6 simple yet effective strategies to completely modernise your learning provision in the corporate world. In this article, Paul Archer from Archer Training shares six strategies to completely change your L&D offering to make it fit for purpose for the third decade of the 21st Century.
How to Modernise Your Training and Development Using 10:20:70
2, 4, 6, 8 whom do we appreciate or is it 10, 20, 70 gives you longevity
Great title but I’ll need to explain.
The world of corporate training and development has changed and evolved entirely in the last ten years. Gone are the days of the annual training course booklet put under everyone’s nose and courses are chosen. “Just in case” was the mantra.
Nowadays successful corporate training departments engage learners by providing flexible, personalised, bite-sized, relevant, accessible and on-demand learning opportunities delivered across a variety of platforms and devices.
Here are the six pillars to make this happen:
Learning Pathways
These are suggested routes for someone who joins the firm and takes up a role. It contains the high-level learning requirements of a performing person. What they need to know, what skills they should be able to perform and to what degree of competence and success. There need to be pathways for every role in the firm, these should be perpetually in motion, relevant and directly linked to the performance objective of the role.
Dashboards
Driving a car is impossible without regular glances at the dashboard – speed, distance, temperature, time of arrival – this information allows us to navigate to our destination safely and comfortably. Your learner should have a dashboard to view every day. This can be of any type – Learning Management System based, paper diary, whiteboard on the wall – it doesn’t matter. What counts is that they can view progression. Bronze, silver and gold levels each indicating evolution to the next level and the rewards this gives. Please don’t spend too much time on this; keep it simple.
I’ve witnessed teams of trainers getting wholly enveloped in this, spending thousands on a Learning Management System when a paper diary would have done a better job. Keep IT out of learning and development – their world is vastly different with competing objectives and needs. While on the topic, request your CEO speak to IT and allow access to every website on the internet and learn to trust your learners.
Make available to every learner, content that they can consume to achieve their learning goals. Curate don’t create.
Manager Toolkits
Each learner’s manager needs to make it all happen, they are the trainers of old but they don’t have the time or capability to be actively involved. Produce short, visually based “toolkits” for them so they can quickly run a coaching session, a quiz session, a 10-minute teaching session or 1 to 1. An aide-memoir will give them the confidence to become intrinsically involved in the venture.
aide-memoirs are an example of “just in time” learning. Don’t drag them into a training course for two days entitled “How to Facilitate L&D”, just the thought of sitting in a classroom for two days doing that will numb most managers.
Curated On Demand Content
Now the fun begins. Make available to every learner, content that they can consume to achieve their learning goals. Curate don’t create. Think librarian of old who could guide you to any book you sought. A modern-day Google. Teach them to google well; most only achieve this at 10%. Buy or license Automated Intelligent software that trawls the internet bringing up useful, relevant learning content of topics and competencies. Sign up a bulk deal with LinkedIn for its excellent LinkedIn learning, make available YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and all sorts of resources. Build your library of multimedia resources from your experts in house or external. Videos, podcasts.
Affiliate to your professional bodies for resources. In my sector, we have the CII who have cavernous digital resources available to members and corporate members. Harvard Business Review archives, industry journal archives, all indexable and searchable. You’ll be amazed at how much you can curate for your learners.
Live Learning
Nothing can beat a live experience but keep these for the maximum impact. I can stream Coldplay on Spotify on any device and listen to their tunes all day long. Adventures of a Lifetime was streamed 322 million times in 2016. For me to see them live at the O2 or Glastonbury is a lifetime experience, one to savour and remember all your life. That’s the analogy with live learning events. Fewer, more impactful, far more immersive and application based. Leave the knowledge acquisition to the curated content, use the live event for peer to peer sharing, simulation-based activities. Roleplay, case studies and let them practise in as real a simulation as possible. That’s the secret. I’ve left the best to last. Topic Mentors or on the job gurus. Let those in your firm who are particularly useful at a topic and talented at dissipating it, do it. Let them go around the firm guruing. Train them to teach and let them explain live to one person, their expertise. They will be highly motivated to be a guru, who wouldn’t want to be.
