6 Most Common L&D Challenges [How to Solve Them]

Many enterprise companies face significant learning and development challenges now and beyond. Organizations also face sharp budget cuts while dealing with employee retention issues. These issues and more have led to significant L&D challenges at a time when companies are under pressure to deliver engaging training courses.

Every organization has its own unique set of workplace learning challenges. Our research shows these six biggest challenges in learning and development continue to vex training teams:

1. Tight budgets for learning and development teams

How do you continue to deliver training to engage learners while facing tight budget restrictions? This is one of the most common development challenges enterprise companies are facing today. 

Company leadership may have shifted budget priorities to the digital transformation of business processes after COVID-19, funding recruiting efforts, or increasing salaries and benefits to improve employee retention. As a result, your employee development teams are faced with doing more with less. 

How to solve budget-related L&D challenges

You can do several things to bootstrap effective training for your team.

• Encourage knowledge sharing
• Offer access to third-party, self-directed learning options through a learning platform
• Connect with government agencies for free safety and compliance training
• Implement mentorship and cross-training options

These are just a few low-cost employee training solutions your organization can use to meet ongoing training needs while facing budget challenges.

2. Scaling global employee development

Enterprise companies are going global, creating a hybrid workplace. This allows companies to tap into new markets and hire talent from around the world. This undeniably creates opportunities for growth. At the same time, globalization creates employee learning challenges. 

Your employee learning and development teams may be faced with overcoming company culture and language barriers. Moving into new markets also means learning new business processes and complying with unfamiliar regulations.

How to solve scaling global organizational performance

The first thing to do is identify the employee learning challenges that are created by scaling your company globally. The next step is to determine where existing training initiatives can be optimized to better meet emerging needs and where entirely new training modules are needed. 

Finally, organizations can take advantage of digital technologies that make content creation, sharing, and assessments easier when building training programs that must serve a global audience.

Check out how Slack used Continu to scale their global remote learning initiatives.

Slack + Continu case study

3. Training effectiveness and learner engagement

Employee engagement has always been one of the most prominent L&D challenges many enterprise companies face. The difference is that now, the stakes are higher than ever. 

Companies desperately need well-trained employees to face challenges, adapt to new technologies, and take advantage of opportunities. Individual employees are increasingly demanding access to the training they need to work effectively and provide them with professional development opportunities.

How to solve employee learning engagement with training

When training engages, employees are more likely to actively participate and retain what they have learned. These methods will help ensure your training efforts keeps employees engaged and boosts retention:

• Adopt a curriculum to accommodate multiple learning styles
• Use visuals to add impact and build interest
• Add gamification to training
• Personalize training where possible
• Share clear training objectives

With the right learning technology, you can create and share personalized learning pathways that help ensure that workers find relevance in their assignments.

4. Training employees in the face of staffing issues

According to Gartner, employee turnover will increase by 20% compared to pre-pandemic averages. Some industries, including hospitality, food service, logistics, retail, and call centers, have been hit particularly hard by high turnover rates.

This has led to a series of learning and development challenges for organizations that include:

• Lack of time for staff to engage in employee skill development
• Urgent need to onboard new staff quickly
• Cross-training employees
• Frustrations with training opportunities leading to more turnover
• Staffing shortages within training departments

Companies must find ways to overcome these challenges, or staffing-related issues will only multiply.

How to solve employee training challenges with fewer staff

When staffing is an issue, it’s difficult to dedicate staff to lengthy classroom training sessions. Supervisors are less likely to approve of this, and workers may find it a stressful waste of their time.

Instead, learning and development teams need to focus on offering options that work with the needs of the organization and individuals. This includes converting in-person training to online learning and implementing microlearning to make training more efficient.

Companies are now forced to accelerate onboarding to get new employees quickly up to speed. One way to do this is to ensure that your onboarding process is documented so that it goes smoothly each time.

You can also implement pre-onboarding to take care of digital transformation efforts early on. This will enable new workers to be productive sooner.

5. Prioritizing diversity training

Ultimately, your company benefits from diversity. When you bring people together from different backgrounds with different experiences, their perspectives contribute to better innovation and productivity.

At the same time, diversity also means that training may be required to create an inviting workplace for all. Workers from diverse backgrounds may have different learning styles.

How to solve diversity training challenges

Organizations must deliver effective diversity training to their teams. There simply isn’t room for cultural insensitivity or bias in modern workplaces, even when it is unintentional.

Additionally, trainers must ensure that materials meet the needs of a diverse workforce. This includes removing confusing or offensive materials from the curriculum, ensuring that workers can all benefit from training, and providing accommodations as needed.

6. Increasing learning resource accessibility

Can your workers access learning materials that are available in a way that works for them? Many companies are still working with training programs that were created when employees were centralized and in the office full-time. Now, remote workers, freelancers, and contractors may not be able to access the training they need.

How to provide access to learning materials

Now is the time to invest in a modern learning platform. Additionally, workers should be able to access company training systems where and when it meets their needs.

An LMS to Solve Workplace Learning Challenges

Your organization must be able to overcome learning and development challenges. It’s the only way to guarantee growth and remain competitive. You need the support of solid training and technology infrastructure that can only be provided by a reliable learning management system, like Continu.

Unlike legacy systems, Continu is designed to help companies overcome these learning and development challenges, with features and solutions such as:

• Powerful eLearning authoring tools
• Cloud-based LMS to train employees globally
• Track and measure employee training progress
• Generate insightful reports on learner data to improve training programs
• Integrations with popular tools your organization already uses
• Automate onboarding tasks with workflows
• Plus, much more...