Skills-first L&D: thinking strategically, acting tactically

About this event

L&D Network: For CIPD Members developing people, building capability and shaping the future of learning within organisations.

Skills-first organisations need more than new language about skills and capability. They need L&D practitioners who can connect organisational priorities, required performance and practical capability support.

This session will explore what skills-first thinking means for L&D in practice. It will start from the idea that L&D often works between operational demand and transactional delivery. The opportunity is to move into a more useful tactical role: understanding the strategic context, brokering the right capability response, and deciding when learning is, or is not, the right intervention.

What we'll cover

• Why skills-first needs a different L&D conversation. Skills-first work can easily become another way of asking “what training is needed?” The session will open by reframing the issue around organisational priority, required performance and what people need to be able to do.

• Think strategically, act tactically. Using a simple strategy, tactical, operational and transactional model, we will explore where L&D often gets pulled into activity and what changes when L&D works tactically from a clearer strategic understanding.

• Brokerage as the skills-first L&D role. We will look at how L&D acts as an engineer to broker activity that connects the work that needs to improve with capability needs, available expertise, learning options, performance support and the conditions needed for people to apply skills in practice. This will link directly to the CIPD skills-first resource, showing how it can help practitioners ask better questions, diagnose the issue more clearly and choose a proportionate response.

• Practical reflection. Participants will be invited to consider one request or issue in their organisation where L&D may need to pause, reframe the conversation and decide whether learning is the right response. 
  

What you'll take away

• A simple framework for identifying the skills your organisation needs by starting with business priorities and performance outcomes, rather than training activity.

• Leave with a clearer understanding of how L&D can connect operational challenges, strategic goals and capability solutions to create greater organisational impact.

• Use the CIPD Skills-First resource to have more effective conversations, diagnose capability needs and make informed decisions about the most appropriate response.

Guest speaker's profile:

Andrew Jacobs is a Learning Strategist and Organisational Impact Advisor. He works with organisations to move learning beyond training supply and connect it more directly to capability, performance and measurable organisational impact.

He has led learning, talent and capability work across public, private and third sector organisations, including central government. Through Llarn Learning, he now advises leadership teams, people functions and learning teams on how to design learning systems that are grounded in work, evidence and organisational need.

Andrew’s work focuses on the conditions that help organisations learn in practice. This includes learning strategy, leadership capability, workforce capability, evaluation, performance support, and the relationship between learning, work and organisational change.

He is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, producer of the Women Talking About Learning podcast, and writes daily at lostanddesperate.com. His work has been recognised through national industry awards for informal learning, capability development and learning strategy. He speaks at conferences and events in the UK and internationally on learning, leadership and the systemic work required to build organisations that learn