To have an adaptive, engaged, and dynamic workforce, you can’t let learning stop when workers finish school. Changes in technology and best practices are constantly reshaping the workplace. If you want your business to keep up, you should adopt a robust learning and development (L&D) strategy.
What is L&D in business?
The specifics of a learning and development (L&D) strategy depend a lot on the industry, but in a broad sense, L&D is the process of providing employees with opportunities to grow their knowledge, skills, and expertise in areas that are relevant to their work. An effective L&D strategy can integrate ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) principles such as compliance training, talent development, education courses included with the job, leadership development, and onboarding processes, to name a few.
Learning development strategies are important because they allow your business to grow and adapt to new situations. A stagnant workforce means leadership skills won’t develop, employees won’t understand new technology, and you’ll lose many opportunities. On top of that, L&D is integral to retaining talent. A 2019 study found that 94% of employees said they would stay at a company longer if they invested in learning and development. A healthy business has a healthy L&D process to develop employees into the best they can be.
How L&D contributes to an organization’s growth
Organizations are nothing without the people who run them. Studies have shown that over 80% of HR managers see training as beneficial in attracting and retaining talent, and nearly half of employees agree that training availability was a factor in choosing their current company. Satisfied employees mean better performance and employee engagement. Learning and development practices focus on giving employees the tools and motivation they need to help your organization grow.
But growth is more than just the number of employees – your company needs to use those employees effectively. L&D lets workers reskill and upskill to keep up with new technologies in their field and update best practices as industries evolve. The bigger your company is, the more innovative and creative your employees need to be to keep up with the challenges coming your way. Ongoing training and development help your workers to adapt to new challenges and learn new strategies.
Key components to an effective L&D strategy
Learning and development strategies are systematic plans tailored to the needs of your business and align with your overall business goals. Without this clear framework, your organization won’t be able to choose the most effective methods of instruction or tell if you are accomplishing your goals. Another key component of a good L&D strategy is knowing your employees. The strategy should incorporate the needs of the business, employees’ current skill levels, potential for growth, and their areas of interest.
Regardless of the type of industry, we can break down the components of a good L&D strategy into four key components.
Assessment
In this initial part of building a strategy, you look at what exactly you need from employees you are not currently getting. Maybe it’s a lack of skill at using technical equipment, or perhaps a communication problem. Whatever the case, this is the foundation of the next three steps and will be the guiding principle of your strategy.
Learning objectives
With a basic understanding of what your business needs for employees, you can start to build specific learning objectives. The key here is to ensure that you have a measurable outcome to determine if you’ve been successful. For example, you want a majority of employees to be able to use a particular machine, or you want to see a 5% increase in successful internal promotion to management positions.
Learning methods and resources
This is where you set the strategy in motion by determining what learning style works best for your employees and how to implement it. Is taking time off normal work for classroom instruction the best approach? Or is on-the-job apprenticeship style training better? This is also the phase where you identify relevant learning technologies and training personnel to help you accomplish your goals. You need adaptive solutions that will let learning and development professionals train your employees efficiently and successfully. Cost also comes into play in this phase because you have to determine what talent and infrastructure you have available to facilitate the education.
Evaluation and measurement
This final step of the process is determining if you’ve reached your goals. This can come in the form of tests, letting employees demonstrate their new skills or any other form of applicable evaluation. The key here is tracking employee improvements and attempting to measure ROI. If you only see small improvements, it might not be worth your while – or you may need to funnel more resources into training or rethink your learning methods.
Building an L&D strategy
To get an idea of how to build an effective Learning and development plan, let’s consider how an L&D strategy might play out in the real world. Suppose we are looking at an automotive corporation – think of one of the larger manufacturers in the United States. You can break the four key components into four steps that you can take to facilitate Learning and development training in the best way possible.
Step 1: Run a needs assessment and set goals
Find the gaps in your company’s knowledge and skill sets. A good needs assessment will find multiple gaps, but this step is about finding those places where you need work, not fixing them just yet.
Let’s look at how that might play out in our automotive example. After conducting research, you might discover that your company has significant knowledge gaps when it comes to electric vehicles (EV) and autonomous driving technology. You need engineers familiar with battery tech and upskilled technicians who can work on electric vehicles. Your research also found that a few of your departments could have better customer service records.
Step 2: Develop a strategic plan with clear learning objectives
Now that you know what you need, you can prioritize what to tackle first. If your poor customer service is causing a major problem, you might put electric vehicle training on the back burner and train workers in issues relevant to those problems. But, if you know you are going into the electric vehicle business full tilt, you need technicians on the ground who can fix problems.
For example, let’s say you are sticking with electric vehicle maintenance training. Now you have to consider the who and the when – how many employees do you have that need training to learn EV maintenance, what is their baseline skill level, and what kind of timeline are you looking at? Make this specific – create a statement like “By the end of training, 75% of our technicians will be able to perform routine maintenance on electric vehicles.” Keep in mind that you are going to need to define these outcomes for each section of your workforce you are aiming to train.
Step 3: Choose your learning methods and allocate resources
Choosing the right learning and development platform can be tricky, and a lot of it depends on who you are training and your budget constraints. In our example, interactive displays could work well for hands-on training, helping technicians learn the ins and outs of EV maintenance. An interactive display can show the inner workings of an EV engine and let learners explore the components in a more hands-on way, without needing to bring in an actual engine.
When making decisions on learning methods, it’s also important to have professionals trained both in the learning platforms you’re using as well as the subject matter itself. In our example, that might mean finding experts in interactive display course development as well as EV technicians capable of training your workers and who know how to use an interactive display in your workplace.
Finally, budget is a major issue addressed in this step. You have to consider not only the cost of learning resources and hiring specialists to train your workers but also your employee’s time away from their normal jobs. Adding training on top of an already overworked employee is not the best approach. A workaround for this could be staggering training over a longer period of time so you’re not down too many employees at once.
Step 4: Implement and track your progress
Before you launch into training, you should consider how you will determine if you’ve reached your goals – metrics like completion rates, participant feedback, and performance improvements help to make sure your technicians are able to do what they need to. The right software can make keeping up with your employee’s success rates much easier.
Once you’ve had a significant number of workers trained in new skills, you can reflect on the data to see if you need to make any adjustments. In our example, tracking how many technicians are able to perform maintenance on EVs and how long it takes them will let you know if you are reaching your goal. A flexible learning platform also is imperative because often, different groups of employees need different learning approaches.
The future of L&D strategies
Technology is constantly reshaping every industry while at the same time impacting L&D strategies. Artificial intelligence is already creating simulated experts in areas that can answer most questions in technical fields. Augmented reality allows workers to overlay simulated objects on physical reality. Gamification motivates learners in new ways through interactive technology. Companies like Promethean work towards creating learning environments that are rewarding and interactive so that your employees can reach their potential and have greater job satisfaction.
If you’d like to learn how Promethean can provide the tools you need to launch your learning and development strategy, schedule a free demo today.
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