The opportunity for L&D in 2012

The news has been full of information lately about what businesses are likely to face this year. Doom and gloom abounds all round and it's going to be a tough slog. There's no doubting that business and organisations alike in the coming 12 months will face possibly one of the hardest years in recent history.

There is very little positive in this message. Unemployment is up, in particular youth unemployment has hit above 1m for the first time. Retail industries are facing less spending from customers. Borrowing and lending from banks is becoming more restrictive. Older generations are facing having to work longer to have a comfortable life in their later years. Charities and not-for-profits are facing squeezes on a number of fronts.

This is good news for L&D. Wait, what? How did I get to that conclusion? Let's consider what L&D is about. It used to be the case that your internal trainer was there to develop training courses to give the workforce the skills they needed to do the job. Well, 20 years later, the trainer has evolved into an L&Der. This L&D professional isn' t just focused on training. It's about looking at all aspects of a person's time with a company, when he needs that learning, how he receives it, and what he's able to do with it.

We know this, right? Well, I'm not so sure. I think we've got so used to using L&D suppliers to help deliver on our business objectives that we're at danger of doing ourselves out of a very important role. In times of hardship and austerity, one of the key motivating factors a business needs to cultivate and nurture is the L&D it provides for its teams. By farming out various pieces of work and delivery to our training partners, we've forgotten that we are fully capable, in ourselves, of delivering the proposition. Yes, this means a re-think of what L&D is meant to be achieving. And that's not an easy change in mindset.

The key thing is we forget we can enable and make things happen. There are a number of experts right now sitting there with a mountain of knowledge in those marvellous brains of theirs. And they're waiting to share it all. They just don't know they're waiting to do that. Not until an L&Der comes along, gets them together and starts giving them the forum to make it happen. And what needs to take place in those discussions? Well, remember those product innovations you've always said you needed to do? Or that new marketing strategy you need to look at? Or how you get the leadership team to work together? Or how to keep people engaged in the business? All these and more are the exact conversations that need to be happening right now.

I'm a believer in collaboration and achieving more in numbers. Only a few people have the drive, vision and ambition to achieve great results on their own. In every other case, collaboration comes up trumps and, as L&Ders, we are the best placed people in an organisation to make it happen. We understand the culture of the business, we understand group dynamics, we understand how to use tools and techniques to get people thinking and we understand the business objectives. The opportunities in the coming year are plentiful, and we should be at the core of making them realities.