What are the best practices for setting and measuring learning and growth objectives?

Learning and growth objectives are crucial for organizational success, fostering continuous improvement, adaptability, and employee engagement. They demonstrate a commitment to talent development, driving innovation and competitive advantage. By setting clear objectives, organizations can measure the impact of training initiatives on performance and outcomes, ultimately ensuring long-term success.

The world is more fast paced than it ever was. Disruptions are more frequent than they ever were. Supply and demand is the key. Demands are changing and hence up-skilling in-order to stay RELEVANT is important. Take the example of marketing. Look at the evolving dynamics. Field marketing, Digital Marketing, Influencer marketing, Performance Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Marketing. Definitely a lot to keep up. And constant learning and evolving is the key to growth.

Learning is the active process by which a company is able to maintain trajectory on it's vision as well as foster and align a healthy corporate culture. The culture must align with the vision and mission of the business or else the financial results will suffer over time.

If you stop learning, you start dying. Its true in nature, and its true in organizational psychology. Learning means growth. Whether it improves a person's ability to do a specific job or develops that employee in other ways, learning is beneficial to every company. Yet in the world of business, time is money. Even the best companies I've worked with struggled to make training a regular part of everyone's role. That's why I love LinkedIn Learning. I can assign a 3- to 5-minute video segment and teach on it for 15 minutes. This makes it easy to incorporate learning as a part of building a thriving culture.

Set clear, specific learning objectives aligned with business goals, provide adequate resources and support for skill development, regularly assess progress through performance reviews or skill assessments, and adjust objectives as needed to foster continuous improvement.

It's not always about finding your biggest gaps, but what your strengths are and building deeper knowledge and skill in the top strengths that can help you advance in your life, career, or goals. Plenty of studies show that it is easy to master your strengths from 70% to 100%, than to try and built up your weaknesses to 70% or even 50% mastery. Selecting what to work on is just as important as setting your growth goals

Simply put, from an individual perspective, I'd suggest to measure learning in increments. Set simple goals & metrics. For instance, data analytics plays a key role in strategy roles. My go-to tool predominantly has been excel. I set a simple goal of using PowerBi to create dashboards and check the ease of repeatability. I compelled myself to learn PowerBI, use it instead of excel and measured the efficiency in terms of 'time taken to build dashboard in excel vs powerbi'. Turns out powerBI was better. Up-skilled, executed, time saved.

For Learning and growth perspective, it is paramount that KPIs selected must be SMART. Some examples of learning and growth KPIs include employee retention rate, customer satisfaction score, system uptime, or number of innovations.

I'm a fan of pre-and post-testing. Yet in HR and management, the training is not of the multiple choice variety. I devised a situational awareness test for first-time supervisors that is now used for management teams in several countries. In this test I use real-world examples and design questions using whatever skill the learning is focused on. For example; one question deals with a charge of rape from one employee to another. I ask the question; When I'm focusing on biases; Who do you think perpetrated the rape? Most assume it was the male. Most are incorrect. At the end of the training, I re-present the same cases, and ask the learner how understanding their implicit bias may have jaded their investigation of the rape charge.

It is important to review your people perspective as the organization's goal changes per time. When this is done, it can be integrated into the balanced score card and cascaded to all employees for performance reviews. Finally, I would encourage that performances should be rewarded.

To benefit from L&D growth objective, the organization's culture would be strengthened significantly as well as HR initiatives and innovations made to address feedback received from employees following the appraisal or concluded employee satisfaction survey.

Top 3 Skills you need in strategy roles: 1. Analytics - Ofcourse you are a strategy guy, you are supported by analysts. But why bother them for simple & urgent data driven decision making? Skills- SQL for data query, POWER BI or Tableau for visualisation, Python or R for data analysis and cleaning. 2. Market Research- NO ! not everybody is efficient at research. Skills- google trends, filter options on google , market research frameworks, boolean logic on google search. 3. First Principle Thinking to Problem Solving Breakdown problem statement to simpler and smaller fragments, and work your way to the top. Comes with practise. Easier said than done. One trick, ask why 5 times to get to the root cause of the problem.