Are you creating a culture of learning in your workplace? If not, you may want to take a close look at the potential benefits you could be reaping. Providing employees with relevant learning and development (L&D) opportunities can facilitate better work environments and help move you closer to your goals for business growth and profitability.
The first big question you’re likely to run into is how to deliver engaging, meaningful training that contributes to your organization’s growth. This is a smart place to begin your journey as you build your L&D strategy–after all, everything you do should help strengthen your business.
“Navigating these challenges becomes easier when you attach them to a business result,” says Juan Otero, training consultant and owner of Tecadi Training Technologies.
With over thirty years of experience in corporate training, Otero has deep insights into how business owners can benefit from robust learning and development strategies, and how to measure success.
If you'd like to attract and retain top talent in your organization, developing engaging, effective and memorable training can be leveraged to encourage these results.
In this article, we’ll cover how to create your learning and development strategy, and the essential components you can activate today.
Learning and development programs support organizational growth
Selecting the right tools and technology can help you deliver a broad range of business outcomes by boosting productivity, improving business agility, and increasing employee satisfaction.
“I would encourage any business owner to transform their organization into a learning organization,” says Otero.
Managing, capturing, and sharing knowledge all strengthen your organization for the long term and help you build a strong workplace culture that attracts and retains high-quality talent.
As a bonus, you’ll increase employee performance, productivity, and motivation by providing the knowledge and skills they need to perform their best. A robust training program can also help you stay competitive in your industry by offering extra value to new hires.
Developing your learning and development strategy
If you’re ready to get strategic about learning and development in your organization, Otero recommends you start with an assessment of your training and knowledge gaps. Then, get clear on the problem you’re trying to solve with training, so you can effectively develop a solution to meet that need.
Next, connect your training plan to a business result, identify the audiences you’re trying to reach, and clarify the resources you need based on that information.
“Design the solution based on the training goal and based on the characteristics of the audience,” Otero says.
The medium and message you choose are both important when creating effective training programs.
“It is so clear right now how media impacts learning,” Otero says.
He explains that there are times when visual information is more effective than delivering training content in text, since visual resources work well to illustrate objects, systems, and flowcharts.
More importantly, if your organization relies on collaboration, visual ideation, presentations, and problem-solving, you’ll require interactive tools to support these business workflows and build high-performing teams.
To build a successful learning and development strategy, organizations must:
- Create a culture of learning and knowledge sharing in the company to help align priorities
- Understand how learning and development drive recruitment and retention to properly assess benefits to all departments
- Deliver training in ways that support your teams, whether in-person, remote, or hybrid to ensure equitable access to learning and development
- Promote cross-functional learning to expand the capacity of people on your team
- Focus on delivering interactive learning experiences to promote comprehension and engagement
- Invest in the right tools to connect people, technology, and spaces
Evaluating the success and performance of your corporate training
As with any other strategy you implement in your organization, continuous improvement is key. Try to measure how effective your training programs are by reviewing the elements you used to create them. Otero again stresses the importance of reviewing the measurable results of your training.
“What is the business impact?” he asks. “Are you attending more customers, are complaints down, is customer satisfaction up?”