Strategic training and development is the process of designing specific employee training programs that directly align with business needs. Training with a strategic focus develops the capabilities and tools that employees need to successfully carry out their jobs.
The difference between regular employee development and training with strategic goals comes down to a few characteristics.
- All development activities are based on strategic organisation objectives.
- Learning frameworks are broad enough for all functions to use but deep enough to address personal needs.
- Continual reporting, analysis and iteration.
- Management are key champions.
- Training activities are tailored to personal needs to ensure learning sticks.
The process of strategic training and development is always rooted in business-level outcomes. While you’re looking for performance outcomes at the individual level, these outcomes need to have business impacts. It’s also a cyclical process where each step informs the next.
- Define Strategic Initiatives: If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, you can’t effectively identify or track results. Look at your business drivers. This is usually where organisations pull from strategic planning tools like a capability framework, because these are what make a business effective.
- Skills Gap Analysis: Whatever the initiative, you want key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are what make strategic training an iterative, cyclical and strategic process as they give you a measure of change. Prioritise capabilities based on the impact they will have on desired business goals and the availability of said capability.
- Personalise Training: Any program should be practical to an employee’s day-to-day, while the mode of training should complement it. As much as we’re thinking long-term, training needs to be accessible, timely and relevant in the interim for employees to engage with it.
- Analyse & Repeat: This is the step that makes the process cyclical. It’s also where you show the ROI of training, ensuring that organisational value is easy to convey. The focus is always on tangible outcomes that occurred – and only occurred —because of training. Whatever insights you gain here you funnel back into the process.
Compliance, onboarding and product training will likely not be strategic, even if they’re important to your business. The key difference between these types of training and training with strategic impact is that they are niche topics for a certain moment in time. Strategic training looks long-term, often encompassing short-term initiatives.
Consider these examples of strategic training and development programs.
- Leadership Development: Leaders are the core of workplace culture. Any traits, positive or negative, filter down to employees. Many great leaders will say experience is what sets them apart from junior roles, because experience provides context. Mentoring benefits both mentee and mentor since it builds new knowledge in one and develops and reinforces skills in the other.
- Social Learning: Even at their most introverted, workforces are generally social. Think of the mission-critical knowledge that is shared in non-trackable ways: Between peers throughout the day, within meetings, on the coffee run. Lunch and learns are an informal but impactful way to deliver social learning.
- Capability Building: Capabilities – technical or soft, core or complementary – need to be continuously developed in your existing workforce as they determine your long-term success. Sometimes, you can’t hire for emerging skills. Stretch assignments are often labelled soft promotions as they add dimension and responsibility to an employee’s job, while helping solve a business problem.
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