ATD Research analysts survey industry professionals and analyze the data, conduct interviews with talent development executives, and collaborate with well-known subject matter experts to develop and publish numerous data-driven research reports each year. Those reports are focused on industry trends, benchmarks, and best practices. ATD’s research is well-respected in the business community and has recently been mentioned in Forbes and Newsweek. Some recent research reports focus on hybrid teams, learning technology ecosystems, and finance training.

Developing Hybrid Teams: Combining Office and Remote Work

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in early 2020, many employees who could perform all or parts of their jobs from home began working remotely to some extent. Now leaders are looking ahead and trying to imagine what the postpandemic workplace will look like. Many expect a hybrid workplace to emerge.

To help organizations better understand the landscape of hybrid teams and best practices, this report looks closely at 133 organizations that currently have hybrid teams in place. At the average participating organization, 69 percent of managers oversaw hybrid teams. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, that figure was only 20 percent. In particular, the number of employees who rotate between a central office and another location rose dramatically. The change appears to be here to stay, with a large majority of organizations saying the number of hybrid teams will increase or stay the same. A best practice associated with performance is delivering team-building training to managers and employees on hybrid teams.

Learning Technology Ecosystems: Tools, Platforms, and Strategies

In the past few years, ATD has explored the role of learning management systems, e-learning authoring and delivery platforms, social learning tools, and virtual classroom platforms in separate research studies. Those reports showed that learning technology has the potential to drive business and learning results.

The Learning Technology Ecosystems report represents ATD’s first research on complete learning technology ecosystems, which are defined as the tools and platforms organizations use to create, deliver, manage, and analyze their learning content. The ecosystems also include the people and processes for enabling those tools and platforms.

The report identifies practices related to learning technology ecosystems with statistically significant connections to high performance. For example, one practice associated with success was frequently doing formal reviews of the platforms and tools in the organization’s learning technology ecosystem to make sure they remain current with business needs.

2022 State of Finance Training

This report provides a detailed view of training in finance, sharing metrics such as learning expenditure and the average number of hours employees use on learning annually. This report compares those findings with data from ATD’s 2021 State of the Industry report to identify key differences between talent development activities in the finance industry and those in all other industries. When possible, this report also compares findings with the 2019 State of Finance Training, which was the last time ATD looked specifically at benchmarking data for the financial industry.

To identify how responses differed among distinct types of financial organizations, ATD reports data for three separate groups: the consolidated financial group, banks, and credit unions. The consolidated group includes banks and credit unions as well as other financial organizations (such as organizations that specialize in savings and loans, mortgages, brokerage or trading, or wealth management).

Employees at financial institutions used an average of 41.2 learning hours annually, 18.1 of which were used for mandatory and compliance training. The 41.2 learning hours are about six hours higher than the average learning hours used across all industries.

To purchase one of these reports, visit the ATD Store (West B Lobby) or go to td.org/research.