These next few Powerful Practices will highlight top Learning and development challenges, their criticality, best resolution practices, and how they and Meridian Learning Management System can position you for success.
We’ve all been here… a higher-up issues a year-end goal of lean business process training for every associate across the organization.
So, in the lean business process team, you scramble to get the curriculum designed, facilitated, and wrapped up by year’s end to all associates to meet your goal. The organization should now have an army of trained, engaged, and motivated lean process engineers to drive performance, reduce waste, and cut costs. End of story, right?
You may think so, but not really.
There are so many factors that contribute to the end of the story, including audience analysis, business goals, production targets, and organizational goals. These all contribute to the overall effectiveness of training and whether or not the training launch was effective in meeting the overall goal.
These factors all relate to one thing. Targeting!
How to successfully target learning audiences
Targeted training occurs when you analyze these factors to develop an audience profile, which you use to design and develop training that meets the needs of that specific audience.
“Audience segmentation is a process of dividing people into homogeneous subgroups based upon defined criterion such as product usage, demographics, psychographics, communication behaviors and media use.” Wikipedia
The business factor segmenting the targeted audience might be training that drives the performance of an individual business unit, contributes to the organization’s overall health, reduces production waste, and increases employee engagement (just to name a few). Each of these scenarios presents a unique audience with specific training requirements.
Targeted training may include one or more of the following audience segments:
- Learning Modality
- Business Unit/Division
- Process/Procedures
- Standards/Requirements
Let’s take a look at each one of these in a little more detail.
Learning Modality
Training targeted based on the learning modality best suited for a specific audience is one of the most crucial elements when designing your custom training solution.
Would you develop an intensive, 40-hour instructor-led classroom session on customer management for your road warrior sales executives? No, the modality would not fit.
First of all, sales executives are normally not tied to an office or seat (hence the term “road warriors”), so making them sit in a classroom for 40 hours is a recipe for disaster!
- You would perform some audience analysis to determine the best instructional strategy and modality for that audience segment,, whether brief surveys, side-by-side observations, or quick touchpoint calls, to better understand their daily routines and processes.
- Then, you take your findings to develop a customized, blended curriculum for sales that may include:
- Pre-work such as worksheets to determine missing competencies
- eLearning curriculum to introduce the core curriculum
- Official kick-off call/virtual meeting for introductions, expectations, and standards
- Virtual classroom sessions woven with eLearning courses PLUS hands-on scenarios and role plays for reinforcements of valuable concepts
- This approach will define the specific audience needs, and the custom curriculum will encompass most learning styles for maximum efficiency and retention.
Business Unit (BU) / Division
- Business Unit/Division targeted training is also very important when designing training solutions for your organization. In the lean business process example from earlier, would the right implementation approach be one standard curriculum across all business units? It may seem like the easiest and most economical approach. However, it will not meet the needs of individualized business units such as Finance, Marketing, and Engineering. Each of these business units has a unique team of employees, processes, goals, products, and procedures. A one-stop training curriculum will not address the specific needs of a Finance Manager, let alone an Engineering Manager.
- By simply performing a quick needs assessment of each of your organization’s business units, you can assess each BU’s needs and tweak the curriculum to meet each unit’s individual needs.
- For example, Finance and Treasury undergo tedious and timely quarterly government audits. You could create a handout or quick 15-minute eLearning module to cover this material separately and add it to the total curriculum that only Finance team members would receive.
- The core curriculum would remain the same, and Finance would get an additional 15-minute module or their specific workflows. Problem solved.
- Incorporating these small “tweaks” into the curriculum will ensure that the right content gets to the right population at the right time, allowing for precise measurement and effectiveness of the training program.
Process/Procedures
- Since work flows, processes, and procedures may vary by division, location, and manager, it would be a best practice to target training solutions for individual processes and/or work flows. Let’s say your organization is upgrading its Salesforce Application and needs a full training implementation. Would you roll out the same training to every sales exec and admin in the organization? Not really… You would create targeted training for each role, such as sales manager, sales executive, and sales administrator.
- The training design should include a brief introduction to the new Salesforce Application, i.e., the hows, whys, and reasons behind the upgrade. This should be followed by how to access and log in to the new system and basic navigation and functionality. Then, separate the curriculum by role—a sales manager would have a slightly different curriculum than a sales admin because their daily roles and responsibilities greatly vary.
- This way, everyone affected by the changes understands the project drivers and background, how to access the system, and, most importantly, how to perform their jobs in the new system.
Standards/Requirements Compliance
- Standards and requirements vary greatly from vertical-to-vertical, division-to-division and role-to-role. The need for targeted training here is critically important to the organization’s overall health. Let’s say your organization is launching a new PMO (Project Management Office), including new roles for Senior and Junior Project managers. The training needs for this type of venture will include overall PMO training (what PMO is, what the core standards, requirements, expectations, processes, and outputs of the PMO are), along with core job training for each new role.
- Training for this type of implementation may include an introductory eLearning module that covers the new PMO from an organization perspective (covering all associates), including the background, need for the PMO, goals, location, outputs, and team, followed by job-specific training for each of the new roles.
- Senior Project Manager core content may include the primary roles and responsibilities, team organizational structure, online repository for process, templates and procedures, systems used, quality standards, and escalation processes… to name a few key elements.
- Utilizing the introductory eLearning course and pushing it to all employees in the organization will introduce the new department and requirements to the entire office quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively.
As you can see by now, targeted training must be a key element in your training strategies, solutions, and implementation schedules. Launching training to meet the needs of your organization’s audiences must be well thought out, planned, and structured, with strategies aligned and structured to be successful.
Meridian LMS™ offers various tools, resources, and functions to help you create targeted training for specific audiences, business units, or processes/procedures. Introductory eLearning modules can be designed to launch a new product, process, or standards to the masses, followed by more specific on-the-job training and collaboration spaces for further audience engagement.
To operate as a cohesive, strategic business entity, all units must collaborate in a healthy, open arena for sharing, communicating, and living and breathing the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic goals.
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