With the rapid, unabated rate of change in technology and the world of work, it has never been more important for leaders to stay current with the latest trends and understand what those trends mean for their organisations.

“The world of work today is almost unrecognisable from what it was just a few years ago. Today, employees want control over their unique career paths. The 9-to-5 beat is fading, and new ideas like fractional talent are emerging. We are navigating more legislation and compliance than ever before. The skills confidence gap is stubbornly expanding. And, of course, AI promises to accelerate it all beyond our imagination,” said Himanshu Palsule, Chief Executive Officer at Cornerstone OnDemand, Inc., a leader in learning and talent experience solutions.

2023 was an eventful year in talent management and HR. Knowing what else lies ahead will be crucial in conquering new challenges, streamlining processes, and preparing the global workforce, so Cornerstone has identified a few trends impacting HR practitioners in 2024.

Learning and development (L&D)

Mature organisations are transforming into proactive skills marketplaces that empower their employees to build the skills needed for their own journeys. This also helps organisations identify the skills needed now and for the future.

• AI will be used more extensively to map existing skills to content, improve instructional design, and support the creation of learning and development tools such as virtual coaching. All of this will significantly increase efficiency.
• Intentional AI will rise in importance by delivering dynamic, personalised experiences in moments that matter. Through customised learning paths filled with bite-size trainings, organisations will use AI to make it easier to train efficiently and effectively.

“It’s exciting to see the AI pendulum for L&D leaders swinging away from anxiety and toward highlighting all kinds of new possibilities. I think this journey from being in a state of conscious incompetence about AI to conscious competence about its value will only continue”, says Marc Ramos, Chief Learning Officer at Cornerstone.

Content strategy

Content is a critical element of an L&D programme. In 2024, businesses will curate their learning content more closely, regularly and tie it more directly to business challenges as a solution.

• User-generated content will become more integrated into content strategies, and the technologies that support it will make it easy to format, store, and access the content. This will allow team members to develop skills faster and more effectively serve customers.
• Content value and impact will become important KPIs to measure and report as demand for learning content at work continues.
• Accessible learning for people with disabilities will become more strategic to organisations for attraction, as well as retention. Collaborating with employees to create accessible learning will require removing barriers that often define existing modalities.
• More instructional designers will turn to AI to quickly create content. So-called co-pilot methods, where the designer collaborates with an AI agent or LLM-based tool, will increase in importance.

Talent Reporting, Data, & Analytics

Cornerstone’s 2023 Talent Health Index found that mature organisations use centralised reports, while managers have access to self-service reports. These organisations use data to inform people and business strategy and explore predictive analytics to anticipate future business needs. There are three main ways HR leaders can rise to this level in their organisations:

• Specific new functionality will take work off of HR’s plate. This means more automation, warnings, verification tools, flexible reporting, and linked datasets.
• More proactive data approaches will appear to help businesses manage employee information, employee wellness, and mobile-enabled HR functions in order to better communicate with and personalise information sent to employees.
• Customised outcome dashboards will also become more popular. Because each company and CEO is different, HR organisations will adopt dashboards that put data into context and prioritise a focus on outcomes that matter to them, correlating actions and the decisions behind them to actual results.

The HR industry has seen seismic shifts in employee demands, which requires a strategic shift in perspective. One where employees are in the driver’s seat of their careers, and leaders believe that embracing intuitive technology as a co-pilot — not as a replacement — is paramount to creating a future where technology is a supportive vehicle in enhancing the capabilities of employees.