and Forbes vacations. They have several similarities and I have drawn five very obvious trends.

Let’s get started. So the way I would go about looking at learning and development trends is by understanding what are the main business challenges for 2024 because in the end of the day learning and development role is to support business in a strategic way. According to Harvard Business Publishing these are the top business challenges that will persist in the coming year.

Inflation and economic downturn, changing customer expectations, embracing change and transformation, building diverse and inclusive culture, driving inspiration and motivation among employees. So based on these challenges and what is happening on the market these are the trends that I foresee in 2024. The trend number one holistic change management.

82% of HR leaders say that their managers aren’t equipped enough to lead the change. 77% of HR leaders say that their employees are feeling fatigued from change. Employees feel tired and skeptical due to continuous change that started in 2020 or even earlier.

The volume and pace of change is overwhelming for employees as changes are both stacked and continuous. Change fatigue is feeling of exhaustion or resistance to constant organizational changes. It can manifest in different ways including stress, fear, burnout, frustration, lower employee engagement and productivity.

That is why L&D needs to help businesses and leaders to develop great change management skills and L&D professionals by themselves have to be experienced change agents. The trend number two is adapting to generative AI. AI training is the third most sought after learning after leadership, mindfulness and well-being skills.

According to Charm or Society for Human Resources Management only one out of 10 employees were offered AI training in 2023 despite 85% of employees needing training on AI.

The online survey was conducted in August in Australia, Germany, India, UK and the US and showed differences among countries around the use and understanding of AI.

In India 56% of workers currently use AI in their jobs compared to Australia 30%, US 29% and UK and Germany both 24%.

So when it comes to AI literacy and usage different organizations will be on different levels and it’s learning and development responsibility along with organizational leaders to help employees close this gap. If you want to learn more about how you can future-proof your career in learning and development with the rise of AI check one of my earlier videos. Number three continue bringing learning into the flow of work.

So if you find yourself organizing more and more face-to-face trainings, pushing more online courses for employees, enrolling more employees into structured educational programs, you could be unintentionally focusing on the least important component of employee development. Development through structured courses and programs. According to LinkedIn Learning 68% of employees prefer to learn on the job and almost half want to learn in the moment of need.

Therefore in 2024 focus more on bringing learning back to the workflow. The best time and place for us to learn is on the job in the flow of work. If we have a genuine problem to solve we have a motivation to go learn and find a solution.

There is a high possibility that we will apply what we learn. If we apply it and it influences our performance it also increases the likelihood that we are influencing business goals. The trouble is that too many companies still drag their people out of the workflow to learn things that don’t seem immediately relevant and we don’t have a chance to put them into practice for a while.

Putting learning content first makes learning feel irrelevant and drives lower engagement. Trend number four redefining and reviewing learning development metrics. According to the LinkedIn Learning 2023 workplace report many organizations still use vanity metrics instead of business metrics.

2024 will be a time for a you and for change. The top five ways L&D professionals measure their success based on employee satisfaction with programs and some kind of completions. Vanity metrics according to LinkedIn Learning are employee satisfaction measured by survey, employee satisfaction informal or qualitative feedback, number of employees taking courses or training, employee performance on post-learning quizzes and assessments, number of courses or training each employee has completed and number of hours spent on learning.

Listen I’m not saying that you should stop tracking these metrics it’s just these metrics do not really show how your learning and development initiatives impacted business results. The business metrics fall in the middle or bottom of the list and they are improved employee productivity and retention, progress towards closing workforce skill gap and number of new skills learned per learner. Trend number five maximizing employee productivity and reducing stress.

This trend is a logical consequence of the four trends that I mentioned earlier. In 2023 62 percent of employees reported feeling the weight of burnout. Think of a big office space more than half of the room would be grappling with the feeling of exhaustion and overwhelming stress.

This year we will see organizations more than ever working on helping their employees to achieve work-life balance and work-life integration. Why? Burned out employees are less productive, less engaged and more likely to leave their job. This in turn will lead to increased turnover rate and higher recruitment cost.

Gallup lists the primary causes of burnout as unfair work treatment, unmanageable workload, a lack of role clarity and lack of communication and support from a manager. This is where learning and development will come in place to help leaders develop the necessary leadership and communication skills.

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