Time to Revamp Your Learning Landscape?
With winter almost over it is time to consider a spring clean of your organisational learning landscape. Rather than getting stuck with doing things as you’ve always done, why not take some time out to revamp the way you approach learning and development and re-energise your learners.
This edition of our Optim Learning Solutions newsletter is packed with ideas to help you revamp your organisational learning landscape.
Learning Architecture
Learning and development initiatives are now such an integral part of an organisation’s success that it makes sense to plan for them in a structured manner. Most organisations tend to do this on an annual cycle by:
- Broadly aligning training to organisational strategy
- Responding to internal and external environmental pressures
- Reacting to ad hoc training needs.
Sound like the way you do things?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to design a strategy that focuses and targets learning and development efforts to maximise your investment in learning and development initiatives? An organisational learning architecture defines learning and development requirements over a specific timeframe (normally aligned to Strategic Plans), identifies the learning and delivery approaches to be used and when and where they will be implemented. This type of planning provides a cohesive, structured approach to organisational learning and focuses attention on activities that deliver maximum benefit for the organisation.
Does your organisation have a learning architecture? If not, we’d love to help you design one so that you can get the best ROI for your learning and development initiatives.
Creating a Supportive Learning Environment
One factor that successful companies have in common is a supportive learning environment. They exhibit a culture that encourages their people to learn, grow and apply their new knowledge without the fear of failure. Several ways that you can develop your own supportive learning environment include:
- Create a culture of learning
Identify the opportunities for learning in everyday activities (both formal and informal) and include them as part of your organisational culture. For example, schedule time in team meetings where one or two team members can share something they learned that week. Also encourage conversations of where something has gone wrong or hasn’t worked; this can facilitate innovation and eliminate the fear of failing. - Support learning communities
Provide staff with the media and the opportunity to share learning. This may be via an opt-in group email address, team blogs, social media, online forums, or even a learning noticeboard where employees can post hard copy questions and answers for their peers. - Create self-efficacy
Provide managers and team leaders with the appropriate training and support to encourage and create self-efficacy in their team members. Employees that have a positive outlook on their ability to learn and apply new skills are much more likely to succeed. - Provide motivation for learning
Whether it’s through communicating your learning architecture, your learning and development strategy, or the skills gaps between where you are now and where you want to be, employees need to understand the benefits of personal change. Motivating a learner to improve their skills will maximise their engagement in your learning and development initiatives. - Vary the style of learning
Remember that all learners are different! It is important to vary the style of learning and development initiatives offered to ensure that the learning culture of your organisation is inclusive of the needs of all of your learners.
Cascade Your Learning
In some organisations we have noticed the start of an ‘us versus them’ mentality when it comes to learning and development. That is, leaders get one type of training with specific topics and employees get another type of training with other topics. This approach can lead to disengaged learners, limited learning impact and knowledge transference.
By linking all training to your organisational strategy, goals, capabilities and/or competencies you can show learners how all of their learning is related. Regardless of what level within your business a learner is, they can understand how their learning relates to someone else. It also provides the opportunity for leaders to report back to their teams on their learning and have valuable conversations about how it relates to what the team is doing / learning / trying to achieve.
August Tips
Our tips for improving your organisational learning landscape include:
- Develop a learning architecture and communicate it across your entire organisation
- Review your learning environment and determine areas for improvement and how you can make it more supportive
- Cascade your learning
- Document learning effectively so that knowledge is not lost when employees leave or move on
- Identify Learning Coaches or Learning Champions throughout your business who’s role is to support others in identifying appropriate learning opportunities as well as reporting back to the business learning and development support gaps
- Audit your current learning and development offerings and determine if they are in the most appropriate media
- Audit your current learning and development offerings and identify if any initiatives should be discontinued, improved and/or replaced
- Look for opportunities to use technology in clever ways to support learning and create efficiencies in knowledge transfer.