Posted by Organizations spend a lot of time and resources in training and developing their employees. Instructor- led courses, online and mobile learning modules and a social learning management system to coordinate these as well as the learners: you, as an organization might be using one or more of these platforms to engage your learners. Everybody’s ultimate goal: to hone employees’ talents in a way that can boost your business. For any outcome-oriented endeavour like this, it is important to keep a track of how far your program are delivering what they intend to deliver. This underscores the need to have a clear Learning Management Strategy in place well before execution to avoid bottlenecks and time-cost overruns.
A good learning management strategy should be able to answer the following questions:
- What areas should we work on for the year?
- Will the initiatives in these areas contribute to our organizational goal achievement? Are they well-aligned?
- What are our SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Time-constrained) goals for the year or for a particular program or initiative?
- How will we achieve these SMART goals in a timely manner to deliver the planned results?
- What will be the protocols for measuring, evaluating and reporting?
To address these questions, you need a multi-pronged strategy that will consist of processes, timelines, and roles and responsibilities.
Visualize a scenario: You as the Chief Learning Officer, need to set the calendar programs for the coming year. For the programs to be coherent with the organizational goals, the CEO of your company summons a meeting with all senior leaders to prioritize and set the goals as well as the people who would sponsor them. You then meet with the department head and learning managers to examine the need for a learning program and the impact it will have on the goal. You workout on the due dates, application rates, expected number of participants, etc. These are the SMART goals of your learning function. All this being done, you also need a good mechanism to evaluate your initiative as it progresses. For example, your strategy might call for fortnightly meetings to review progress against plan and take corrective actions if necessary.
Though a detailed management strategy takes some time to create, it pays big dividends in increasing the impact, effectiveness and efficiency of your department.