Amidst massive evolutions in the world of technology, unprecedented cultural occurrences, and rapid changes within the landscape of work, learning leaders and corporate training companies are being tapped to help solve the complex challenges facing organizations today.

And rightly so, as investing in learning helps you not only overcome the difficulties existing in the current sphere of business but also inspires your team and brings your organization into the future. Not to mention, the positive financial impacts of investing in L&D are almost unbelievable; a 2022 Deloitte report illustrates these impacts, revealing a 370 percent return on investment (ROI) for L&D.

Although the value of enhancing your learning experiences is undeniable, not all initiatives are created equally, and developing top-notch approaches that solve L&D challenges is no easy feat.

For large-scale organizations, finding the right strategic learning partner—whether it’s a learning innovation company working with you to build custom solutions or an L&D vendor offering off-the-shelf content—to optimize your learning initiatives is critical.

This is because high-quality corporate training companies offer a swath of technologies, resources, and capabilities that most businesses simply don’t have in-house, giving you otherwise inaccessible solutions to current challenges. They also help you execute programs flawlessly, amplifying your outcomes and overall business success.

Whether you’re facing specific L&D challenges in your organization that you need help to solve, you’re wondering if consulting with a learning partner could help you reach new heights, or you’re simply looking for inspiration on how to fix these problems yourself, this article is for you.

Read on to discover:

• What are the top challenges for L&D in 2023?
• 3 L&D success stories to inspire your approach
• How learning exists to create change

What are the top challenges for L&D in 2023?

While this list is far from comprehensive, these challenges represent the primary obstacles business leaders are facing within the modern world of work:

• Identifying and closing organizational skills gaps.
• Modernizing learning opportunities.
• Remaining people-centric despite widespread automation and AI.
• Retaining top-notch team members.
• Developing and engaging leadership.
• Accurately measuring impact.

Let’s look a bit more closely at each challenge before diving into real-life case studies illustrating how partnerships with our corporate training company have helped organizations overcome these barriers.

Identifying and closing organizational skills gaps

One study found that almost 4 in 5 employers across the globe have reported difficulty finding the skilled talent they need in 2023, highlighting the widespread need to partner with corporate training organizations to pinpoint and remedy organizational skills gaps by investing in your current workforce. Learning partners help by identifying the best solution and delivery method for teaching skills while ensuring you’ll get your desired results.

Modernizing learning opportunities

As a leader, it’s essential to help your organization’s L&D framework adapt and modernize to evolve with the lightning-speed developments in the world of work. But bringing your L&D experiences into the future is a huge challenge—even with help from the best corporate training companies—due to high costs and technical knowledge barriers. However, with the right learning partner, you can strategically update your learning programs, even within the constraints of your budget.

Remaining people-centric despite widespread automation and AI

Taking a holistic person-centered approach is critical for employee satisfaction. But as AI-powered technologies continue to develop and data-driven automation expands its reach, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a human-centric approach to learning. Thankfully, great L&D partners specializing in custom solutions can assist with cultivating initiatives that meet learners where they are—programs designed with empathy, curiosity, compassion, and inclusion in mind.

Retaining top-notch team members

The skills gap, the Great Resignation, and the rise of hybrid and remote work all represent unprecedented obstacles to keeping your team members loyal. LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report illustrates those difficulties, revealing that 93 percent of organizations are concerned about employee retention. The same report revealed that providing more learning opportunities—which great corporate training companies always do—is the number one way organizations are working to improve retention in 2023.

Developing and engaging leadership

The quality of leadership is closely tied to organizational engagement, retention, performance, and overall success. Because of this reality, developing and engaging leaders across an organization is vital for any business. But doing so has always been arduous for learning professionals, and undertaking this practice successfully remains a huge challenge to this day.

By working with L&D partners who offer learning frameworks that integrate innovative approaches, you can improve learning experiences and results for your leaders.

Accurately measuring impact

Tracking, evaluating, and measuring the success of L&D initiatives is a big obstacle—even for the best corporate training companies in the world. While the rise in automation has streamlined certain aspects of measuring impacts, the oversaturation of data is making it increasingly difficult to determine which metrics to track and many features essential to gauging L&D success are qualitative. But great learning partners provide opportunities to evaluate the success of initiatives and streamline the evaluation process through their strategic teams.

Now that we understand some of the top challenges facing L&D in 2023, let’s dive into in-practice examples and stories that showcase the exact ways in which we—the team of learning experts at Maestro—have used our innovative strategic learning solutions to help clients solve pressing L&D challenges.

3 L&D success stories to inspire your approach

Here are three case studies representing key examples of how our organization has helped businesses overcome L&D difficulties and improve their company across the board.

Johnny’s Markets: Turning managers into effective leaders

As retaining top-notch talent is a critical L&D challenge, it’s no surprise that Johnny’s Markets—a chain of family-owned convenience stores—was struggling to keep its team members.

Before designing a strategic learning experience for them, we spent an entire month immersed in the learner-discovery phase. We conducted field interviews with team members across the organization, shadowed a store manager, and visited a Johnny’s store to observe team members.

Through this phase, we uncovered key problems and actionable insights. For example, we learned that 34 percent of attrition resulted from issues with managers. We also developed a deep understanding of which learning solutions would be the most effective.

Then—together with our partners at Johnny’s—we leveraged our findings to create a strategic learning structure focused on behavior change in managers. We reworked the structure and content of their training program to innovate a learning framework optimized for their learners’ needs.

Finally, our Media team created commercial-grade videos for each module in the program and our Design team created engaging, interactive eLearning that meets learners where they are.

At Johnny’s Markets, employees are now more satisfied and turnover is lower. Additionally, managers are now happier, more likely to stay and grow with the company, and better equipped to lead.

These impacts solved L&D challenges and optimized this company’s bottom line, highlighting the difference working with highly qualified, innovative corporate training vendors can make.

BWH Hotels: Mastering the art of video-based learning

Modernizing learning activities and upskilling employees—L&D challenges all learning leaders are facing—represent feats top corporate training companies are prepared for. That’s why BWH Hotels came to us for help with innovating their employee training framework.

They asked us for “training videos that didn’t feel like training,” but we couldn’t find any suitable corporate training video examples for inspiration. So instead, we decided to look to other industries, like the entertainment industry, to spark fresh ideas. We started brainstorming through a “writers’ room” approach, collaborating to pitch ideas for a unique, video-based learning series.

Our media team shot and edited the videos—making them witty, playful, short, funny, human-centric, irreverent, and easily digestible—while incorporating motion design.

The video series helped reinvent and modernize BWH Hotels’ training methods, culminating in a comprehensive video-based learning framework.
By combining learning with creativity and intrigue, we helped bring this organization’s training program into the future, keep team members engaged, and effectively upskill employees.

The finished products both highlighted the top-notch service culture at BWH and emerged as an original collection that learners loved watching!

Royal Caribbean: Measuring & evaluating impact

The best corporate learning companies present a holistic approach addressing long-term L&D growth and helping companies accurately measure L&D impacts.

The Maestro+ Royal Caribbean global onboarding program represents one of our favorite corporate learning strategy examples of this approach, as it was a four-year initiative designed for upskilling and measuring ROI for a global audience of over 24,000 team members.

All of our teams worked together to create out-of-the-box learning opportunities.

We created a massive cross-functional onboarding program with 250+ eLearning courses and on-the-job assessments. We also designed a customized bartender training simulation, which won a Brandon Hall Gold Award.

Our Strategy team managed audience research & discovery, developed a measurement framework
and deployed content strategically while our Design team handled UX/UI, art direction & brand extension, illustrations, and instructional design.

Our Media team took care of video production, 2D animation, and photography while our Engineering team managed web development, mobile app development, custom analytics, and an array of other engineering activities.

With a project of this scale, it was critical to measure impact and ensure we were truly achieving the change Royal Caribbean was after. That’s why one of our strategists worked closely with the L&D champion at RC to monitor and evaluate key metrics and present the most important data points— such as customer satisfaction scores before and after the training was implemented—in a quarterly report.

The project resulted in a 21 percent average increase in performance scores, a 90 percent increase in crew confidence and preparation, and a 2.9 percent increase in guest-service scores.

Yes, the data-driven eLearning materials we used allowed for streamlined ROI measurement—but this project also helped Royal Caribbean mitigate every single one of the other key L&D challenges we discussed in this article!

Learning exists to create change

Although it’s an exciting time for L&D, there are tons of challenges facing industry leaders at every turn.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to do it all alone. And with the right partner, challenges can turn into long-awaited opportunities.

Great corporate training companies like ours can help you overcome these barriers to success. And working with a top-notch L&D partner like Maestro can help you optimize not only your learning experiences but also your overall business outcomes.

With the right strategic partnership and the right approach, the possibilities are truly endless.