Address the Skills Gap and Future-Proof Your L&D Strategy

Key takeaways

1. Start from business outcomes, not from courses

   David Wilson said L&D has a "habit of delivery": it picks topics, runs events and publishes catalogues, but rarely starts from the business outcome. Success measures should be about people's ability to do things, not learning metrics or happy sheet scores.

2. Segment the workforce by what each group needs to learn

   Caroline Ford described AstraZeneca's personas for digital capability across roughly 75,000 staff. General employees need breadth rather than depth, digital practitioners need narrow, deep expertise, and leaders need to guide a move from hierarchy to a more agile organisation.

3. Find the red threads before you design anything

   Ford advised L&D teams to talk to senior leaders, middle managers and frontline colleagues who deal with customers, then look for the concerns that come up across all three groups about the organisation's future and their own skills and careers.

4. Make every employee a good data citizen

   Ford said people do not need to be data analysts, but everyone has to understand their part in keeping data clean and current: if the data is poor, applying AI to it risks bias. Ford also named data ethics, design thinking, lean and agile as priority skills.

5. Do not leave ownership of reskilling in no man's land

   Wilson cited earlier Fosway research showing employees assumed employers owned development while employers assumed employees owned more of it. High performers already help themselves, so it is middle and lower-level employees who most need the organisation to take the lead.

6. Tie learning to real work and ask people to report back

   AstraZeneca built learning agility as an enterprise capability. Ford said staff learn through education, peer networks and hands-on experience: apply a resource at work, connect it to a business outcome, and report back on the impact.