Do You Have An Effective Learning Management Strategy?

Workplace learning is essential to an organisation's overall growth strategy, providing employees with essential skills and the motivation to support those plans.

If an organisation has an overall business strategy, one assumes that it also has a learning management strategy… and that the learning strategy provides the organisation with a plan of what is needed, where it is needed, and details how you measure the success of these interventions. Though this is not always the case.

In a perfect world, your strategy should consider the overall business strategy, people, processes, timelines and future plans. What about risk mitigation and planning for unforeseen events? Also, how will you coordinate and manage the complexity often involved in deploying your strategy?

Without the investment of time and effort to develop a well-thought-out plan, many organisations will find themselves woefully unprepared to deal with the all-too-certain parade of unanticipated events and circumstances that keep them from achieving their goals.

By developing specific and measurable goals, you can assess the benefits you expect and weigh them against the efforts and risks you are taking to achieve them. They provide focus and purpose.

Your goal with a learning management strategy will be to create an environment that helps your employees thrive while discovering the importance of their current and future roles.

While we can't answer all of your questions nor have a crystal ball, we can offer you some thoughts that will support the development of your learning management strategy.

Considerations for your learning management strategy

Transferring learning to the workplace

One of the biggest hurdles faced even before you put a plan together is how to ensure that your employees can do more than recite theories. You want them to apply what they learn and how their new-found knowledge will support the organisation and its issues. This is what your learning management strategy seeks to address.

Training needs analysis

The first point is to undertake a training needs analysis which aligns learning outcomes with organisational goals and then plan the strategy to meet the most urgent needs, followed up with a list of other priorities. Naturally, you will want to work with the employees to ensure that they are the right fit and that the training will support the employee, their career path and the organisation.

Align training with jobs roles, responsibilities and needs

Training enables organisations to remain competitive. A well-planned learning management strategy which creates a fully aligned training and development program helps to engage employees, improve retention, and fill skill gaps and is critical to business success.

Communicate expectations

Long before the training is delivered, the organisation will need to understand and communicate what it expects to achieve from its training plan. As we have said, the training needs to align with the business needs and anticipated outcomes.

It is imperative that employees see that the training is an opportunity for their personal growth and the growth of the organisation.

Effective communication ensures everyone is on the same page and motivated to work towards common goals.?

Create a training plan

This goes without saying that the organisation will need a training plan. This is where Ligtas can support you to ensure that it fits in with your learning management strategy and overall business needs.

Set training objectives and measure

Once you have the training plan in place, the organisation will need to decide what the employees will gain once they complete the training, how this will be applied and how the investment can be measured.

To help justify the training cost, measurement must occur throughout the whole learning experience. Add meetings with employees into your plan. If you don't ask, you will never know if your spend is justified.

Deliver the right training

The right training will be the training the organisation identifies it needs to reach its goals, which also supports how the employee learns best. Check out our article Lifelong Learning Which Is The Best, Online Or Classroom?

Feedback

Assessing the training as an ongoing activity can allow the organisation to identify and adjust weaknesses accordingly.

What if you don't plan?

If an organisation doesn't place enough importance on employee training, it will lead to high staff turnover and an unengaged workforce.

What about a Learning Management System

So, have you considered a Learning Management System (or LMS) as part of your strategy?

Learning Management Systems save organisations valuable time and money by enabling them to easily manage the training of every employee through a web-based environment with any time, anywhere accessibility.

Not only that, they can handle a wide range of other documents, transforming your LMS into something even more valuable, a Knowledge Management System.

When the LMS and the KMS are integrated, your learning management strategy has a tighter fit with your overall business strategy. Learning and content are delivered where you want it, when you want it, and in a measurable way. Perhaps more importantly, the LMS becomes a repository for a wide range of your organisation's knowledge – capturing best practices, reliable methods, demonstrations, words of wisdom from process and product champions, and emerging learning where online communities within your organisation can discuss, debate and develop key ideas.

Call us to find out more and discuss how to create an all-embracing learning management strategy!

Call: +44 (0)2922 800000. Email: [email protected]