Ensuring the Success of Learning Projects

The best way to sustain success is to align the learning and development organization to the business. Learning needs to be part of how the organization delivers against its goals. Learning strategies must be in sync with your market and your business objectives.

The key question is not: What training do you need?

The question should be:

• Where is your business headed?
• What are the market challenges you need to handle?
• What skills and capabilities are needed to perform successfully in our markets, and hopefully, outperform our competitors?

What often happens is organizations create competency models and develop learning solutions to bridge and strengthen key competency gaps. It takes time and investment to create those learning platforms. Then, within three to four years, those competencies become outmoded because the market has shifted, business strategy also shifts and the old competencies no longer reflect the skills needed to compete. Learning and development then lags behind and becomes less relevant to achieving business goals. As a result, budgets are cut.

What can organizations do to keep their learning relevant? The obvious option is stay nimble and encourage informal learning reports which, in addition to summarizing various programs and statistics, help management how learning and developments dollars are spent and to spot programs, which no longer fit into the company’s strategy.

In order to be truly effective, training and development needs to be planned, executed and measured. There is a process for this and it requires expertise, resources, systems and processes to manage.

In other words, it’s a business and, for most organizations, training and development is not their main business. So, should leaders really understand how to run a learning business within their main business?

Unfortunately, in order to be competitive and to grow, there may not be a choice. For most companies we work with, training is an overhead line item, usually buried in the HR budget, when a large part of the cost should actually be part of the contribution margin; in other words, it’s a cost of production. If training is not viewed as a critical part of a business process, it does not get the correct priority and consequently the proper funding.

Assuming the funding is available, the other common mistake is going straight for a technology solution to address training and development needs without first fully understanding the needs of the organization. This trend has been driven by solution providers that convince organizations their solutions can easily satisfy their needs.

The end result is a situation where the organization’s training and development processes are dictated by the technology, instead of the technology supporting the organizations training and development processes. This is further exacerbated by the fact that most training and development implementations are phased by business unit or department within an organization.

Without proper training at an enterprise level, there is an increased possibility that what has been successful for one position of the organization may not work for another.

We see six main issues as the most common reasons for failure:

• Ineffective or no leadership
• Lack of vision and declaration of desired outcomes
• Poor technology choices as a result of inadequate requirements gathering
• Poor planning resulting in lack of funding
• Lack of organizational governance to sustain the project and provide ongoing direction and support; and
• Poorly defined training and development business process.

(Abstract from the source: “ Cornerstone of Success ” | Executive Panel Discussion moderated by Mike Capaldi, Associate Vice President of Sales Training & Management Development, Sanofi-Aventis)