Goal Oriented Learning Strategy

Continuous employee training and development has become a prerequisite for global businesses to develop skilled resources to navigate through changing business environment, ever changing technology and strong competition. As the focus on employee upskilling and reskilling increases, it is more important than ever for organizations to shift to adapt to a knowledge-based economy that thrives on the digital revolution and caters to a vibrant workforce.

In most of the organizations today training and development have advanced to a revenue generation model, acting as a differentiator in winning new clients and new innovative ways to deliver content in shorter time to bring extensive value to the organization. On the other hand, even in our more saturated society where self-learning free and easy to get, it is seen as important, however, investments in learning always compete with other investments. That’s one reason organizations have to shift gears and focus on new concepts, automation and focus their learning journey towards, business value.

While this training as a service has multiple strategies keeping in mind the organizational goal the starting point can be to create an annualized training strategy plan. While developing a learning journey for an organization, it is important to define goals focusing on value or outcome we are aiming for, and then constantly monitor the same. This is a tough task however not impossible. 

So, what is the starting point for this change?

Build a learning strategy for your organization :- The learning function must be viewed as a business partner that understands what the organization goal are. Its strategies must readily demonstrate how learning will help employees accomplish business objectives. So, internalize the training roadmap to the organization goals for the year and then evaluate gaps to build a strategy. For example, your company has a focus on building Domain Experts, then training strategy can be how to build academies, curate domain content or subscribe to external certifications. This will have your domain, options, budgets and outcome or value. So how to create an effective strategy and execute it?

·       Define the Strategy: What are the organization goals and what is the need of the learning team to deliver for the employee to align and deliver towards those goals. This is the most important starting point. Most organization falter in defining a clear strategy and thus the results are either not encouraging or not aligned to the long-term goals.

·       Identify the gaps and socialize: You can do this by looking at a written job description (make sure you have one!) and comparing the skills the position requires with your employees’ current abilities, new customer requirements, change in systems and next 12-18 months business improvement plans. Understanding where there may be gaps will help you identify the type of training interventions you need.

·       Analyze your needs and goals: Take the time to carefully analyze your business and employee needs and assign the right priority to the immediate needs when designing your training plan. This will help you choose the right type of training for different prioritized requirements e.g. a short term intervention of customer experience management vs. a middle term need to improve technology quotient of the employees. Above and beyond your business needs are to review what the trends are in your industry. Will you need to train seasonal staff for new health and safety protocols? Or perhaps you may need to invest in upskilling existing employees for future needs.

·       Solution : An effective solution therefore should cover prioritization of learning courses, choosing the right delivery model for different interventions and looking at significant amount of  automation and technology enabled delivery for the interventions planned. An effective learning solution should be measurable, trackable and should be able to produce enough data to analyze the pre and post intervention quality change in the employee deliverables and outcomes. It is important to course correct the learning plan, it mode of delivery and speed of execution since one size will never fit all. Periodic data measurement would help create a holistic training need identification and intervention plan. Remember skill development is not a one-time activity.   

·       Prioritize : Assign the training you’d like to provide into categories. Is it mandatory, must have or good-to-have? If it’s absolutely required, training for your staff becomes imperative e.g. ethics, compliance or policy related trainings. If it reflects an ideal situation that isn’t immediately feasible, you’ll know to plan for it in the longer term. Prioritization also has to be done for the segment of employees and how far their current state is from the end goal you want to achieve. Different employee groups may have varied length of training programs and interventions required. A pre assessment of the current state therefore is the starting point of prioritization of the effort and content to be enabled.

·       Fuel in Automation and other solutions : Digital Transformation is the basic need for all business and organizations to strive. However, a similar approach to transform the Learning functions also has to be enabled and budgeted to drive effective content broadcast and usage. Using technology enabled content goes a long way in today’s world to effectively implement all interventions. A 3 point agenda to consider strongly is to have an effective measurement system and data of records, innovative content creation and content delivery using technology and finally a system to measure pre and post-performance impact analysis of the population covered to align future interventions towards the common goal. 

• Evaluate the impact – ROI & ROE: The degree to which targeted outcomes occur as a result of the training and the support and accountability package. This can be a set of any KPIs which the team tries to influence, from error rates, sales revenue, time saved to cost saved. The best approach to isolate the effect is to compare the people who get training to people who did not get training, another great option also via a random assignment. While a good experimental setting is hard to get and quite some effort it supports evaluating cause and effect and not only correlations.