Learning and development are important functions for any business but they are often ignored. Here’s how to get learning accepted in business.
An ASTD survey conducted in 2011 estimated that organizations spend up to $1228 and around 31.9 hours in training each employee, but even with this amount of resources, senior managers are reluctant to accept that training has a significant impact on business results. Though most companies invest in L&D departments, most senior managers believe that it’s not business critical. Most even believe that L&D functions are not effective in equipping employees with the skills necessary for improving business performance. This view however, is completely erroneous as the L&D is quite critical to business. to put this into perspective let’s look at some critical facts. Internet time alliance conducted a survey among CLOs (chief learning officers) and one in four of all those questioned said that employees were learning fast as a result of which they could keep up with business needs. There’s a lot to be said however about these statistics there seems to still be a major gap in the consensus regarding the importance of learning in business.
As a trainer, getting the buy-in of your training from management means getting the training right from the get-go. This means that every training session that you conduct should be impactful enough and you should not risk that it can fail. To achieve such efficiency, one, you have to ensure that the skills you are disseminating will be utilized from the get go. This is the only way for a training program to make any impact as managers can start assessing effectiveness immediately. Two, you have to ensure that the managers get the training first so that they can assist and coach the employees who report to them. Training the managers first makes it easier for them to see the sense in having their employees imparted with the same skills. Three, ensure that any training you take employees through, answers key questions that they face on a daily basis. For instance, an employee who is managing a team for the first time would benefit a lot from attending leadership coaching Sydney as he or she will be able to answer questions such as: how to communicate effectively or how to mentor team members.
Four, you should ensure that your learning program allows for social learning and that learning is encouraged to happen in a social environment. Five, ensure that learning is continuous. Just because you have completed a learning program shouldn’t mean that it’s the end of it for employees. Keep building up on the course to boost more knowledge. Six, you should involve employees to share what they have learnt and encourage them to get interested in mentoring others. If you don’t know how to encourage them to do that, you can organize for them to attend Leadership Training Sydney. Lastly, capture feedback from employees and improve on what you have done previously.