Driving Better Learning Outcomes For Your Organization

Key considerations to make before creating an organizational development plan

How do you develop your organization’s talent? That’s not a new question for HR professionals, but the reality is that the answer is always evolving with the times. 

Employees across all departments put a premium on new opportunities to learn and develop. In fact, 93% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their careers, according to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workforce Learning Report. So, while organizations have an inherent need to grow the skills of their employees, to meet the evolving demands of today’s world, its importance doesn’t stop there. Development is a very critical part of job satisfaction and employee retention too.  

Today’s professionals have a whole host of options for growing their knowledge and skill base, but they look to HR departments to step up and facilitate these learning and development (L&D) opportunities in a focused way. The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone. There are many resources and services available to help human resource departments implement digital L&D programs, but there are also some important considerations to be made before diving in. 

At Kineo we talk a lot about the importance of a custom learning journey because we know it’s different for every organization and every employee. The main idea is to view your organization’s development opportunities as a series of interconnected experiences rather than a singular problem. This means thinking critically about the challenges your organization is facing as well as the associated technology components needed to address them.

What behaviors do you want people in your organization to adopt? How can you drive motivation in that direction? By focusing on these types of questions you’ll better understand the bigger picture before rushing off to find a solution, and it’s worth noting that a good L&D partner will take the time to help you uncover these questions and challenges on an organizational level. It’s also important to think about the key metrics that will let you know you’re heading in the right direction with your L&D program. By addressing those items up front, your organization will have a better focus on ways to build an adaptable learning solution for long-term success.

But bear in mind that learning isn’t just happening through formal training courses anymore. Today’s world demands that a variety of systems integrations are in place to allow for a seamless experience. That means that your learning management system (LMS) should be able to connect with other systems via a single sign-on framework, so employees can locate relevant resources all in one place. Potential examples include  Salesforce integration
for educating your commercial team or a content repository integration for employees to reference materials outside of the learning courses. 
You may also want your LMS to have a social learning component through an integration with Yammer, LinkedIn, or other platforms. Of course, the exact specs of this depend on the goals and challenges of your business, but integrations are such a critical component to approaching any L&D solution.

Regardless of how you approach your organization’s learning journey and integrations, you should always be thinking about the analytics component. The key metrics and success indicators for your L&D programs should be discussed early and often. They should also be evaluated after the program is launched to help fine tune the process and continue the learning journey into the future. The more you track about your users, the more correlations you can associate with success. 

This data isn’t only used to track course completions; it also informs different development paths and goals within your business. Tracking data points from the beginning will help you uncover hidden opportunities within your business. Many organizations will include an initial skills assessment as part of their training program, which not only provides a baseline for competencies, but also drives engagement and self-awareness among the users. 

There’s a long-term play here too – with more data on your employee skillsets, you are in a better position to serve-up relevant learning content on an ongoing basis. Think about how companies like Netflix and Amazon provide suggestions for content and products based on what their users have interacted with in the past. The same principle can be applied to digital learning – by integrating a learning recommendation engine like Magpie, you can ensure that employees are getting relevant training in their area when it becomes available. 

Additional Resources: Developing a results-driven curriculum