What is a Capability Academy and Why Should You Be Using One?

This article first appeared on Acorn Labs in September 2023.

“Capability academy” was a term coined by Josh Bersin in 2019 to refer to a method of learning that focuses on essential business capabilities. Traditional L&D isn’t always the best or most effective way to build capabilities in your organization, which is where capability academies come in.

A capability academy is a physical or digital location for training designed to build capabilities for a specific “functional area” (such as your finance, marketing, or sales functions). These are strategic needs, so they have to be sponsored at the business level rather than by leaders of individual business units.

Why use a capability academy?

It’s not necessary to use a capability academy for all types of training—just the training that is of strategic importance to the organization. So, you can exclude simple compliance training here because it’s not a key strategic driver.

When you’re considering a capability academy, determine:

1. The most strategic capability areas or sets, which drive your competitive advantage
2. Which areas or sets are custom, therefore need something more than off-the-shelf training
3. Which areas or sets are most urgent to develop to drive business growth.

The sweet spot for capability academies is somewhere between strategic and custom in order to ensure L&D is contextual to your organization. This contextual aspect is usually where traditional L&D falls short, as L&D often isn’t designed at the right time or to address the right reasons.

Capability academies, on the other hand, have one goal: To deliver business capabilities. Activities and courses are tailored to your processes, procedures and tools, and don’t worry about course completions or skill development in isolation. The outcome of these activities should be a credential or certification with inherent value (think promotions or salary increases, here).

The essential components of a capability academy

The first step to creating a capability academy is to identify the capabilities that need development. These capabilities include role-specific capabilities as well as the soft skills (such as communication) that your organization needs to deliver on goals and priorities.

You also need to define your desired outcomes so you can measure the success—or lack thereof—of your capability academy. Given capability academies are strategic in nature, you should make sure your goals are strategic as well.

Then you can conduct a learning needs assessment to determine exactly what kind of training is needed. This will help you in designing custom learning paths for your participants, increasing learning engagement and ROI.

Capability academies should also provide multiple learning methods and approaches, to better enable knowledge retention among learners. You can include coaching, digital learning, and hands-on activities work there. You can make the learning interactive here to ensure better knowledge retention, too.

Finally, the most important component of a capability academy is demonstrating the real=world applications of learning. Not only is it a great way to expose how pain points have been addressed by learning, but it also emphasizes how relevant and necessary it is to learners themselves.

Best practices for implementing capability academies

• Get leadership buy-in, because 70% of change management programs fail to meet their goals without leadership investment. You can do this by demonstrating how the capability academy will address leaders’ pain points and KPIs through the development of critical capabilities.
• Use a performance learning management system (PLMS). A traditional learning management system (LMS) focuses more on compliance (which is what capability academies are not about), but PLMSs work to align learning and business capabilities with tangible performance improvements.
• Communicate the roll-out strategy to employees so that everyone is on board and willing to participate. You can combat resistance by answering the “why” behind capability academies for the stakeholders involved. In other words, how does the capability academy benefit stakeholders and provide value to the business?
• Monitor training effectiveness with a training needs analysis before and after training to discover where capability gaps have bene closed and where opportunities for improvement still exist.
• Measure the return on investment (ROI) of your capability academies to understand the business impact capability academies have had. This looks at the pain points addressed, the goals met, and the increased revenue due to effective learning.
• Use case studies to strengthen your own capability academy and iron out any potential issues before the fact.