New report argues all of HR should take ‘ownership’ of L&D

There are many issues likely keeping HR pros up at night, including the worsening labor shortage.

The US had 8.1 million job openings and 6.8 million unemployed workers in June, according to a Chamber of Commerce report published late last month—that’s a deficit of 1.3 million workers. And it’s only expected to get worse, as the US could face a deficit of 6 million workers by 2030, according to a Korn Ferry estimate. Now, amid rapid AI advancement, employers must think and act fast to prepare their workforces for the changes that lie ahead.

While many learning and development (L&D) experts have their own ideas about how the industry will need to change to keep pace, some have supported an approach called career pathways, in which companies retrain employees for critical, yet understaffed, roles, while also supporting their career advancement. But a new report from HR consultancy the Josh Bersin Company and education startup Guild found that few companies seem to take this approach to employee skilling.

Arrested (talent) development. Only 1 in 10 companies have “effective” career pathways, and 1 in 12 support employees’ movement into high-priority roles, the report states. Most companies fall flat on employee training, because it’s often relegated to specific parts of the HR department, like in L&D or benefits. Instead, the report argues, all parts of the people function—talent acquisition, DE&I, and people analytics, to name a few—should take shared “ownership” of talent development.

“Moving talent inside of an organization from one part of the business to another part of the business is generally not a very seamless approach, because no one person owns the full spectrum of what needs to happen,” Bijal Shah, Guild’s CEO, told HR Brew. “There’s just a lot of work that has to happen across the business in order to help identify: What are those in demand roles? How do we get people trained for those roles? Who are the right people to train for those roles? And then how do we help the employer understand, this person is now ready to embark on that next role?”

Taking ownership. Companies that don’t strategically invest in talent development could be leaving money on the table. And there is a lot of cash at stake: Employee training expenditures for US companies exceeded $101 billion in 2022 and 2023, according to an analysis of more than 142,000 companies by Training Magazine, a L&D trade publication.

“Most of these organizations are already spending dollars. The question is, are they optimizing the spend on those dollars? Are they seeing the ROI? And do they really understand the outcomes they're trying to drive?” Shah said.

Organizations with more advanced talent development strategies should have a clear, three-year talent strategy, including different approaches for identifying internal vs. external talent, Shah said. From there, they can more easily tackle L&D issues, like whether the company’s current L&D approach helps employees train for necessary roles, and whether it helps attracts and advance diverse workers.

“It allows each leader to tag on to that and figure out how their part of what they do can strategically aligned to what the overall strategy is,” Shah said.