When planning for a year, plant corn. When planning for a decade, plant trees. When planning for life, train and educate people. -Old Chinese Proverb
Working in learning and development can be a challenging role. The company looks to you to understand the business, the people and then create solutions to the problems that arise. Often this is in a reactive manner, fixing a problem after the event.
So why plan?
Planning gives you the opportunity be more proactive to meet the business training needs. It reduces the risk of you getting caught out and having to react. Taking action to pre-empt a problem, whilst challenging, is easier than trying to solve it after the event has occurred.
Forward planning allows you more time to consider all of the learning resources available and you’ll be able to use these in a more considered and wiser approach.
The beginning is the most important part of the work. –Plato
The 5 keys to L&D planning success
Using our years of experience in assisting learning & development professionals and teams we’ve created the following key steps:
1 – Understand the aims of your organisation
The most important part of the process. Getting an understanding of the strategic aims and goals for your organisation allows you to start assessing what learning and training needs there are.
- Meet with senior stakeholders – the leaders, directors, board, managers – who can tell you the organisation’s plan for the next twelve months and beyond. Is the plan to grow, diversify, merge, acquire, expand into new markets, develop new products? Start assessing the needs on an organisational level and assessing the skills gap. Think broadly and big picture.
- Meet with heads of departments to understand what the organisational plans will mean practically and what their training needs are. Make sure you know the different needs of each department but avoid getting bogged down with too much detail so don’t try and assess needs of line managers or staff at this stage.
2 – Start considering solutions
Armed with the knowledge of the organisation aims and the practical implications for the business it’s time to start thinking about how you and the learning and development department (which might just be you) can support the business with the solutions.
- We say support and not create as we know that the days of L&D being solely responsible for creating learning solutions are long gone. That doesn’t mean you should stop using company wide programmes and have a schedule of training courses, it just means you should consider all resources available to you and your organisation. A blended approach, which engages employees whilst focusing on delivering measurable and achievable learning outcomes is what you are aiming for.
- Think of all the resources you can provide and curate for your organisation. Resources such as books, videos, audio, radio, networking events, forums, internal events, social media can complement formal training programmes and on the job training.
- Start thinking of how you’ll evaluate and measure the success of any learning and training solutions. How will you know what success looks like, will there be quantifiable and tangible outcomes or will the outcomes be more qualitative and feelings based? What are the stakeholders looking for? Knowing and planning all of this will make sure that you can report back proving that you’ve met the objectives on a regular basis.
3 – Plan for the unplannable
There will be situations that arise beyond any control that you can’t plan for. These will be the times when you will be more reactive than proactive. However, you can build in contingency plans.
- When speaking to the heads of departments and line managers ask them the “what if” questions. What would do if sales dropped, budgets were cut, key personnel left, regulations changed and so on?
- Then you also have the needs that come out of the yearly people reviews. For lots of companies, these happen at times after the yearly plan has been put in place. So you are having to work with the information that is coming from the employees but again consider what has happened in previous years, review those training needs that haven’t been met previously and spend time trying to find out from managers what they think the individual or group needs might be.
4 – What does successful implementation look like?
The successful implementation of the learning and development strategy is important to the organisation, its employees and we suspect to those responsible for delivering it.
- At this stage you need to identify the different roles and responsibilities and who will fulfil them. In a larger L&D team these might be split internally however what happens in a smaller team, or a team of one? Who else can you call upon and whose support do you need? Consider the personnel that are key.
- Getting buy-in from senior management is crucial. They can set the agenda, dictate the pace, influence formally and informally the rest of the organisation. If you can get buy-in at this level then it should make for an easier and more successful implementation.
- Heads of departments will have their role to play. They can delay or accelerate the plans so we recommend you work on creating great working relationships at this level.
- Line managers are also important at this stage. Whilst it will be time-consuming and probably unpractical to have great relationships with all line managers it will be wise to support them. Create a structure where they can have a voice, more often than not they will be the ones with a greater understanding of the learning and development needs of the employees.
5 – Prioritise, backwards plan and review your progress
It’s highly likely that at this stage you’ll have a significant action list. However, it can’t all be completed at once so prioritise what actions will have the greatest importance and impact on what the organisation is trying to achieve.
- Plan out these actions over a period of time thus giving you focus for shorter periods of time and making the action list far more achievable. You can create milestones which you can then review to measure progress and use during your reporting back to senior management.
- Make sure you communicate the plans and progress through the year to people at all levels in your organisation. Frontline employees and managers can benefit from knowing about the solutions relevant to them but don’t be afraid to share the bigger picture with them.
The above points provide you with a high-level overview of the stages we believe useful for successful learning and development planning. If you need assistance in any stage of your planning then let us know, we have experienced learning and development consultants who will be able to help you plan, and turn your plan into successful actions.
To chat further about your planning please do get in touch. Call us on 0845 519 7408 or email info@optimuslearningservices.com
