When we talk about learning and development (L&D), we tend to focus on the why of learning. Workplace learning boosts engagement, aids in retention and helps you upskill your workforce. We don’t, however, always address the “how.” That is, how exactly do you start planning your L&D initiative?
By building a well-thought-out L&D program, you can ensure that your needs are met, while also achieving the business goals of your organization.
Following are key steps to consider if planning to launch a successful L&D program:
Step 1: Understand your organization’s business, short-term and long-term vision and strategy
Start here, as pretty much everything else you do, in terms of your L&D strategy, should cascade from where your organization is today versus where it wants to be long-term, and how it will serve its customers and differentiate itself from competitors.
Yes, your employees need to be engaged and satisfied with the way they are developing and progressing within your organization, but the key is to understand the purpose of their work. Employee development for the sake of development or engagement, that is not aligned with your organization’s business, will falter.
This also means you have to educate yourself on your organization’s vision, strategy and path to market. Too often, we find L&D practitioners not close enough to the business to be able to strategically guide its L&D approach.
Step 2: Identify and align your stakeholders
Like any strategy, knowing who your key stakeholders are, taking time to understand their perspectives, set expectations, etc. is critical to success. When you think of stakeholders, it’s also useful to map them to their level of sponsorship and involvement, as you may have quite a broad set of stakeholders. In that case, you need a stakeholder strategy that is manageable, while addressing their interests, needs and expectations.
As you build your stakeholder relationships, be sure to secure sponsors and spokespeople. Engage your stakeholders in a way that gives them more involvement, which will also bolster the support you have as well as a broader voice across the organization.
Step 3: Identify key capabilities needed to enable your organization’s vision and strategy
Work with your stakeholders and other business leaders to critically evaluate the organization’s short and long-term vision and strategy in light of what capabilities are needed to deliver the vision and strategy.
These key capabilities will become the baseline construct of your L&D curriculum. Most often, key capabilities don’t evolve annually, but will evolve over time, so it’s important to recognize that you will need to check in on these key capabilities every year to ensure your L&D curriculum will deliver against them.
Step 4: Conduct a gap assessment on key capabilities
Use the key capabilities that you define with your stakeholders and other business leaders – the capabilities needed to deliver against the organization’s short and long-term vision and strategy – to conduct a gap assessment. Understand where and why your stakeholders and other business leaders may see some key capabilities as current strengths or developmental areas of the organization.
This does not need to be a highly technical or scientific assessment. Simply asking probing questions, such as where leaders see current strengths, current developmental areas, why, and how they think these opportunities should be addressed, should be enough to critically assess your L&D priorities.
A word of caution: just because something is already a strength doesn’t mean it should be de-prioritized. In fact, success often comes from leveraging an existing strength. Therefore, figuring out ways to address development areas and finding new ways to leverage strengths is a sound basis for a L&D strategy.
Step 5: Create a holistic and systemic L&D curriculum
Using the key capabilities and gap assessment, identify a holistic and systemic L&D curriculum that addresses all learning and development modalities, not just learning topics, and ensure these are systemic in that they address the different learning and development needs of different parts of your organization and different employee levels.
A good rule of thumb is to consider the 70-20-10 rule: 70% on-the-job opportunities like project boards, functional rotations, opportunities to shadow others, etc.; 20% learning from others like internal coaching, mentoring, reverse mentoring and more; and 10% programmatic learning through focused topics that will develop or otherwise better leverage the key capabilities your organization needs.
Pulling this all together in a cohesive, user-friendly manner is important, as most employees and leaders do not know how to navigate all of the opportunities available to them. Always consider the user experience when creating your L&D offerings.
Also, be flexible about how your employees and leaders learn. Do they want this in small bites? Do they need the flexibility of on-demand/when they can attend training?
Step 6: Establish metrics
Again, like any good strategy, there should be clear metrics that will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of your L&D strategy. Some key questions include: are these metrics truly measurable and attainable, what resources might you need to enable the metrics and are they timebound?
Of course, you want to co-create metrics with your stakeholders to ensure there’s aligned standards and expectations as well as no surprises down the road.
Additionally, agree with your stakeholders and other business leaders how often you will track metrics and report on progress. And then, of course, stick with the schedule and agreement to share results.
It’s also a good idea to set a sub-strategy for how (and how often) you’ll share progress against metrics with your broader organization – beyond your stakeholders.
Step 7: Communicate, educate, and reinforce
Again, like any good strategy or brand awareness, you should have a sub-strategy and plan that addresses how you will initially communicate and educate your organization on your L&D strategy, what purpose it will serve (building or leveraging key capabilities your organization needs to enable their business vision and strategy), what it is (your L&D curriculum), how they can engage with it (their roles and responsibilities), when they can expect to start and what they should expect at various intervals. And then, of course, you need to have a plan to periodically remind them of all of this. If you look at any big brand, brand awareness was not built overnight, nor is it sustained without frequent reminders.
In the end, the most effective companies will invest in innovative L&D programs. It may take some trial and error, but the rewards are invaluable!