Building L&D Infrastructure for Strategic Change
Topic: Human Resources
Format: Article
Published Date: October 2026
Chief Human Resources Officer Programme
Strategy changes the work people do, and with it the capabilities they need. Training can address a defined need. When those needs keep changing, organisations need a way to develop new capabilities as the business evolves.
A company can launch a new strategy faster than it can build the capabilities it needs to execute and sustain it. New priorities may require employees to make different decisions, use newer processes, or develop new skills, while the dedicated L&D function continues to design programmes around a set of dated requirements. This mismatch between what the organisation really needs and what is being created for it can result in solutions that are technically sound but strategically misaligned.
Even when the training is effective, employees need opportunities to practise what they have learned, managers need to reinforce it, and the work itself needs to support the new behaviour.
Research on training transfer examines what enables skills learned in training to be generalised to the job and maintained over time, including the role of the work environment. An ISB Discover field study of online sales training found that performance gains came faster for familiar products and more slowly for newer and more complex products. The study further found that peer behaviour affected the benefits employees gained from training.
Building capability beyond the programme
When organisations undertake strategic change, what employees need to know and do can change too. Learning has to extend beyond a single programme if new capabilities are to become part of how work gets done.
The University of California, San Diego faced this challenge when a new strategic plan introduced new processes and systems and called for greater collaboration across disciplines. Its Staff Education and Development team used role-based training for executives, managers, and staff, followed by discussion, coaching, and other learning opportunities. More than 500 staff attended its Learning and Development Days, and over 90% reported that the training provided tools and knowledge they could apply on the job. Follow-up activities helped integrate change management into daily conversations and work.
Employees may therefore need to practise new decisions, managers may need to reinforce new behaviours, and processes may need to evolve alongside the technology. Learning has to reach those parts of the organisation that need to build new capabilities if is going to become part of everyday work.
Deutsche Telekom saw variation in service-agent performance and found that its traditional learning approach was not designed to address individual needs at scale. It developed an AI-powered learning and coaching engine that analyses customer interactions, identifies development needs and recommends personalised interventions within employees’ workflows. The first rollout reached 8,000 agents. Deutsche Telekom reported a 10% year-on-year increase in first-time resolution in its call-centre operation and a 5% increase among field agents.
Making learning part of how work gets done
For organisations facing repeated strategic change, L&D needs to be able to foresee where capability requirements are changing and respond well in time. That starts with identifying what employees now need to know, decide or do differently. Learning, of course, must then take whatever form the work requires, from formal training and coaching to peer learning and practice.
The work itself has to provide opportunities to apply the new capability, while managers, processes, incentives and technology reinforce the behaviours that strategy requires. L&D also needs to know whether the change is taking hold. Measures such as speed to competence, application at work and process adoption can provide that evidence alongside completion and satisfaction.
Over time, these routines give an organisation a repeatable way to build and embed capabilities as its strategy changes.