Reasons Why You Should Take L&D Seriously
There’s a lot of hype on the internet these days regarding corporate training and its best practices. The internet is filled with articles, videos, blogs and such information about corporate training strategies, methodologies, tips and trends which should be able to turn even a layman into a corporate training wiz in a matter of months.
However, most business owners and CEOs have really low expectations of corporate training or employee development. They do agree to the fact that the human resource is the best asset an organization has, but do not believe that L&D actually upskills people. According to some of these decision-makers, the best bet is to hire the best people they can afford and get the hell out of their way. Although this strategy might yield results, it isn’t one which should be relied on in the long run.
The reason that the top brass of various organizations doesn’t believe in L&D, is that they don’t see any quantifiable results even after assigning a good budget to the L&D department and hiring the best trainers as well as L&D managers. Quantifiable results are not achieved because corporate training has become a check-list activity, where employees are expected to walk into a classroom every week or so, sit through a mind-numbing lecture, take assessments or give feedback every once in a while, and sometimes, on rare occasions, attend workshops, conferences or seminars. So much for ‘the greatest assets’ of the organization.
The point is, organizations focus much more on the development of the product or service they offer than the employees that actually create them. The success of a product or service depends largely on the expertise, skill, and creativity of employees. Thus, the better these qualities are developed in employees, the better the product or service they’ll be able to deliver. But, that isn’t done by boring the employees to death. It’s done by engaging them through well-planned strategies so that they retain useful information which augments their skills, expertise, and creativity. And how’s that done? Let us tell you, step by step.
1. eLearning: The Absolute Essential
If your organization’s employee training or development program doesn’t have eLearning in it, what are they even doing? eLearning has been proven to increase knowledge retention by at least half, which is fairly good odds. What’s better, there are a lot of ways you can modify eLearning programs to give you maximum efficiency, as compared to classroom training, which is, frankly speaking, a dead end.
2. Applying Employee Feedback
Just asking employees for feedback in a fixed frequency isn’t enough. What good is feedback if it doesn’t improve the L&D program? Once you’ve transitioned from classroom training to eLearning (it’s important), a great way to ensure that employee feedback actually makes a difference is to go for an adaptive learning methodology in your employee development program, which improves itself based upon the responses of employees. Even if the adaptive learning methodology isn’t applied, make sure that the program is updated on a regular basis, and that those changes are founded on employee feedback. Not only does that improve the program, but it also makes the employees feel involved.
3. Blended Learning
If you don’t want to transition completely to eLearning, that’s understandable. In fact, combining both classroom training and eLearning is known to be one of the best and most effective employee development strategies. It’s called blended learning, and it’s the ultimate L&D strategy because it offers employees the best of both worlds! Some employees just learn better through classroom training, while others show better retention when they learn through eLearning courses or modules. The blended learning model harnesses the power of both, and is a must try if you haven’t had results using simple classroom training or simple eLearning models of employee development.
The critical role of employee Learning and Development has been overlooked for quite some time. However, not all is lost. As they say, “better late than never”. There are tons of major organizations in the world that have been harnessing the power of eLearning, adaptive learning as well as blended learning for quite some time now. Their success stories speak volumes about the success of these learning methodologies themselves.
