4 Power-Ups for your Learning and Development
By: Stuart Page
Tags: Learning And Development, Talent Acquisition, Startup, Learning, Talent Management

It’s tough. You’ve invested time, costs and resource into delivering learning. You believe that your effort should significantly create more competitive advantage for your company.

Instead you are increasingly seen as a cost to the business, and your Senior Team are looking to reduce the L&D budget.

The “Cathedral in the Desert”

Do you recognise this analogy?

After your budget is approved, you introduce learning technology that has a great user experience.

You move your existing in-house content to the learning platform as well as good quality content sourced from several content providers.

So everything is in place.

You monitor user engagement.

Engagement is low.

You develop a communications plan and remind everyone to make use of the great learning available to them.

Still nothing — you are not seeing the uptake you expect.

At best…compliance and certification training is completed, providing you have the right processes and workflows in place to remind people.

At worst…compliance content isn’t getting utilised and you are failing to ensure mandatory training is covered. This is putting your organisation’s reputation at risk.

And… you’ve entered into a three year agreement for both the platform and content and your glistening Cathedral in the Desert starts to lose its shine.

Personally, your reputation as a L&D professional takes a knock and you move a few steps back. The L&D function is less relevant to the operational effectiveness of your business and starts to be a seen as a cost.

A better way?

As with all critical business roles, you as L&D professionals are no different. You want to see a correlation between your efforts and the success of your business.

Imagine if you could see how your efforts directly linked to business improvements.

a reduction in attrition rates and talent acquisition costs

the speed by which you get new joiners or those changing jobs up to speed to become productive

shifting your learner experience into one which uses technology available in the 21st century

transforming your learners’ skills into those required for the 21st century

focusing on the ‘hows’ as well as the ‘whats’ to improve culture and increase your company profile as a great place to work in order to attract new talent to recruit as you grow.

For example, let’s take the first metric — Attrition.

In this scenario, upskilling costs 16% of new talent acquisition (Source: Gartner; Josh Bersin, Keynote — 2018 Skillsoft Perspectives Conference)

Let’s assume that you integrate your learning and development technology and content with a talent focused solution. This enables career pathing and recommended learning for future roles. It also enables employees to state their career aspirations.

The system enables employees to get feedback, enrol on other learning and express an interest in future roles. This data gets reviewed and there is a feedback loop to both manager and employee.

This achieves a reduction in attrition by 1%, for example, within a 5,000 employee company. This saves £1.5 million in recruitment and onboarding costs. If you then consider retaining that 1% and upskilling those employees to occupy alternative roles, it will cost £250,000.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could stand up in your Senior Management meeting with good news. Due to your efforts you have reduced attrition. You have also upskilled a proportion of employees who can now take on new roles. This saves £1.25 million.

Let’s take another — Reducing the time to get new joiners productive.

If we are being realistic, it can take a minimum of at least six months to get a new joiner productive. But let’s say you could reduce this to four months and still provide a support infrastructure through both technology and employees. If it normally takes more months in your organisation, then your business case numbers can work out more favourably.

On the basis that you have reduced your attrition rate by 1% by upskilling, you are still likely to be bringing in one new recruit for every ten employees you have.

So, what does this all have to do with my Cathedral in the Desert?

By integrating your Cathedral’s functionality and content you can re-introduce it in a different way. You can start to show the impact you are making within your role.

If you’re lucky, you may have decision-making powers to change your LMS altogether. This will accelerate an increase in employee engagement and company performance.

How can I start to re-focus my efforts on something more meaningful and relevant to the business?

It’s time to Power-Up

Not all Power-Ups will be relevant to you. Some will cost more than others. You may not be ready for some. Regardless of where you are on your journey, this article aims to provide you something useful to make your L& D more relevant.

Some Power-Ups provide you with ideas using new technology, some don’t.

1. Powering Up the relevance of learning

What you already know: Human capital management (HCM) is the comprehensive set of practices for recruiting, managing, developing and optimising the human resources within a business.

Through Technology

If you can change your learning technology, consider how it could be delivered within a single user experience alongside other HCM processes. This will make it more streamlined. You will also be able to report on data to measure effectiveness.

No compromise — Ensure you choose the Right Technology

It is important to remember that you shouldn’t compromise on the quality of your LMS in order to integrate.

This is all too easy, with the commercial discounts larger ERP vendors can potentially provide. Very often the Learning module is the poor relation within a competent HR and more established, robust system. It is often strong in core HR linked to Financials. The deep and broad LMS functionality you need simply isn’t there. Also, since the LMS component is a small piece of a very large ERP system, it is likely that the provider will invest less into its development roadmap and support.

Certain platforms who have strong Learning functionality can combine with Talent, Performance and Workforce Management. These will have APIs and xAPI capability. They can give a single unified user experience for the processes you care about as a front-end platform. They will also be able to dynamically transfer data into your back-end ERP system.

Combining processes to give you more value

As an L&D professional, you can combine your learning and development with other processes by using the right technology. This will not only makes more sense to your learners, but it also makes learning integral to the success of the business. Success you can measure.

You don’t need to consider this as an ‘all or nothing’ approach. Even a blend of learning and some basic components of talent functionality can seriously increase learning uptake. This will improve employee engagement. It will provide a platform to make learning more frequently consumed and relevant for your learners.

An example of such a platform is SumTotal

OK, I am biased. Other quality providers also exist, but check that all modules truly sit on one back-end unified platform to give you the unified reporting and analytics you will need :-))

These types of systems make Learning more relevant by using an integrated user experience to integrate learning interventions into other HCM processes. The power of combining different processes can be seen below.

You can access more information on how a more holistic approach can help here.

If you can’t introduce different technology now…

…start to work closer with other HCM subject matter process experts. When you start to consider new technology, approach the solution more holistically rather than with a best-of-breed mindset. This will get you more for your money.

Also, if you combine the automation of several processes which complement each other you will be able measure the effectiveness of learning with business metrics.

If you won’t get budget, aim to combine processes on paper or online documents to make it easier for employees and managers to complete.

2. Powering Up multi-modality

What you already know: Multi-modality modes are visual, audio, text, speech and movement channels traditionally derived from a classic classroom situation. As communication in society changes, there are opportunities to take advantage of emerging 21st century technology and create new modes.

By effectively managing more conventional modal content, you will give your L&D team the head-space to look at creating new emerging modal options to significantly change the way your organisation consumes and measures learning.

Curation of established multimodal content, rather than creation

If your can get your L&D team act more like conductors of a multi-modal orchestra, this will give you an ability to introduce a broader range of modal learning types, to suit different employees. It will also give you more time to ensure content is aligned with the required competencies and skills in your business.

In addition, L&D can focus on being coaches and mentors within the business whilst enabling you to track, tweak and market curated content based on the uptake and the change in business behaviours that you see.

A worthwhile read on this topic is by Ben Betts and can be found here.

L&D Mindset on emerging technologies

Many learning management systems are capable of managing compliance, instructor led courses and digital learning. However, they have so much more value, if effectively utilised by L&D teams.

Learning and Development teams can play a much bigger role in organisational development when mindsets can move from more conventional learning methods to augmented and virtual reality experiences. This will deliver a more immersive learner experience.

A change in mindset from traditional learning methods is not only more immersive. It can make the efforts of L&D teams more business critical.

For more insight, one of my recent LinkedIn posts supported what David James says on this subject in his article which you can find here.

These more advanced technologies offer a real opportunity to shift knowledge transfer. However, these are still unexplored options for many companies. Once you work out how this can be best utilised, it will give you one of the most powerful ways to make learning increasingly relevant in the current and future workplace.

Many existing LMS platforms including ones you may already have support these AR/VR modals. The content/experience may still need to be created and will often be very specifically tailored for your company. It will need to consider the scenarios in which employees need to be trained.

3. Powering Up upskilling and onboarding

What you already know: The quicker you can get new employees more productive their value will be realised sooner. This will contribute to the growth of your business. Bringing in new talent to fill your attrition gap is often out of necessity rather than desire. Also the cost of doing this versus retaining talent and upskilling can be six times the cost.

Upskilling

Whilst the Industry 4.0 digital supply chain revolution is developing and Society 5.0 is getting big in Japan, you are getting increasingly aware that we are now in a world where we are still in the early stages of trying to upskill our people into jobs. At this point these are in the minority or don’t yet exist.

You may not be clear on the specific future job roles you will need. By identifying the emerging skills and technologies that will be important to build your business, you can start to lay the foundation for your content areas and methods of learning.

Before you get to this point, you can already make L&D more valuable in your short-term upskilling. At the most basic level, an easy way to start to make L&D more relevant to the business is to reduce costs and provide learners with a more flexible approach. Look to tweak your modes of learning for the one or two of the most basic trainings to provide a more scalable cost-effective solution.

Take a simple business case on the cost of time, travel, tutor time and accommodation for learners to attend basic repetitive ILT technology courses, for example, Microsoft Excel. Look to invest in digital content which is accessible by all, mobile ready and can be consumed in bite size chunks.

A great place to start is to review how this type of training could work. As an example, have a chat with one of the leading content providers, for example Skillsoft, (once again, other content providers are available). See what they offer within their Digital Skills Training. It will give you some ideas of what’s possible.

On the surface, some libraries of content may seem too expensive and expansive, but start to do the math on those training areas where you invest in a lot on mandatory instructor led training (ILT) and supersede it with digital content to provide the same results. Once you work out the comparable costs, you can get a vast library of content for often less cost. This will enable you to offer additional non mandatory digital skills training to your learners for them to upskill, ready for future jobs with no additional investment.

A great introduction into this area is to look at the video presented by David Wilson at Fosway Group discussing the agility and transformation of learning, which you can see here.

Onboarding

It’s likely your onboarding effectiveness may have variable success across your organisation.

Some scenarios,

a new employee is totally reliant on their line manager’s ability to effectively onboard.

..and that is if the manager is not on holiday or away on business.

Even if the manager is around, they consider the job is done by giving the employee a pile of books to read.

Alternatively, you might have a learning system that provides a batch of online training and policies for the employee to work through. Once completed the system tracks that it is done, and the employee gets on the best they can with their job with no local support.

These examples provide inconsistencies and lacks the support framework.

Research says the following when done right,

Consider this to Power-Up

utilise your platform to pre-board . Introduced to the new recruit before they join, this could just be a few forms through to welcome and introduction videos, a day one schedule and a link to ‘Meet the Team’. This will start to accelerate a new employee’s knowledge and make them more productive sooner.

. Introduced to the new recruit before they join, this could just be a few forms through to welcome and introduction videos, a day one schedule and a link to ‘Meet the Team’. This will start to accelerate a new employee’s knowledge and make them more productive sooner. let your system automate the delivery of content, forms, equipment and checklists at the right time. Give the line manager the time with the employee to set expectations, provide feedback and coaching and connect them to their role.

of content, forms, equipment and checklists at the right time. Give the line manager the time with the employee to set expectations, provide feedback and coaching and connect them to their role. setting up you (L&D), the employee and the line manager for success will significantly increase the likelihood of the new employee staying with you for the long term.

you (L&D), the employee and the line manager will significantly increase the likelihood of the new employee staying with you for the long term. go one step further and see pre-boarding as an extension to the candidate experience. You can initially use the talent acquisition component of your platform which extends into onboarding, learning and development, performance management, career pathing and measuring talent in the organisation.

4. Power Up your maturity

Not sure where to start to join the dots and develop a clearer strategy from all of the points above?

More and more organisations are trying to understand where their Learning and Talent maturity sits in line with other companies of the same size or in the same sector.

The Organizational Maturity Index Diagnostic developed by some of my colleagues is an excellent place to start, found here.

After responding to the questions, you can receive a report or one-on-one feedback as to where your organisation currently sits and the steps you can take to increase maturity which may include some components I’ve described in this article.

What are the Power-Ups you’ve used to make L&D more relevant in your organisation?

If you are in the early stages of Powering-Up, which parts of this article have been the most useful?

I look forward to your comments below and feel free to contact me if you want to discuss any points at through LinkedIn.

STUART PAGE

Helping organisations develop great people, drive effective leadership and produce superior business achievements.