According to ASTD (2011 survey), organizations spend $1228 and 31.9 hours on average per employee on training, yet senior managers don’t think learning and development (L&D) impacts business results. Roughly, 76 percent of line leaders in various organizations believe that the L&D function is not critical to business outcomes and 77 percent were dissatisfied with their companies’ L&D functions overall effectiveness. (CEB – Corporate Leadership Council Survey, 2011)
Business often overlooks the contribution of the learning department. Now consider this: One in four chief learning officers surveyed by Internet Time Alliance said their employees were learning fast enough to keep up with the needs of the business. I am concerned about the other three CLOs. What has been missing from their learning strategy after adding great learning professionals, 3.0 technology platforms with a great bunch of enthusiastic learners?
Organizational learning has failed to deliver the business results. Being a learning professional, I keep asking myself WHY – How do I resolve this gap? I came up with an ever-evolving checklist to not let your next learning project fail.
Check and ask yourself the following questions every day:
- Timing and utilization: Will the learner be practicing the skills immediately on-the-job and utilize the knowledge within one week at the workplace?
- Leadership/manager participation: Have you trained leaders/managers to support and coach the employees and enable on-the-job training?
- Business and people performance alignment: Does your training answer the business and people problems your participants face? For example, a soft-skill course for first time managers will be more successful if it answers business questions like:
- How to establish yourself as a manager and communicate effectively during crucial conversations.
- How to stop yourself from working on your team member’s project and mentor them effectively to encourage team spirit.
- Social learning and blended approach: Does your learning project wrap around social learning and provide post/pre e-learning or m-learning in a social environment of pull and not push?
- Repetition: Do you have a structure in place that can support learning nuggets after course completion, like an infographic or certification?
- Involve and engage: How will you involve your learners to share their learning or get them to engage in a community of practice/interest or mentor others?
- Measure, feedback and improve: Can you measure the success of your program on business results and people performance? Have you collected feedback on-the-job, maybe after two months of completing the learning, and how do you plan to improve your course?
- Storytelling, business case and instructional design: Does your course tell a story – based on a business case and enable participants to utilize the instructions properly in different business situations?
- Tools, technology and people: Is your learning tools or technology capable of delivering training in a virtual, cross-platform environment and does it support personal devices where participants want to access?
- Personal learning environments (PLE) and extended learning support: While considering every learner is different and their needs/level for the same course can be different, do you provide extended and customized learning support where they can use outside resources and learn more?
If you have just answered a “Yes” to the above checklist, congratulations for a successful learning project delivered! If it’s a “No,” then think about how you can implement this checklist in your existing and new learning projects.
Comment below to share your thoughts on the priority level of this checklist.
