Everyone must be proactive and do all they can to help themselves to stay employed. – Stephen Covey
How can being proactive align the learning and development strategy to the needs of the business? We believe that an L&D professional working with the business on developing proactive plans to avoid anything becoming a problem can counteract the common complaints of the world of L&D being reactive.
This is part 4 of a series about L&D Strategy; with parts 1-3 covering everything from planning, implementation to successfully sustaining the strategy.
How to be proactive in your L&D role
1. Understand your business
Building on the work you undertook when creating the strategy is an ideal time to get a deeper knowledge of your business. In terms of personalities, aims, long term objectives, marketing strategy and its competitors. Understanding all of this will help you to become the best asset you can be to your company.
When you are aware of the business as a whole and how the different elements work together you will be able to provide solutions to them working better together and being able to highlight areas of need. Working with them all to a better outcome will create a business that has buy-in, support and a common goal.
Being proactive and understanding its competitors and place in the industry will again build trust and fuel great working relationships for the success of the business.
2. Language
Being able to converse with others in the business is obviously an important element for any employee. Learning the language and specialist terminology of the business/sector and of your business can only bring about progress. You can get by with a little knowledge of a foreign language on holiday but to live somewhere you need to know the language.
3. Network
When you think of your network how far do you go? Within the organisation only or further afield? To network involves communicating, learning and supporting and the larger your network the more success you will achieve.
Network with all levels within your organisation; sharing knowledge and ideas – you never know who will hear and who they know. Perhaps you work closely with other similar organisations; collaborating rather than competing. What can you learn from these? Sharing good practice and learning from them can strengthen your own position and benefit you and your organisation.
4. Communication
We believe that L&D can work with marketing with great success. Communicating via the internal communications team; using their systems of sharing knowledge and informing the organisation of progress can work well for L&D. If not, set up your own regular mailing list and share what you are doing, your success and plans for the future. Gaining their input can support your request for new learning to be considered; for example.
5. Research and statistics
Being able to sell your ideas to the business at all levels will require concrete, accurate and current statistics. Carrying out research via your marketing department will provide that information and which will support your recommendations for the good and benefit of the company.
You can also use evaluation from L&D activities to support your recommendations and further promote the work of L&D.
6. One step at a time
You will have more ideas than you’ll ever have time to implement. So focus on the one thing that will make the biggest difference first and once that’s implemented move on to the next. It may feel slow moving at the time but over a longer period you’ll release how far you’ve come.
Trying to focus on a number of areas will take longer and achievements will be harder to see.
Can we help?
At Optimus Sourcing we want to help you and your employees to be more proactive in their roles. Our range of managed learning services are designed with just that in mind, from the sourcing and booking of your training to providing invaluable evaluation and management reporting to align with and guide your L&D strategy forward.
To chat more please call on e 0845 519 7408 or email info@optimuslearningservices.com. We have an experienced team of learning and development consultants to support you with whatever you need.
