What is an L&D strategy
An L&D strategy is a vital tool for organizations to align the corporate training with business objectives. It has the following benefits:
- It ensures that staff learning and development needs are effectively met.
- Company’s skills requirements for senior management are being developed.
Despite knowing these benefits, questions still remain: what are the best tips to create an L&D Strategy?
The 8 easy tips to create the best L&D Strategy
- Formalize your corporate training
- Set clear corporate training objectives in your L&D strategy
- L&D strategies must be geared towards employee satisfaction
- Create separate L&D strategies for different positions of the workforce
- The L&D strategy must be geared towards solidifying the talent pipeline
- The L&D Strategy must be flexible to constant change and continuous improvement
- Choose the delivery style and mode of implementation of the L&D strategy
- Benchmark the performance of the L&D strategy
The essence of a great L&D strategy
A successful company does not underestimate its role in meeting the learning and development needs of its workforce. An effective learning and development strategy enables better management of the talent pipeline through human capital development.
It helps build a skills base that is rich in both quantity and quality, for a direct impact on the bottom line. To do this successfully, start by matching your corporate training to your overall corporate strategy; and build this into a concrete, formal L&D strategy.
1. Formalize your corporate training
A formal L&D strategy allows the HR department and the company as a whole to have a clear vision of their learning and development strategy objectives. It also allows people in the business organization to see how such plans support the overall corporate strategy.
In other words, developing a clear and well-written L&D strategy will help you gain better buy-in from both the senior general management team and employees throughout the organization.
2. Set clear corporate training objectives in your L&D strategy
In your L&D strategy, clear objectives should be set to ensure that it hits the mark on various levels. It should include clear goals and objectives pertaining to organizational development, employee satisfaction, solidifying the talent pipeline and the growth of the L&D strategy as a whole.
3. L&D strategies must be geared towards employee satisfaction
Employee satisfaction does not always depend on monetary compensation. Most employees seek greater benefit by being able to learn new things and upgrade their leadership skills and technical competencies.
Top professionals and human resources in the corporate industry usually seek an employer that will support their learning and development needs. You must create policies that encourage employee training and development programs while people are doing their jobs.
4. Create separate L&D strategies for different positions of the workforce
You should always create separate L&D strategies for the different positions of the workforce since the needs of each position vary. You can’t treat each of the positions the same.
Make sure your L&D strategy fits the right people to the right leadership skills development to ensure a strong leadership team into the future.
Your L&D strategy goals should draw the line between the corporate learning program and the expected impact on the organizational development and business objectives.
5. The L&D strategy must be geared towards solidifying the talent pipeline
Clear objectives for your L&D strategy should include leveraging management training programs to ensure human capital development is done constructively, ensuring strategic placement of skill sets – both on a management level, and along the talent pipeline.
6. The L&D Strategy must be flexible to constant change and continuous improvement
Learning and development needs within an organization change over time. This is the reason why you need to make the L&D strategy objectives aligned with future training and development programs and keep improvement measures in mind. It must be flexible to any change and must be open to continuous improvement.
7. Choose the delivery style and mode of implementation of the L&D strategy
Choose whether the mode of delivery of the L&D strategy is conducted internally or with the help of an external organization. In-house management training courses have the advantage of centralizing corporate training, creating unity and increasing the speed of delivery and transfer to the job. This option is generally only available to larger organizations.
Small and medium-sized companies may have more success by outsourcing training courses to business schools. This will allow them to tap into a level of specialized business and training knowledge that would be hard to access internally.
Your L&D strategy can also be built around a judicious mix of in-house and outsourced management and leadership programs, thus cherry-picking the best of both worlds of executive education.
8. Benchmark the performance of the L&D strategy
Your formal L&D strategy should include Key Performance Indicators to benchmark your training and development programs, and measure return on investment.
You’ll want to see:
- Direct alignment of your corporate training with your business challenges & objectives
- Employee satisfaction, retention and loyalty
- Cohesion among teams and commitment to business objectives
- Employees rapidly transferring new management training and leadership skills to their jobs
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