The shifts over the last two years haven’t been easy on individuals — both personally and professionally. Thankfully, organizations can support them with leadership development solutions that emphasize human skills training, continuous, practice-based learning, and more.

If you’ve been wondering how you can support your workforce with effective leadership development in 2022, start by prioritizing the following five things.

1. Evaluating the Impact of Learning

Investing in leadership training requires a return on investment. L&D professionals are tasked with finding the right solution for their organization while also being responsible for evaluating the impact of that solution, affirming that it is working, and proving a use case for the continued use of the solution.

In one survey, 96% of respondents said they want to measure learning, but only 50% evaluate learning based on ROI, organizational impact, and job performance.

In 2022, L&D professionals will be more selective and have more questions about measuring the impact of a selected learning and leadership training solution.

How to get it:

Look for leadership training solutions that offer visibility into usage rates, as well as measurements that help you see improved engagement across your team over time.

2. Getting Internal Support to Make Learning a Priority

The positive effects of leadership training won’t get very far if there is no internal buy-in, and traditionally, this has been a blind spot for organizations.

According to the Linkedin Learning Report, 83% of L&D professionals said that executive buy-in is not a challenge. Still, only 27% of L&D pros report that their CEOs are active top-down champions of learning across the organization itself. As a result, a reported 32% of L&D leaders are prioritizing activating managers to encourage employees to make time for learning.

How to get it:

Look for solutions with features that encourage engagement with others, such as the ability for admins to recommend specific content to team members. 

3. Focusing on Human Skills Training

It’s not a secret that employees will need continuous reskilling of technical skills as technology evolves. Despite this, learning and development professionals are quickly seeing the value of training that focuses on human skills, which have a much longer shelf life.

In fact, L&D professionals are placing the highest priority on skills like leadership and management (57%), creative problem solving and design thinking (42%), and communication (40%). In 2022, the best learning and leadership training solutions will be the ones that focus on these human skills.

How to get it:

Look for solutions that provide meaningful training that focuses on being a good employee, a good leader, and a good person by honing in on skills like empathy, giving and receiving feedback, and more.

4. Microlearning

94% of employees see the potential career benefits of making time to learn. Despite that, 49% said they don’t have the time to learn at work.

This year, L&D professionals will be seeking to move past the traditional model of offering one-off corporate training sessions that can be forgettable and difficult to reinforce. They will be looking for solutions that make it easy for employees to fit learning experiences seamlessly into their work.

How to get it:

Instead of long and tedious courses, look for solutions that offer microlearning that can easily fit into a workday.

5. Practical Application

One of the main reasons that seminars don’t have the desired effect is that while they’re inspirational in the moment, but there’s a gap when trying to apply what was said to the day-to-day.

Even with longer courses, the amount of knowledge an employee receives is enormous, but knowing how to apply everything they just learned is often lacking.

L&D professionals are seeing the value that only practice-based learning can bring, where the learning loop and the discrepancy between “learning” and “doing” is closed.

How to get it:

Look for a solution that encourages learners to apply what they learn by taking action. Real behavior change will only happen when people can put their knowledge into use and reflect on its impact.

Leadership Development in 2022

Leadership development is more important than ever, and in 2022 L&D professionals will be shifting their priorities to solutions that go beyond what traditional programs can offer.

Finding a solution that covers all of these priorities can be difficult. At Verb, our practice-based leadership development platform provides ongoing leadership training for the whole team. Unlike conventional L&D platforms or in-person training, Verb delivers curated, high-quality content through scalable practice-based learning.

---

Ready to learn more about what people leaders are prioritizing in the coming year? Get the survey report.