In order to be successful and stay competitive, organizations need to re-invest in their learning strategies in 2016.
We sat down with Kris Dunn, CHRO at Kinetix and Founder of Fistful of Talent, to get his insight into the top 5 areas that Learning and Development organizations must focus on this year.
Getting Organized and Understanding the Trends
Being organized is a no-brainer, but what trends should you focus on for 2016?
- Leadership development is becoming a growing part of L&D and now claims, on average, 35% of training budgets
- Increasing efforts to expand training offerings beyond onboarding and creating a culture of continuous learning
- Just-in-time learning is a must, but most training and development activities aren’t small enough to be effective
Becoming a Better Marketer of Your L&D Offerings
Building engaging learning content that no one knows about will get you nowhere. A big part of marketing is ensuring you send the right message to the right audience. To the business unit, make sure you are describing how the training will solve their need for increased performance and engagement. Let the individual employee know how your training offerings can help them progress in their career.
Learning and Development with an Eye on Retaining Top Performers
Most good to great performers leave at the 1-3 year tenure mark. For learning, this means it is time to stop investing in underperformers and ensure that the right learning and development opportunities are being offered to at-risk, high performers. This can mean anything from a learning path of internal content to help them progress in their careers to opportunities for broader professional development with third parties.
Investing in Managers of People
There is no question that managers who are perceived by employees as overly “bad” or “good” can have a dramatic impact on performance, workplace stress, and overall retention. But what should organizations be training managers on? Delivering feedback and coaching, goal setting, and performance management are good places to start.
Reinforcing the Culture of Your Company with L&D
This resolution can be misleading. It is less about focusing on “culture” as a set of values and behaviors that you want to reinforce and more about operationalizing learning to ensure alignment with the groups or areas that are of high importance and focus for the organization as a whole. A good place to start? Focus on the people and functional areas that deliver results and contribute directly to revenue.