Why Traditional L&D Strategies No Longer Work (And What to Do Instead)

Has your organization’s approach to learning and development changed little within the last five years? What about the last 10, 15, or 20 years? Even those organizations that have moved with the times may still hold onto traditional L&D strategies that neither work in today’s workplace, nor appeal to the employees forced to endure them. In this blog post, Open LMS Director of Sales, Jasmine Martin, examines some L&D strategies that have outlived their usefulness and suggests new techniques to fill the void.

3 Strategies to Move Away From

A Total Reliance on Knowledge-Based Learning and Assessment

Though many modern L&D departments strive to think out of the box and ditch the reputation as a tick-box function that periodically puts out compulsory compliance training and not much else, most still struggle with that image, and many others still have far to go.

Part of the problem is that, even when L&D is covering topics and leading learning initiatives that aren’t strictly to do with compliance, they’ve often been using many of the same techniques and tools. Most learning management systems and learning content authoring tools were originally geared towards compliance training, and some haven’t evolved much beyond that remit. Digital training has traditionally involved static content, assessed by multiple-choice questions and true-false statements. The goal is to tell learners what they need to know, quickly check that they know it, and move on.

Compliance training isn’t going away, but as L&D’s focus increasingly broadens towards supporting a culture of lifelong learning and understanding the skills the organization needs and the skills it currently has, new techniques are needed. Job roles are becoming more fluid—the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report says that if the global workforce were made up of 100 people, 59 would need upskilling and reskilling by 2030. This requires employees to become more adaptable and develop new skills in order to stay relevant.

In this context, businesses that stick with an approach based solely on knowledge-based learning and tools may well get left behind when their competitors take a more skills-based outlook. After all, if staying at your organization means standing still, your employees will likely want to move on before long.

Participation as the Exclusive Measure of Success

If the nature of learning and assessment is changing, it stands to reason that what L&D measures must also change. L&D has traditionally solely measured participation in training—once again, this is a holdover from the focus on compliance training. In fact, the nearly three-decade-old SCORM standard on which a lot of digital learning is built doesn’t actually measure much more than this.

However, in the 2020s, such an approach to learning measurement is only kicking around because of force of habit. There’s certainly no technical reason for not taking a more granular approach—more robust measurement standards like xAPI have been available for over a decade. And if you’re not already being asked to demonstrate return on investment tied to metrics such as productivity and financial goals, economic factors may force the issue.

Nonetheless, learning professionals should welcome a more robust approach to measurement with open arms. Demonstrating how your learning objectives support business objectives is invaluable and helps you make the case for more investment in learning.

MORE ON MODERN MEASUREMENT | ‘Measuring Impact and ROI: How a Corporate LMS Helps You Get Started’

One-Size-Fits-All Approaches

The biggest, all-encompassing point is that L&D must distance itself from one-size-fits-all approaches—personalization is paramount in most aspects of our lives, and this is no less true in education and training. Every learner needs a different educational path, and demand is high: in one survey, 74% of respondents agreed with the statement that “Learning opportunities here are a tangible benefit to my job” when their learning plan mapped to their career goals. 68% agreed with the same statement when they were offered a variety of learning approaches, and agreement fell to 48% when just one learning approach was emphasized.

There’s a certain amount of irony in calling a one-size-fits-all approach a “traditional” one, however. Once again, it’s more like a habit L&D has slipped into due to the limitations and rigidity of available tools and a historical near-exclusive focus on compliance. Going back far enough, to when face-to-face delivery of learning was the primary mode of delivery, there was actually arguably more scope for personalization. After all, when you think of a teacher in the classroom, they have ways of learning from their students and adapting their approach.

Nonetheless, the modern era of digital learning can reinstate this kind of communication while taking advantage of new learning modes and formats that go beyond face-to-face learning’s own one-size-fits-all aspects.

7 Methods That Will Lift Your L&D Strategy Up to Current Best Practice

1) On-Demand and Self-Paced Learning

The move away from offering just one big course is by no means a recent trend, but offering learning in bite-sized chunks—microlearning—is an important way to get in front of learners when they need new knowledge or have a rare free moment in a busy schedule.

Microlearning scratches the TikTok or YouTube Shorts itch that many younger learners have, in that it can not only be dipped into quickly, but can also naturally (and optionally) be stretched into a longer learning session based on algorithmic connections. You watch a video on one topic, and are immediately served a succession of videos on a certain aspect of that topic or a related topic.

Of course, it’s important not to shift from one type of one-size-fits-all approach to another—these formats should be just one of the methods employed to provide options that best engage employees. If a learner wishes to go deep on a certain topic and watch an extended lecture, that should be an option, but making the same information available in other formats widens engagement.

DISCOVER MICROLEARNING BENEFITS IN THIS EBOOK | ‘10 Benefits of Microlearning in the Workplace’

2) Blended Learning

A related and thriving learning format is blended learning, wherein traditional face-to-face instruction is combined with a range of online learning approaches in order to capitalize on the benefits of both. Blended learning also allows you to benefit from the increased personalization and greater engagement potential of a mix-and-match approach.

Getting blended learning right requires careful planning. You need to determine the right balance between online and in-person sessions, and understand which content would be best delivered in either form. Your learning platform is also a key factor: if you can’t support multiple learning formats, easily facilitate collaboration and communication, and monitor your efforts with robust tracking and analytics features, it may be time for an upgrade.

MORE ON ADAPTING TO NEW LEARNER HABITS | ‘5 Ways Digital Learning Keeps Your Hybrid Workforce Engaged’

3) Interactivity and Gamification

Learners benefit from, and have come to expect, a higher degree of interactivity from their learning experiences. Leaning too heavily on traditional, passive forms of learning—lengthy lectures, video slideshow presentations, basic “click to continue” eLearning—tends to greatly undermine user engagement.

Adding quizzes, tailored feedback, simple games, and even a variety of different layout and interaction types to a single piece of learning can make any topic that little bit more interesting. Additionally, gamification—the process of integrating game mechanics such as scoring, rewards, and progress-tracking systems most commonly associated with video and boardgames—can drive longer-term engagement with ongoing learning.

Inevitably, there’s a technological requirement here: ensuring your LMS has support for technologies such as H5P is crucial, along with support for certification and tracking standards that enable gamification.

OPEN LMS SUPPORTS H5P—FIND OUT MORE | ‘H5P Benefits, Content Types, Integrations & Getting Started’

4) Social Learning

One of the things that digital learning initially lost when organizations moved away from in-person learning was the greater collaborative potential inherent in being in the same environment as others. LMS platforms now more commonly integrate online functionality that replicates these kinds of interactions, such as message boards and other social platforms that encourage discussion and knowledge sharing.

Instructors can then set collaborative tasks that take advantage of these features. For example, employees can be assigned to groups with their own repository for discussions and draft document uploads. Or an instructor could use breakout room features in their video conferencing platform to set small and engaging group tasks in a session.

5) Learning Analytics

Moving away from participation metrics alone requires that you gather and use a plethora of new datapoints to prove your success, and make decisions that improve learner and organizational outcomes. As mentioned earlier in this article, the technology already exists in most modern LMSs—the tracking capabilities of xAPI, for example, are significant and allow for a huge range of statements to be defined and triggered by key learning events.

With this data on your side, it’s possible to monitor engagement on a page-by-page basis, helping you identify resources that may need strengthening or, conversely, are already effective. Additionally, benchmarking and measuring behavior change and knowledge acquisition before and after training should be considered the norm—and it should be possible within your LMS to take these kinds of advanced performance measures and compare them against financial markers such as productivity, revenue growth, and profitability.

BUILD ADVANCED REPORTS WITH ORE | ‘Put Your Data to Work With the New Open Reports Engine’

6) Personalized Recommendations

Recommendation algorithms are a cornerstone of personalization across many of the services we use every day—from social media feeds, to streaming audio and video services, to ecommerce recommendations. Inevitably, the tech is now available within an L&D context. For example, Ease Learning’s Skillways feature (available in Open LMS via an extension) maps the skills available within your learning content and in your workforce and makes learning recommendations based on learner and organization needs.

Meanwhile, Open LMS’s own Personalized Learning Designer (PLD) tool can further your personalized learning goals in a number of ways. It allows for direct intervention by sending remedial or revision courses whenever a learner submits work below a certain grade, for example. It also frees up time for more individualized instruction by reducing administrative burdens—for example, by sending alerts when courses aren’t accessed or assessments aren’t completed on time.

GET A FEEL FOR PLD WITH THESE TIPS | ‘8 Personalized Learning Designer Rules You Can’t Live Without’

7) Accessible Learning

In our push to avoid one-size-fits-all learning experiences, it’s important that we take the opportunity to consider where certain groups of learners have been overlooked and disadvantaged by traditional L&D strategies. Simply broadening the variety of learning formats on offer can help employees who require certain accommodations to find versions of the material that work best for them. For example, providing a descriptive transcript of a video that heavily features onscreen text can help ensure that a visually impaired learner can understand the content in full. Or if the same content is covered by a podcast, they may prefer to consume that instead.

However, it’s also important to, as far as possible, build content from the ground up with accessibility in mind. Open LMS integrates the Brickfield Accessibility Toolkit for this reason: the toolkit helps you evaluate course content and assessment for accessibility issues while suggesting edits for remediation.

ACE ACCESSIBILITY WITH THESE TIPS | ‘4 Principles for Accessible Design in Digital Learning’

How Open LMS WORK Can Help

Open LMS WORK modernizes learning and development with on-demand, self-paced, and blended learning options that fit today’s workforce needs. The platform supports gamification, social learning, and AI-driven recommendations to boost engagement and retention, while allowing you to track and measure learning effectiveness across various programs.