Creating a culture of continuous learning and growth
At its core, learning and development (L&D) is about creating a culture of continuous learning and growth that enables organisations to constantly evolve and people to develop to their full potential.
What does a learning and development specialist do?
At the macro level, L&D is about understanding the organisation strategy and its future capability needs in order to identify learning priorities across the organisation. On an individual level, it’s about creating learning environments where employees can continuously develop to be their best.
L&D specialists put in place learning initiatives that enable organisations to constantly evolve and develop. Motivational and behavioural science are key to impactful learning, and learning is about much more than just attending courses. An L&D specialist excels at identifying the current and future skills requirements of an organisation, and creates flexible learning interventions (through digital and other means) to meet the diverse needs of the workforce.
Your typical activities
Here are some of the activities you can expect to be involved in as an L&D specialist:
- Carrying out capability assessments across the organisation
- Designing blended learning solutions for example, digital, face to face, social collaborative learning, coaching, action learning sets, and so on.
- Using digital tools to create flexible and innovative learning programmes
- Applying adult learning theories to ensure employees get the best out of their development
- Designing a range of learning interventions, including technical, behavioural and leadership programmes and working with external partners where relevant
- Driving a culture of continuing professional development (CPD)
- Facilitating learning interventions
- Creating a coaching culture in the organisation
- Monitoring how effectively learning has been transferred to employees.
A day in the life of an
L&D specialist
A day in the life of Neil Barnett, Learning and Development Adviser at Samaritans
Types of roles in learning and development
Here is a shortlist of the types of job titles you might find in L&D. As you can see, L&D specialists are at all levels of experience and seniority:
- Learning administrator
- Facilitator(face to face or online)
- Training deliverer (face to face or online)
- Learning and development business partner
- Learning and development manager
- Head of learning and development
- Director of learning and development.
- Instructional designer
- Digital learning designer
- Learning assessor
CIPD Learning courses in Learning and Development
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Video: We can all be agile learners
With the technology at their disposal, L&D professionals have a duty to change the way employees learn, says Mike Shaw – whether that means becoming agile content curators or strategic business partners.
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I think within organizations within
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business there's a very much the time
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there's quite a traditional view of what
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L&D is those additional ideas Verity I
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think knowing concrete sometimes and
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that the digging we then need to do to
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trying
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extricate people from that mindset is
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really challenging so for me we use the
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word agile a lot and I you know
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sometimes wonder what people understand
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is that job but for me agile in part at
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least is about having input support
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solutions at the point that people know
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important people need it it's about
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utilizing the range of resources and
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sources we have available so you to
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learning of course being a major
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elements of that you get helps people
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get their job bottom line and that you
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know and I think if we have it without
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it with that view and that mindset I
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think that helps guide the sort of
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resources and the solutions we're
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looking for for me the other key thing
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is around just being multi skills now it
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doesn't mean to say that energy
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professional has to be able to do
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everything but the sort of thing I've
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really enjoyed in recent time have been
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around developing you know video skills
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public podcasts skills curation skills
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and building programs were curation
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those have been things that have really
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excited me in my own development that
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have hopefully cascaded to my team and
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been cascading to the wider business you
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need to develop a wider set of skills
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and all different sort of mindset maybe
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so that's tradition on my set and be
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really open to having discussions with
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people it will morph into different
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things as it is morphing and it all
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looked different but I believe of course
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self-directed learning is where we are
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going for so many of the things where in
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which you work but there's always a need
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to help facilitate that be bold about
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this ask difficult questions of your
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business leaders challenge them and if
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they're indeed professionals we can't
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change and develop then actually that
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would be a problem a thing
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you
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Develop your knowledge in learning and development
Each L&D standard progresses through four levels of impact. Which level do you most embody in your day-to-day work?
Devise a learning and development strategy aligned with organisational objectives and priorities.
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