What’s in it for Learning and Development?

In most organizations, L&D is mostly known as a support team/function, and rightly so, as it is a catalyst in ensuring improvement in performance of the prime asset of the organization - ‘The Employees’.

Unfortunately, L&D never really seems to make an impact in many of the top management meetings or even within the employee groups, as it fails to showcase its worth or YoT (Yield on Training) in the form of numbers or graphs. It is very difficult to capture the outcome from a training unlike other measurable indicators.

It is important for L&D to learn various tools and techniques which would help in quantifying trainings and their implications on individuals, teams and organization as a whole. L&D needs to focus on being ‘Analytical’ or ‘Data driven’ in order to make strategic decisions and also, to show its validity, importance and effectiveness .

There will be a time when L&D will not be called a different department/team but, will be within each department/team handled by Supervisor/Manager who would be playing a vital role in the overall development of each employee, team and organization.

Talking about the Manager’s role, I had read in one of the articles-‘A Manager’s EQ should be equivalent to his/her IQ’. For this to happen, EQ training must be made mandatory for all Managers and Organizations must encourage continuous learning with the help of right tools, techniques, collaboration(s), open communication between managers and management.

About Employee’s role, in this day and age where things are rapidly changing around us, the idea of designing, developing and delivering traditional trainings would be rather vague. Hence, organizations, be it small or big, must emphasize & encourage self-learning bit by bit i.e. by making employees extract relevant information from various sources rather than pressing it to them. Employees will have to master ‘how to learn’ on their own and identify their individual learning styles. This will eventually help companies gain competitive advantage.

L&D’s future seems really exciting and to help employee(s) & business(s) cope with these rapid changes, there are various tools being developed like MOOC (Massive open online course), Gamification, Social Learning, Simulations, Mobile Learning, Bite-size learning etc. some of which are being incorporated in a few companies as well.

So, to answer ‘what’s in it for L&D’? Well, the horizon definitely appears brighter. The future should be more on ‘grasping’ aspect and not on ‘pressing’. Though it seems difficult to achieve but the excitement in the implementation of these new approaches will definitely keep the pace up and running.

“Learning is an Art, should be made Habit’s part.”