Alex's L&D Thoughts: The Excitement of Building L&D Teams from Scratch

I've recently spoken to a few fast-growth startups who are building out their L&D teams from the ground floor. In several cases, the entire L&D apparatus—from what staff to hire to how learning operations should look to which tools they're going to use—is materializing in real time.

What an exciting place to be!

If you're in a similar point at your company, here are three tips to consider as you embark on that journey:

1. assess how much time your employees spend on training currently, pre-L&D growth. This gives you a point of comparison. I recently read an HBR article that found (among survey respondents) that employees actually spend more time learning new skills outside work hours than they do on-the-job. So even without a formal L&D program in place, you bet folks are learning skills related to their work somewhere in your org. Who's doing that? How much time are they investing? What results are they getting in their day-to-day work? Can you scale that for similar roles across the org, using your L&D team's focus and firepower? In addition to how much time they're investing in learning, also identify what your people are currently learning, need to learn, and want to learn. Use that to inform your L&D program design. These data points can also help you determine an annual budget for discretionary personal development allowances (aka "learning budgets"), which is a perk I'm seeing pop up at many companies lately
2. identify your highest-need / highest-business-impact area. This is obvious, but you can't be everywhere at once or deploy learning programs everywhere in the business at one time. Try to narrow down your initial use cases for L&D based on business need and ROI. Some of the companies I talk to have major growth spurts in customer-facing reps in certain parts of the year, while others have a lot of recently promoted mid-level managers who need leadership training as part of the company's talent management and long-term org development goals. Other companies have immense pressure to deliver strong sales results after hiring a ton of sales reps post-funding round, in which case their priorities include a strong sales enablement engine and the coaching and learning that comes with it. My point is that your highest-priority learning and training needs will look very different depending on your company's particular growth curve, business unit make-up, hiring trends, and company strategy and OKRs for the coming year. Consider all this and use that to back into what your L&D team needs to look like (and how much money to ask for to build your custom engine)
3. anticipate how your learning technology stack can help you prevent or break down learning silos. This one might come as a surprise, but you should absolutely think about this early on if you can. I've encountered L&D pros at mid-level and large companies where this is an issue, so it's worth avoiding if you can do so. For example, would you like every team to use the same system for learning management or learning retention? If so, try to plan ahead and find software multiple teams will be able to (or will want to) use. That way you don't end up with the very common nightmare of Team A using LMS 1 and Team B later buying LMS 2. Get buy-in from end users in different parts of the business to avoid this. Another angle to consider is whether or not your L&D org can use the same system to address multiple use cases (from onboarding to upskilling to leadership development training). Sometimes that's not practical or desirable—some teams do need dedicated software for certain aspects of L&D, e.g., maybe you're at a point where it makes sense to buy dedicated career development software separate from what you use for all other learning needs. If so, no problem. But if one system can address most of the use cases you'll have for the next 12-24 months, consider the positive implications of that

When you're growing your learning team and learning operations infrastructure, there's a lot to consider, evaluate, and answer. With startups, daylight seems to burn more quickly, so time-to-decision is key. But it can also pay off to find a solution that works both for your highest-priority business case in the near-term and sets you up to scale and deploy great learning programs throughout your business over the long term too. This affects not only who you hire for your team and when but also which tools and technologies you buy and for what. Getting that right is a difficult, yet exciting, part of growing an L&D team!

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Thanks for reading ALDT! If you have questions or comments, please leave a note below or send me a message -> [email protected].

Enjoyed this? Here's the next one: Alex's L&D Thoughts: Handling Seasonal Surges in Staff and Training.