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| Learning must aim for the same goals as the rest of the business |
Learning and development strategy
The right strategy can help to increase productivity by building a talent management pipeline that matches the strategic needs of your business. You have to join up these often disparate processes:
- Recruitment
- Training needs analysis (TNA)
- Training design
- Workshop delivery
- Blended learning
- Coaching
- Development
- L&D evaluation
Recruitment: analysis and assessment
You may have a clear idea of the perfect person for a role, but how do you know when you've found them? There are many ways to assess a candidate, such as CV screening, interviews, simulations and presentations. But these methods all suffer from the same flaw: they're subjective. If two people disagree about the strength of a candidate's interview or presentation, who's right?
KSAs and job descriptions are all very well, but the way they are specified is often subjective, as is the way they are used to assess candidates. By using assessment tools more effectively, it’s possible to be very objective in the way you identify the qualities your people really need to succeed in your business, and identify those qualities in your candidates. This allows you to stop wasting time interviewing the wrong people. You can save money by ensuring that your interview and assessment processes closely match your job requirements.
Training needs analysis (TNA)
TNA helps you to prevent future costs by identifying and pre-empting knowledge and skills gaps before they become a problem. TNA also helps you to avoid wasting money on 'blanket training' that does not meet training needs well.
TNA is a methodical (if not always scientific) approach to uncovering skills gaps, based on the principle 'diagnose before you prescribe'. Without it, the real training needs may go unmet. TNA can be very systematic, assessing people against a list of competencies, or it can be more intuitive - simply asking individuals and line managers what they think the training needs are.
Either way, it certainly helps to know more about the problem before you try to solve it.
Training design
Whatever the type of training, training design is critical. Not only do you need a flair for creating clear content and layout for materials, you need to be able to create innovative programmes, workshops and other activities that will keep people engaged with imaginative methods of learning. Good training design will meet clear learning objectives while also appealing to all the different ways that people learn - and making it fun!
Workshop delivery
Workshop delivery (or facilitation) requires a rare combination of organisational, creative and interpersonal skills. Workshop facilitators must understand the principles of training design and adult learning to allow the workshop structure and design to 'teach itself'. They must be at once time-keeper, chairman and coach, asking the right questions at the right time to stimulate discussion, debate and learning.
I believe that people get the best learning from experiences. It's possible, with a little imagination and planning, to design workshops that 'deliver themselves' through learning experiences. I believe that anyone can deliver a great training workshop - they just need the right skills.
You can reduce training costs by empowering your line managers and business leaders to deliver a wider range of training themselves. If you can offer in-house training skills workshops that will develop the right skills in your managers and leaders, this will give you a valuable and permanent training resource that will add value for years to come.
Blended learning
The term 'blended learning' recognises that there are many different ways of learning, and that some learning activities serve us better than others depending on what we are trying to learn. It’s often most effective (and more cost effective!) to combine various different learning delivery methods to achieve a particular learning outcome. Blended learning approaches also recognise the important role that electronic forms of learning can play, often running alongside, or even replacing, traditional forms of face-to-face learning.
Blended learning management systems (LMS) can help you to manage complex training programmes that combine online training with distance learning and traditional training. There are many proven approaches to blended learning programmes that are fast, effective and easy to use.
Coaching
Coaching is a very effective approach to leadership and management: it can be the way you manage. Through skilled questioning and objective feedback, the coach helps the 'coachee' to identify and take ownership of their work goals and targets.
Coaching is a gradual and on-going 1-2-1 process where you seek to raise the awareness and responsibility of your people with regard to their work performance.
Many managers lack the training or expertise to coach effectively. Leadership programmes can provide coaching skills and L&D leaders can 'coach the coach' to establish a coaching culture in the organisation.
Development
This is sometimes called personal development planning (PDP) and it’s a critical part of talent management. It lends itself very well to a coaching approach where leaders help their people to identify and work towards career goals and get the training, qualifications and work experience required to attain them.
PDP really helps with long term motivation and staff retention, increasing productivity and reducing recruitment costs because you can more easily promote from within.
L&D evaluation
L&D leaders need to be able to evaluate the impact of their L&D activities and strategies. The first three of Donald Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation (reaction, learning and behaviour) are useful for capturing feedback about how L&D activities can be improved to make them more effective in achieving desired learning outcomes.
But its Kirkpatrick's fourth level (results) which tells you whether you picked the right learning outcomes in the first place. When all is said and done, business is about results, and L&D must demonstrate bottom-line impact, just like every other part of the business.
Measurable outcomes from L&D can sometimes be hard to pin down, but with a little imagination, empirical and even quantitative evaluation can be achieved. This can be used to demonstrate the real return on your L&D investment and helps to build the business case for future L&D strategies and avoid wasting resources on activities that don’t have business impact.
Picture: IntelGuy, Flickr
