Learning and Development Strategy – While you’re looking at your company’s objectives, market trends, here are five mistakes that we  don’t want you to make.

Learning and Development Strategy – Mistake number one:

Look at your plan and tell me what are your top four priorities? Oh, you have more? Do you have quite a lot? Maybe you have eight or twelve? I want you to stop, pause and think.

If you were to choose only three priorities or goals, what would they be? Define your wildly important goal or weak, not that weak. A wildly important goal is a goal that can make all the difference. Because it is your strategic tipping point, you won’t commit to apply disproportionate amount of energy to it.

Focusing on the wildly important requires you to go against your basic wiring as a leader to do more and more. Instead, focus on less so you and your team can actually achieve more. The concept of wildly important goals comes from one of my favourite business books.

The four disciplines of execution are highly recommended. Another principle that goes in hand with wildly important goals is the 80-20 rule, which says that 20% of your effort will bring 80% of the result. So, allocate your efforts strategically.

Learning and Development Strategy – Mistake number two:

look back honestly at this year activities and ask yourself, what served you well? What didn’t? What serves you this year might not serve you next year? We often do things because this is how we used to, this is what management approved or this is our standard operating procedure. Challenge this is how we do mentality. If something didn’t serve you, look at why didn’t serve you? Is it the form or a way that something was done? The content, the audience, the time of the year, maybe when it was done.

Maybe you don’t need to completely disregard something, maybe you just need to change one of the variables. Please, experiment more often than you do. 10% of all of your learning and development activities should be experimental, which means you trying something new that you haven’t tried before.

Search, design, test, fail, win and do it again. What brought you and the organization where you are today won’t bring you to a new height tomorrow.

Mistake number three:

you aren’t thinking in advance about your success criteria and how you’re going to measure your activities.

What would be your indicators of success? How are you going to measure your goals? What would be the indication that you are winning? Some metrics might be already there that can give you a hint such as customer satisfaction scores, employee engagement and retention scores, sales volume, market share of the organization and so on. But in some cases consider introducing additional measurements metric depending on your goals. Maybe you want to evaluate the employee’s skills or competency level before and after training.

Perhaps it will make sense to have a mystery shopper to come to your business and check the quality of the service that you provide. So you will ask me, do I need to measure everything? My answer is no. For all activities that you do, collect feedback through some forms, measure your widely important goals, measure the return on investment of those activities that are high in investment.

By that I mean it’s either you’re paying quite high training fee to a third-party provider. Another example could be when many employees are going through the same one training even when it is internal one. In this case you might not be spending a lot of money because there is no third-party but think about the employee’s time.

The time is as valuable as money if not more and of course closely monitor your experimental activities. Do people enjoy them? What is their reaction? Do you see positive change after it?

Mistake number four:

your RSF ratio is far from ideal. You don’t have the right balance between all your development activities.

Here I’m talking about 70-20-10 learning concept. The model was created in the 80s by three researchers and authors working with the center of creative leadership. According to this 70-20-10 concept people learn and grow from three types of experiences following the ratio of 70% of learning from experiences at 20% of learning from others and 10% structured learning.

Now have a look at all of the development activities that you do in your company. Usually the learning and development department tends to focus mostly on the last one which is structured learning, online courses and certifications. Are you one of them? If yes, this is the time to change things.

My question is do you have enough tools for employees to learn from experience at work? Here you have action learning, problem solving, placements, job rotations, job shadowing, self-directed, incidental learning, projects and special assignments. Other examples are cross-functional training, cross-departmental training, auditing, reviewing, reflection exercises, taking up challenging tasks and learning from mistakes. If you don’t have enough experiences for employees to learn while they work, this is your time to review it.

The same comes with social learning. Do you have platforms for employees to exchange organizational knowledge, experience?

Mistake number five:

You aren’t designing learning journeys. Training is often a one-time event, face-to-face training, webinar or online course. However, if the goal of the training is a behavior change, training should instead be viewed as a learning journey.

Learning journey is a series of learning events made up of a blend of formal and informal learning interventions, follow-ups that help develop new behavior. For example, it could be a small one-two hours face-to-face workshops, leaders talk, brainstorming sessions, bite-sized online learning, reflection discussions etc. From a business perspective learning journeys are customized programs structured around key enterprise goals and objectives.

From the employee perspective learning journey acts as a GPS, a guide that guides employees in their learning efforts through formal and informal learning. Employees go through different stages starting from awareness, motivation, participation, experimentation and ongoing connect.

Learn More – Learning & Development Certification Course