It’s time to review your learning and Development Strategy.
It’s time to rewrite your learning and development strategy. Chances are you wrote your learning strategy with a focus on face to face interactions. Covid, has made this increasingly harder to deploy. It’s certainly an interesting time to be in Learning and Development. Your audience, once primarily based in the training room, is now working remotely. Zoom and video conferencing are bigger than ever, and many organisations are placing their energy to reformatting their learning material to be trained remotely.
Being a proactive Learning and Development Team
While organisations are focused on surviving, or treading water, this is the time that Learning and Development teams need to step up, be solutions targeted and embed relevant learning pathways for employees and organisations. They also need to be prepared to demonstrate that they are relevant and actively add value to the organisation.
Learning managers will need to prepare for hard questions from the business, such as “How did you help during the pandemic?”
Collect and depict data and stories to quantify and to show how you and your team helped your employees, your executive team, your customers and your communities during the pandemic.
For example:
- Show the number of webinars
- Or online town halls you held,
- The number of online courses provided,
- The number of employees supported during the crisis.
- What did you do to support employees who were stood down during the pandemic?
Prepare to dig into the lessons learned from failures exposed.
The crisis hit so rapidly that numerous organisations were unprepared. As a result, mistakes were made, and shortcomings were detected. You will need to come together with your L&D team to review the actions taken during the pandemic.
- What worked well
- What didn’t?
- What elements can be adapted?
- What were the costs?
- What investments will be needed in the future?
Be objective and avoid finger-pointing and assigning blame. You will need to glean lessons learned from the failures. Then you will need to identify was to reduce these risks.
List what you will do differently next time, defining new processes and procedures and roles involved. When reviewing actions taken and learning deployed, consider that many workers will continue to work remotely. Additionally, take into consideration the impacts of these same workers ‘double timing’. Working on their day job whilst homeschooling their children.
One of the benefits of this will be a greater understanding that teaching, and training others is so much more than standing up the front and talking to a PowerPoint presentation. Creating the right environment for ‘aha’ moments takes skill, effort and application.
Additionally, post lock down, the appetite for face to face learning will be higher than ever, with people globally, longing for person to person interaction rather than ‘another bloody video conference.’
So, what is the future of learning?
Prediction No. 1: Blended Learning will dramatically increase
The remote teaching and learning efforts that employees are now engaged in do not resemble what we think of as traditional online education. Quality online learning programs are high-input operations, requiring both time to develop and significant investments to run. How can you use elearning, reference guides, remote workshops to create a blended learning program? Many learning professionals are worried that the rapid shift to remote learning will tarnish the reputation of online education. Review of your current content and generic eLearning content is advised. Better learning occurs when using language, and case studies that reflect your organisations.
This does not mean, however, that the COVID-19-necessitated move to universal remote training will be all bad for learning.
The necessity of teaching and learning with asynchronous (Canvas, Blackboard, D2L) and synchronous (Zoom) platforms will yield significant benefits when these methods are layered into face-to-face instruction. We will come back from COVID-19 with a much more widely shared understanding that digital tools are complements, not substitutes, for the intimacy and immediacy of face-to-face learning.
Prediction No. 2: Blended learning will be a strategic priority
Very few organisations were doing absolutely nothing with online education pre-COVID-19. There was wide variation, however, in the degree to which online education was central to the organisations strategic planning. This will all change after COVID-19. In the future, executive, HR team or manager will understand that online education is core to the business’ resilience and continuity. Your role is to start the education process of creating understanding of what blended learning is, and the ways it can occur. Chances are your stakeholders don’t know what ‘blended learning’ is.
Reskilling and engagement of employees.
Engagement of skilled employees will play a significant role in the organisations continued success and growth post Covid19.No organisation wants to lose their best employees. In fact, a survey by Robert Half found a strong learning culture led to a 30 to 50 per cent higher retention rate in companies. That’s why it’s important to plan and act now as to the skills required for your key employees, so they remain engaged and give your company an edge over the competition.
It’s time to rewrite your learning strategy for post Covid19.
Align with organisational goals
The link between learning and corporate strategy should be obvious. It’s a concept that has become increasingly relevant; Learning and Development need to be agile in their response. Business’ will have short term plans to manage their response to Covid19. Needs during this time will be largely reactive, enabling greater skilling of remote working tools, video conferencing, and adapting critical or compliance training to virtual training. When creating new programs, or scheduling training, it is important to check that the request relates back in a tangible way to the organisations business strategy.
Mid to longer-term, Learning and Development needs to be steering the learning of the organisation in the same direction as the overall goals of the corporation. One of L&D’s main goals is to develop key skills of the employees, but also to advance the company as a whole.
People drive organisational growth – providing they have the right set of skills. Aligning learning with strategy ensures that you can target learning outcomes with the potential to facilitate meaningful outcomes.
Plan to engage your innovators to drive change.
Change can no longer be avoided or postponed — it has been thrust on us by the pandemic. At this time, you must engage your innovators to help your organisation embrace change. Your innovators will need to be dispersed across the organisation to assist with business unit change initiatives. They will need to prioritise the lessons learned and engage with other organisations to share learnings. They can apply design thinking and agile methodologies to engage business unit, stakeholders and learners. They can plan and rapidly pilot and deploy new ways to develop, curate and deliver learning to your employees and customers.
Create a learning strategy
Next, create a learning strategy based on what the company’s goals are. Each employee needs to be assessed as to their roles within the organisation and how best to strengthen their skill sets to meet these outlined goals.
‘Learning strategy’ is far from an exact term. It can refer to long-term goals, short-term objectives, considered milestones or vague plans.
Aligning strategy with learning brings it into sharp focus. If you are going to invest time developing skills that promote one goal, that goal must be immovable. It has to offer quantifiable benefits in some form or another. And it must be identified and locked-in far enough in advance to implement learning strategies that support it.
When learning outcomes become integrated into corporate strategy, it makes it difficult to avoid scrutinising that strategy. It brings each goal to the attention of numerous individuals, requires objectives to be thoroughly researched and justified before their implementation, and commits multiple resources to achieving one clearly defined outcome.
On the flip side, it’s essential to discuss with each core employee their individual learning goals so that they remain fulfilled and engaged on the job.
Assess current employees
After outlining a companywide learning program, the Learning manager needs to assess if they have the right employees to properly execute the strategy. If there are holes within the organisation, the Learning manager will need to engage with the business regarding creating a plan to hire these individuals. This may also mean shuffling around responsibilities within the organisation to the strongest employees. And if there are employees unwilling or unmotivated to execute this new learning strategy, these employees may need to be let go.
Review your current processes and how the new technologies will accelerate and improve learning. Engage learners early to be part of the digital transformation efforts to ensure you are developing learner-centred solutions.
Evaluate and make changes
The plan needs to be flexible and creative and endorsed by the executive team. Without buy-in from key operational stakeholders, the plan will fail. The program they put in place also can not be static. Tweaks and changes need to be made often based on employee feedback. Now, more than ever Learning and HR team need to need to stay on top of trends within the industry in terms of technology and agile learning, training design, and technological advancements.
The ‘method versus content’ argument doesn’t mean we should lose sight of the importance of delivery. If learning forms an integral part of your corporate strategy, any weaknesses will have a negative impact on growth and profitability.
A 2014 report by Deloitte found when assessing learning through online courses, social, mobile or advanced media, at least 60% of executives considered their organisation’s efforts ‘weak’.
New technologies, online assessments and a move towards gamification and ranking provide metrics on individual performance, but they give us little feedback on its value to the wider organisation.
The good news is that, by aligning learning with corporate and learning strategy, you can effectively measure the learning function. If people can contribute to strategic goals, the connection between learning and application of that learning in the workplace stands a much stronger chance of becoming clear to everyone. That’s the time to review and strengthen strategy.
Identify current and future challenges
Thanks to alignment, anticipating challenges and assessing current weaknesses is no longer the sole province of corporate strategy. A good learning program considers the capability analysis of the organisation (based on current capability and delivery) and where that capability needs to progress to, based on the needs of the corporate strategy. Knowing where you stand today and how you’re tackling current challenges is one thing, but you also need a plan for anticipating future challenges. A close look at corporate strategy and regular scanning of the wider commercial environment will give great insights into what skills and capabilities your business will need in the future.
If companies are going to achieve their strategic targets, L&D programs need to anticipate and identify future challenges associated with hitting those targets, and with making sure staff have the resources and training to overcome them.
Improve ROI
Learning represents a significant financial investment for plenty of businesses. There’s always been pressure to qualify the ROI for L&D spend but, without benchmarks, it’s difficult to calculate.
Consider:
- How are my employees responding to our new learning culture?
- Are my learning objectives translating into business metrics?
- How is the new learning culture, adding value to the employees?
- How is the increased learning culture helping our customers?
Increase employee engagement
Organisations that treat learning as a box-ticking exercise rarely get any real value from it. The skills imparted are either too broad to offer a strategic benefit, or have such little relevance to individuals that they view it as a waste of time.
On the other hand, when organisations encourage employees to take on skills essential to business growth, they’ll often notice a sense of ownership over the outcome.
To sum up…
It’s not an exaggeration to say that we are currently living through unprecedented times. A brave and agile business can swiftly align its activity to best engage with their audiences who are themselves living in a new form or normal.
The corporate strategy sets a vision or direction for an organisation. Realistically the strategy created for 2020 has been thrown out the window. You need to create a new learning strategy When learning is aligned with new corporate goals, Learning and Development programs support the organisation to deliver capabilities and skills needed for current challenges and the hurdles of the future.
When looking at Learning and Development in the context of business strategy, you automatically target learning budgets at areas of strategic importance. As managers and leaders in business today, we’ve got to ask ourselves “If our Learning and Development programs and interventions aren’t aligned with strategy, why not, and at what cost?”
Facilitated Training has tools to assist with creating a learning strategy and conducting a training needs analysis. To access click here:
Targeted, professional development courses enable you to deliver effective training sessions that get the key message across and retain participant involvement.
- Save hours of research and development time. We have done all the hard work so you can focus on the training delivery
- Own complete rights to edit, copy, and reuse the training materials. You can even brand it with your business logo and name.
- Download all training courses and courseware packages immediately in their source files.
Each training course includes:
- Detailed Trainers / Facilitator Guide
- Targeted explainer video
- Learner Workbooks
- Adult centred training activities
- A self-paced learning plan for learning application back in the workplace
- Learner Attendance Certificate
- Attendance record
- Training evaluation sheet
————————————————————————————————————-
Facilitated Training has the solution that you need. Editable training materials that can be used again and again. Insert your company logo, add in case studies or examples from your workplace, or train using the quality training materials, as is.
Facilitated Training is your one-stop-shop for world-class, customisable training and professional development resources.
Facilitated Training offers training and organisational development resources to facilitators, trainers, coaches, HR managers and individuals.
Specialising in customisable leadership and management skills, Facilitated Training features a wide variety of products, including Training resources, Professional development courses, assessments, ebooks, videos and more.
Click here for customisable training materials that will assist your workplace in managing resources and output.
www.facilitatedtraining.com
About the author: Colleen Condon
Colleen likes to keep things creative in all that she does, often using marshmallows as a source of inspiration.
Everyone knows that ongoing learning is essential for both personal and professional success and yet, for many, this means hours of attending dead boring training or completing’ losing the will to live’ eLearning modules. Colleen’s mission is to end tedious professional development while ensuring targeted outcomes for learners and businesses.
Colleen has honed her skills over the last 20 years across multiple industries and locations. Her previous role saw her overseeing the training and development needs of over 60, 000 employees across 13 countries in the APAC region. This enabled her to hone skills that celebrated diversity and understanding human commonality through learning, and that in the absence of a common language, flip charts and coloured markers helped her to overcome most challenging situations.
After taking a ‘go away package’, in 2019, Colleen founded her own business, Facilitated Training, harnessing her global learning experiences and sharing them through ready to use learning resources, specialising in leadership, mentoring, guest speaking, creative problem solving, filling the gap of high quality, customisable training resources and tools.