Name: Learning at Speed
Rating: 3.9 (201 reviews)
Author: Nelson Sivalingam

What’s in it for me? Discover a learning and development strategy that’ll help your business thrive.

Learning and development (L&D) is a major part of any modern business, with an estimated $350 billion spend. But, ironically, L&D itself has plenty to learn. Nobody knows how to adapt as effectively as a successful startup, which is likely to understand the unbelievable pace of change in today’s professional landscape. If you’re not constantly learning, adapting, and reskilling, you’re going nowhere fast.

That’s why the author of Learning at Speed, Nelson Sivalingam, looks to startups for inspiration for how L&D can most effectively adapt. In this Blink, you’ll discover what successful L&D means in the modern workplace, and how you can begin to create a learning ecosystem that allows your business to thrive – fast.

In this Blink, you’ll learn

why training courses aren’t always the answer;
how to take advantage of open learning resources; and
how “minimum viable product” thinking applies to L&D.

Learning and development departments are like startups – and can fail for the same reasons.

What makes a business successful in the modern, post-Covid world? A side hustle selling hand sanitizer or video conferencing tools? Well, maybe, but the better question is, What attitude does a business need today? Because there’s one common trait that unites successful modern businesses, regardless of which sector they operate in: the best businesses today are the fastest learners.

It’s not just a Covid thing. We live in a fast-paced environment that’s changing at an exponential rate, both in the world of work as much as in daily life. Today’s workforce will need different skills in the future – even in as little as five years’ time. But how can you make sure your business is equipped to help its employees learn at speed when you don’t even know what they should be learning?

The answer is through learning and development – the department that has long been there to upskill or reskill your workers. But there’s just one caveat: to be truly effective in such fast-paced times, L&D itself needs to change too. It needs to think with the agility and growth-driven mindset of a startup. And not just any startup. Many startups fail, after all – and one of the key reasons for their demise is a cautionary message for L&D professionals.

Do you remember Quibi? Briefly, in late 2020, it was big news: a brand-new mobile streaming service with an almost $2 billion budget. Its specialty was short-form videos that users would pay to watch. Why did Quibi fail? Because it was solving a problem that didn’t exist. It sat awkwardly between free social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok, and paid streaming services like Netflix. Nobody really wanted or needed that particular gap in the market to be filled.

Many L&D teams fall into the same trap. One survey found that a staggering 75 percent of managers weren’t satisfied with their company’s L&D. According to another survey, just 12 percent of employees actually applied the skills they learned through training.

It doesn’t seem like L&D is solving the right problems with its $350 billion global spend – that’s enough to fund 175 Quibis, by the way! Fortunately, the solution is to do more with less, through what the author calls lean learning. This is a whole new approach for L&D, and it’s ruthlessly focused on getting fast, measurable impact. It’s inspired by successful startups, and it could transform the way your workers learn new skills.

The first step of effective L&D is to find the problem that needs solving; then, plan your strategy.

Lean learning is a mindset. Its three main principles are action, continuous improvement, and outcome.

Action means it’s vital to act with speed. Things change so fast these days, and companies don’t have time to sit around developing perfectly calibrated, minutely detailed resources. It’s often more important to deliver a solution now – even if it’s initially flawed.

Learning solutions don’t have to be comprehensive – start with a “minimum valuable learning” product.

Nobody gets it perfect the first time – and that’s as true for you in the L&D team as it is for your staff.

That’s why it’s important to update and adapt your learning ecosystem as you get feedback and measure its impact. And it’s also why it’s OK to start pretty simple – with a minimum valuable learning product.

Let startup concepts like sprints and marketing inspire you to learn at speed.

Just like a startup, an L&D team needs to consider which problems it’s solving, deploy solutions quickly and efficiently through a minimum viable product, and improve itself iteratively using metrics and feedback. But there are a couple other things L&D can learn from startups, which we’ll explore in this final chapter.

The first is the sprint – another term you’ve likely heard from tech. A sprint is when you set aside a period of time to focus on achieving a particular outcome – say, developing a new product – as quickly and effectively as possible. But you can do a learning sprint too.

Kernaussagen in Learning at Speed