Most learning and development (L&D) leaders know they need to be working strategically. The road to strategic success is paved with good intentions yet has its hurdles.
First, it’s very likely that your technology is not truly enabling you. Most large organizations start, stop, and start capability projects over and over. They spend ample time and money building capability frameworks they can’t implement with their current tech, making significant manual work pointless.
Second is the hurdle of business alignment. Forget the failed capability frameworks for a moment and consider the role of L&D in your organization. Lacking a clear way to connect learning to business performance, there’s little reason for business leaders to invest in it.
Third is the challenge of making learning stick. It’s somewhat linked to poor tech; legacy learning management system (LMS) metrics and features like course completions and knowledge checks give surface-level insight into engagement. But they don’t show you how knowledge is applied, nor the impact of that application for learners.
The solution is the alternative to the first hurdle: technology. Namely, the right technology. Your old school LMS designed to deliver and test learning is not going to support your major capability and competency projects. But a platform designed specifically to do that — as well as link learning to business and make learning impactful — will get you a return on investment (ROI) and then some.
That’s what a performance learning management system (PLMS) is built for.
3 Key Benefits of a PLMS
Consider these three benefits of investing in a PLMS for your business:
- Technology that gets capability off the ground.
The PLMS works on six core tenets.
- Discovering and mapping capabilities based on business strategy or goals.
- Facilitating and managing all learning opportunities as the central system of record.
- Assessing role-based capabilities to ensure alignment with organizational performance.
- Embedding performance management through demonstrated application of learning.
- Specific portals that tailor content and experience to different learner groups.
- Workflow automation.
When used to its full capacity, the PLMS starts, rolls and ends with capabilities designed to engineer business success. That means that any learning managed starts, aligns and ends with business goals.
But the true benefit is that last point of automation. Most capability frameworks take months to scope, research, and validate. If consultants are brought in, the cost of the project can balloon, and the final product may not even be completely unique for the business.
The work here for the human resources (HR) or L&D professional is validating those capabilities are right. From there, you can input any number of job roles and map capabilities to them as part of a cohort.
- Learning that aligns with business by nature.
The obvious connection the PLMS makes between learning and business is in being capability-led. But there is a deeper throughline of business alignment: capabilities offer tangible impact for learners as much as business.
Capabilities inherently describe some element of business. The capability of project management ensures you have a standardized process for — you guessed it — scoping, documenting and managing projects. Using that as a baseline for learning for any number of job roles means that a learner is developing abilities that positively influence actual business processes. But it also means that learning outcomes are measurable. Rather than an intangible A-F grading system — which only tells you a person’s aptitude at a fixed point in time — capabilities can be measured in levels of competency.
By assigning certain levels of competency to job roles, a PLMS offers more personalized training depending on the complexity of a job role. For example: a senior project manager may be assigned an expert competency level for Project Management, where a junior developer contributing to a few projects only needs to meet an intermediate level. This framework ensures not only do people learn the most relevant thing for their role but get a faster path to progression — ensuring you’re constantly reinforcing succession plans and moving critical knowledge through your organization.
- Learning that changes performance.
Ensuring and measuring knowledge application is the hardest part of any learning program. It’s also the real-life bridge between learning and performance. Most classic learning metrics don’t link to actual performance outcomes. And without a universal foundation, performance conversations are left open to bias and generally put a bad taste in employees’ mouths.
The routine annual performance review, when siloed from learning initiatives, is incredibly uninspiring. It’s also unlikely to be truly impactful for those being reviewed, nor does it give leaders a fair opportunity to develop their own coaching skills. They certainly can’t base a conversation on course completions. On two fronts, you’re failing your people.
Capability-based learning means:
- Learners and leaders have the same language in which to talk about performance, negating any potential biases.
- Learners can advocate for performance-based rewards like bonuses, raises or promotions with accurate development history.
- Leaders can prove the business impact of their teams, with cohort-based capability reporting and metrics that directly link to business goals.
- L&D and HR pros can show the tangible ROI based on the maturity (i.e., strength) of capabilities through the current state of learning and development.
Concluding Thoughts
The power of a PLMS lies in its ability to shift learning from a check-the-box exercise to an engine for business growth through capability building. And when capability building becomes part of the performance conversation, the result is not only better learning outcomes but also sustained business impact — because investing in your people’s performance is ultimately the key to business performance.
