6 New Year Resolutions For L&D Professionals

Setting a competitive edge to their training offering

New Year means New Resolutions, a chance to reflect on the year that was and create a plan for the year ahead. New Year is also the time when everyone starts to think about their goals, to-do lists and what they want to achieve in the coming twelve months. Likewise, Learning & Development teams need to kick start the year with goals that would help them become more capable as learning professionals and, in turn, help future leaders.

For L&D professionals, the year 2019 will be full of opportunities and challenges. Industry 4.0 is at our doorstep, and brings with it a greater demand for a highly skilled workforce. Thus, it is imperative for L&D professionals to be better equipped to develop a workforce that is Industry 4.0-ready. On the other hand, more and more organizations now see L&D as an added benefit to help retain their talented employees as well as acquire newer ones.

To do this, L&D professionals need to be strategic and set a competitive edge to their training offering.

Here are 6 resolutions that L&D professionals should set for themselves to make the most of 2019 –

In the ongoing battle of retaining existing talent and attracting newer talent, L&D professionals will have to look at company culture and development opportunities as strong and meaningful assets throughout 2019 and beyond. In fact, improving culture and employee engagement should be the ideal objective for L&D professionals so as to transform the existing workplace and achieve desired business results.

L&D should create training programs that let the employees know that their organization cares about their progress and personal development. As per Robert Half, organizations that house powerful L&D cultures drive employee retention, at about 50% more than others.

Culture and engagement go hand in hand, and it is up to L&D professionals to develop strategies that will enhance them. This can be done by a consistent effort of aligning actions and behaviors that best suit the organization’s culture, and thus drive engagement. For example, if L&D teams were to build a culture of better performance, they would need the workforce to constantly scrutinize their working culture in terms of priorities and the overall business objective. This way, L&D teams will have inherently created a workforce that is capable of learning and upskilling in their own unique way.

Pull Learning has long been discussed as a more efficient approach by many L&D professionals, with the big differentiator being the employees’ intent and urge towards learning. As opposed to pull learning, push learning is essentially the process where a pre-defined curriculum is set for a learner(s) with an implication that a learner ‘needs to’ or ‘has to’ learn. Although push learning is widely used by most organizations, it is also (often times) counterproductive to the learners’ natural learning process.

Understanding the learning process of the human mind is tricky, more so because learners show greater inclination towards learning on a voluntary basis. It is not up for debate that individuals learn more when they are truly interested; the learning happens faster, information is retained more effectively, while the knowledge is properly integrated into the knowledge base.

Pull learning is based on the learners' preferences and ‘want’ towards learning. Keeping this in mind, L&D professionals should look at evolving their training delivery methods and make them more voluntary-based (read ‘make the tools and the processes easily available and accessible), where the workforce drives the learning process and the organization benefits from a more ‘continuous learning’ methodology. Employees, on the other hand, would have increased performance and productivity owning to their feeling of greater contribution towards the organization, satisfaction and self-respect.

Micro learning is set to be the new talk of the town, come 2019. Micro learning is being hailed as an innovative approach towards training, with a proven ability to drive engagement and retention amidst today’s learner. L&D professionals need to start looking at micro learning as an extremely effective tool in their learning strategy tool-box. According to Micro Learning: A Modernized Education System, 81% of employees felt that micro learning better aligns itself with their learning needs. And, with time becoming a prized commodity, organizations are increasingly seeking out ways to best utilize their employees’ time. As per a report by Software Advice, of the 385 surveyed employees, over 50% employees said they would prefer shorter courses.
Here are some advantages of micro learning in the modern workplace-
 

With rapid digitization revolutionizing the marketplace, more and more organizations find themselves at a loss when it comes to having a workforce that holds the correct skills to maintain a competitive edge. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and more, are set to automate most processes in a given organization, and employees need to be trained accordingly for them to stay relevant.

To be more precise, today’s IT departments are still struggling to understand the full scope of juggernauts like AI, Big Data, ML and more, but don’t necessarily have the talent to fill the gaps. Therefore, L&D professionals should upskill their workforce by providing them with the necessary training to develop such soft skills and drive innovation.

Currently there are many questions L&D professionals are facing that need answering. Questions like should I build or buy talent? Is the workforce skilled enough to cope with the rapid changes? Which skills should the employees be imparted with? And most importantly, can employees with jobs threatened by automation be upskilled? Training programs should then be customized based on these answers.

Almost all L&D professionals will agree that the biggest challenge in training a workforce is getting the employees interested and engaging them in the organization’s training program. To tackle this challenge, L&D professionals need to consider rewards-based learning programs that will grabs the attention of even the most reluctant learners.

The Harvard Business Review suggests that recognition is the topmost incentive when it comes to employee engagement. L&D professionals should value rewards/recognition as great encouragers to promote learning, while also linking such rewards/recognition to the organization's overall business objectives and building a culture that values learning.

While developing these rewards-based learning programs, L&D professionals also need to focus on creating opportunities that make employees more valuable to the organization, because a rewards-based program is deemed more effective when it helps employees apply their learning. Even so, a great rewards package doesn’t count for much if the learning program itself is not capable of making a workforce better than it already is.

In essence, it is imperative to acknowledge that employees want a promising future more than any kind of reward, and the best reward L&D professionals can give them is a great learning experience that helps them develop in their careers.

According to lbert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, learning is a cognitive process where individuals learn through observation, mimicking others’ behavior or through direct instructions. Individuals observe and reproduce actions of others around us to understand certain behaviors. lbert Bandura’s theory has played a major role in understanding how learning takes place.

So, how does this apply to organizational L&D? Well, it is widely accepted that most individuals can only recall 10% of information that they learned within 72 hours. Open communication and collaboration helps reverse this by enabling learners to learn just in time, where learners can seek information within the organization (from experts or colleagues, as and when required) rather than sit through a mandatory training session.

This process of learning can truly be rooted within an organization’s culture by reducing the pressure on employees to “do” assigned training, but rather make it need-based, while encouraging instant learning, where employees could seek knowledge from many outlets, including search engines, online portals, asking a colleague among others. With most good LMSes having social learning tools inbuilt, here are some more ideas to enhance a communicative and collaborative learning culture in an organization through -
 

L&D professionals certainly have their work cut out for them in the coming year. But it is far from being a Herculean task. Rather it’s a strategic and informed approach towards providing training in the modern workplace, provided you put these resolutions to action.