In challenging times, L&D can’t afford to stand still. Chris Chesterman shares three strategic actions to help learning teams prove their value, strengthen skills and support their people. From building organisational resilience to linking learning with business outcomes, now’s the moment to show how vital L&D is to lasting success.
When times are tight, we all need to do more with less. No department is immune, but it’s fair to say that some are more susceptible than others. L&D teams are used to hearing variations on that phrase. Let’s look for economies. Let’s see what we can do without. It’s all too common.
An organisation will always need an essential pool of skills to keep it moving
L&D leaders need to make informed decisions. They need to find ways of maintaining momentum even as the ground underfoot starts to shift. Here are three ways to do exactly that, by proving value, boosting skills growth, and concentrating on metrics that drive business success.
1) Focus on the bottom line with organisational resilience
An organisation will always need an essential pool of skills to keep it moving, no matter how it decides to respond to challenging times. These responses might include the aforementioned cost-cutting and inevitable redundancies, or perhaps a rapid pivot to explore new products or open new markets.
This is L&D’s bread and butter. It may be that they need to identify the non-negotiable, core skillsets on which the company’s existing customers rely. It may be that they need to plan for a whole new suite of skills and knowledge. Either way, a skills gap analysis will give you a roadmap for the skills you need. And unless the company plans to spend their way out of trouble with a costly and time-consuming hiring spree, skills-based learning will give you the resilience you need to adapt to the new normal.
That learning might look like a fast, carefully tailored explainer course in a new tech field to help your salespeople understand the challenges their new clients may be facing. It could be upskilling tech knowledge in your own teams, mitigating the expense of expert hires to lead on new offerings. AI-enabled tools can do this simply and dynamically, adapting to each individual’s specific level of knowledge. If you need a new direction and you want to take as many people with you as possible, this is the shortest cut you’ll find.
2) Create buy-in and promote wellbeing with human resilience
Everyone who’s been through a round of redundancies knows the emotional toll it can take on a team and it’s toughest on the people who lose out. For those who keep their jobs, anxiety can chip away at wellbeing which, in turn, can have an effect on performance. Strong teams offer a layer of insulation in testing times. But what if half your team just got made redundant? Where’s the team spirit now?
If you can show your people that the organisation values their career and their prospects, and that it sees them as a key part of future plans, that’s far more eloquent than a heartfelt speech from the CEO. Investing in a strong, targeted programme of learning, with a clear and well-articulated objective in view, says that the business needs them and is willing to show its commitment in concrete terms.
Take your people with you. Explain the goal, and the steps that need to be taken to get there. Most importantly, follow through on the commitment with action: new skills, new challenges and new objectives. The company needs something from them. But it should recognise what they need too: opportunities, both in this role and their next one, and the skills they’ll need to grasp them.
3) Be laser focused on your strategic value with L&D resilience
Perhaps it goes without saying in 2025, but learning metrics which simply prove that “people are learning” are all too easy to dismiss. If departments are being asked to do more with less, then touting completion rates or time spent learning as proof of success might even work against you. After all, shouldn’t we be focussing on our objectives?
If we connect learning outcomes with team performance and business success, that makes a compelling case for investment. Showing measurable growth in skills which the organisation has identified as critical for success is surely the definitive proof of that. Unpicking L&D’s contribution can be challenging, though. Increased sales may well be down to a focus on negotiation skills within the team, but the marketing director will also be keen to talk up the contribution of their new campaign.
Keep your communications specific. Can you point to deployment of skills across departments, perhaps showing that L&D has facilitated internal moves to offset talent loss through redundancies? Can you show how L&D has adapted its output rapidly to boost new skills which the business has prioritised? Can you work directly with line managers to get new hires into peak productivity mode?
None of this works in isolation, and managers know better than anyone what their teams’ competencies and capabilities are. The better you understand what’s needed and where, the faster and more effectively you can deploy the resources you have. Completion rates, or soft stats like “happiness with learning” are L&D-focussed. But L&D needs a business focus. Moving the needle on sales, technical skills or anything else prove your point far more eloquently than “time spent learning”.
L&D skills to prove value
The tools we now have at our disposal make it ever easier for L&D to prove its value. We have AI-enabled technology which can identify the skills we’ll need, now and in the future. We have AI agents capable of creating tailored learning pathways at scale. This would have been almost unthinkable ten years ago. And just as these are spectacular opportunities for individuals to learn and develop, they’re equally good at helping L&D teams show how vital their work is to the bottom line.
We need to think broadly. We need to work collaboratively with managers to help them supercharge their teams. We need to follow up on that work to show how it makes a real difference to the organisation. We need to show the big picture and the details, and prove conclusively to the board that L&D is the prime mover in delivering the skills they need to fulfil their objectives. Paint that picture, and you’ve proven how much you can do with less. The board might even start to wonder what you could do with more.
Chris Chesterman is VP of Revenue at HowNow
