7 Learning Trends to Watch in 2021 and Beyond

Before 2020, how many of you had ever attended a fully virtual conference? (Scans the room, very few hands raised.) Yup, same here.

The universe pressed the fast-forward button on digitalization and remote work during 2020. Things that would have previously taken 5–10 years to accomplish (taking an entire company remote, creating a fully virtual onboarding process, etc.) happened in mere weeks. The move to remote work changed how employees learn, what they need to know, how teams communicate, and how companies build and sustain their work cultures.

As the Director of Learning & Development (L&D) at a startup company focused on helping companies improve remote work culture, I’ve had a front-row seat to watch emerging learning trends at hot tech companies. Here’s a breakdown of what I’ve learned.

What learning trends should we expect in 2021 and beyond?

There was a time when we expected a ‘return to normal.’ Now, studies show that many of the changes 2020 brought are unlikely to reverse. Here are two recent examples:

• Culture Amp found that 35 percent of companies who previously had little experience with remote work now plan to keep more than half of their employees working remotely.
• Yahoo! Finance reported that “the shift to remote work has made virtual training mainstream in many organizations, and more than 4 in 10 would prefer this to continue even after the pandemic.”

This means that startup companies across the country will need to amend their L&D strategy to accommodate these tectonic shifts of remote work and virtualization. Keep an eye out for these seven L&D trends:

1. Prioritizing internal company knowledge

Before 2020, many companies could rely on watercooler conversations and serendipitous collaboration to spread company knowledge. Employees often learned by “osmosis” — absorbing snippets of dialogue they overheard in the office about department focuses, company strategy, new product releases, and a host of other things.

While not considered traditional “L&D content,” this internal company knowledge greatly benefits employees. By knowing who is working on what and why, employees know who to contact with questions, who to partner with to help a customer, and what teams to coordinate with to implement new product features.

But with more companies embracing remote work, these tidbits of company knowledge will no longer pass organically between employees. Companies have moved their meetings online, but it’s much harder to move the watercooler online. Products like Slack and Donut (a Slack plug-in) can help as band-aid solutions, but they only do so much to spread internal knowledge.

Going forward, look for more companies to seek out solutions that can help them inform their team about what’s going on internally. From asynchronous tools to company intranet features, L&D leaders will be looking for ways to keep everyone connected and informed.

2. Remote-first learning

I’ve heard countless people ask how to make onboarding or manager training “work” in a remote environment. The running assumption seems to be that we all just need to get through this remote work thing, then we’ll all be back in the office soon, doing training the same way we’ve always done it.

That’s not going to happen: these changes are here to stay. Rather than grafting remote learning onto our existing L&D strategy, we need to think of remote as the core driver of the strategy. It’s now the trunk of the learning tree — not a branch.

I’ve written about this topic extensively elsewhere so I won’t belabor the point here, but needless to say, the more companies embrace “work anywhere” policies, the more they’ll need to shift gears to think remote-first, office-second.

3. Microlearning

It’s always difficult to differentiate between fleeting learning fads and lasting learning trends. Author Héctor Correa supposedly introduced the term “microlearning” back in 1963, and the concept caught fire in the 1990s and early 2000s. For a while, it was tough to tell whether microlearning was a fad or a real trend. But I think the verdict is now in: microlearning is here to stay.

A 2020 study showed that excitement for microlearning has more than tripled among L&D leaders in the past year, and for good reason: it’s effective and popular with Millennial and Gen Z learners who comprise an increasingly large portion of the workforce. In a work-from-home environment where parents have much less control over their time (hello, diaper change!) microlearning has the added benefit of being a far more realistic format than a multi-hour seminar.

Today, top PeopleOps teams at startups are finding ways to integrate microlearning into their training and development offerings, such as utilizing smartphone apps that offer bite-sized content, short quizzes, or “retention boosters” after in-person trainings.

Expect this microlearning (and mobile learning) trend to continue in 2021.

4. Doing more with less through automation

Many startup founders, executives, and PeopleOps teams were stretched long before 2020, and the past year stretched the rubber band further.

Overnight, leaders were tasked with taking their companies remote, offering more education around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), providing mental health support as employees dealt with unprecedented stress, and helping managers and trainers engage with remote teams. And all of these initiatives happened amidst cutbacks that reduced headcount, budget, and the HR tech stack in many companies.

For years, L&D leaders have watched their counterparts in marketing and sales lean heavily on automation and analytics platforms that help them achieve more with less. With PeopleOps teams stretched to the breaking point, they’re looking for ways to bring time- and effort-saving automation into the People function’s every facet: from talent acquisition to onboarding to development and beyond. The growing HR tech stack makes this easier to do, but also risks “systems overload.”

Enter the “multitool”: a single platform that meets multiple needs. I predict that in 2021 and beyond, startup leaders will not just do more with fewer resources, they’ll do more with fewer tools, too.

5. Mental health training

It’s no surprise that mental health issues are on the rise. Harvard Business Review reported that 42 percent of respondents to a March/April 2020 study said that their mental health had declined since the pandemic began. Respondents who said their manager was a poor communicator were 23 percent more likely to report a decline in mental health.

This reinforces the importance of providing resources to managers and employees to help them navigate mental health conversations. Employees need to feel that their managers care about their individual situation and are equipped to help them with basic mental health support. Managers also need to be able to identify when a mental health specialist is needed.

As startup leaders, we need to meet people where they are. Employees who are struggling with the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs do not have the mental capacity to focus as much on career growth. An employee who is feeling depressed is unlikely to engage in a training about how to lead meetings more effectively. So it’s our job to find more ways to offer wellness resources and mental health training to employees as a function of the way we develop our teams.

6. The fusion of L&D + Wellness

I’ve heard some startup leaders acknowledge that there’s an inherent disconnect between their company’s wellness initiatives and their standard training mechanisms. One moment, they’re encouraging employees to improve their wellbeing (e.g., get away from their screens, participate in a wellness challenge, take a walk) and the next, they’re sitting someone down in front of a computer for a couple of hours of e-learning followed by a one-hour Zoom call.

Employees can sense when things don’t quite add up, and it’s true that some common learning initiatives just don’t jive with wellbeing focuses like encouraging exercise and avoiding Zoom fatigue.

As more leaders come to that realization, I expect they’ll seek out new ways to fuse learning with wellbeing. This could happen in several ways, including offering more mental health-related trainings or creating more audio-based content so employees can listen while exercising or doing things around the house.

7. Ongoing DEI training

After the tragic deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd, employees across the country rightfully asked whether their companies were doing enough to stand up for social justice and combat systemic racism.

Udemy reported a remarkable 1,259 percent increase in consumption of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) courses from 2019 to 2020, so it’s clear that some employees have begun to self-serve training material. But many forward-thinking startups are rightfully taking a more proactive role to equip their employees with skills to recognize and address injustice within their own companies and in society more broadly.

Many companies have decided to hire their first-ever Head of Diversity. Small companies that don’t have the budget for a full-time staffer have hired outside DEI trainers or incorporate DEI responsibilities into the roles of their existing PeopleOps employees.

DEI has become a core part of training and development for employees at all levels of the organization:

• New hires need to be taught about the company’s commitment to inclusivity.
• Managers need training about bias, cross-cultural communication, and how to lead a diverse team.
• Senior leaders need to be trained on how to talk about sensitive social justice issues in all-hands meetings and media appearances.
• All employees need to learn about their own unconscious biases, find better ways to relate to those with a different background than them, and develop techniques for interrupting bias when it occurs.

The need for antiracism and cultural empathy isn’t going away anytime soon. Expect to see companies continue to invest in social justice training initiatives in 2021 and beyond.