Blogs

In January 2019 I had the absolute pleasure of recording another podcast with John Tomlinson of Trainer Tools. This time it was a little different as I was sharing the mic with Kevin M. Yates, my newly discovered partner in crime. Kevin and I met via social media and immediately clicked over our shared interest in wanting to revolutionise L&D. A podcast would be a great way to share our common interests and the thoughts we exchanged in our initial conversation. The recording is now available by clicking this link.

Let's start at the beginning of the conversation. I began my training career back in the late 80's as an IT trainer for IBM. My title was a 'VM Instructor' and my job was to teach customers how to use the front end of the VM software. If I delivered the training effectively then the participants should be able to use the system for at work, to do their jobs. Our measures though, were purely about how the training was received:

• Was the instructor knowledgeable? Approachable? Friendly?
• Were the notes useful?
• How was the lunch?
• Was the classroom comfortable?

To this day, I don't know if anyone actually found out from the customers whether the training achieved what it had set out to do. The world of L&D is quite different now. For a start more and more training functions have changed their names to 'Learning and Development'. This was in response to the fact that learning was recognised to happen in places other than the training room. Learning had a broader remit and with this came a change in the traditional trainer role.

Since then, L&D have been changing and morphing. Towards Maturity have outlined their thoughts on the 'New Learning Organisation' and I commented on this in my blog about the 'We don't do train-the-trainer'. In this blog I spoke about the new "Learning Leader' required to support this new Learning Organisation. Below I have amended the original diagram to include explicit references to performance and using data to help drive intelligent decisions.

This blog is mostly concerned with the first and sixth of these qualities:

• Clarity of purpose - performance focussed
• Helps people make intelligent decisions - using data

The 'Clarity of purpose' is closely tied in with the identity crisis Kevin and I spoke about in the podcast:

Clarity of purpose - performance focussed ..... means that......

• L&D are business focused but also learner centred. Ensuring that they focus on the aspects of individual performance that will improve how the organisation works.
• L&D is strategically focussed to deliver what the organisation needs. Gathering data to understand where the organisation is, but speaking to the right stakeholders to find out the direction of travel required.
• L&D are curious and analytical. If we gather data to investigate what is true and what is happening, we will need to be less brave about asserting our identity. WE will not have to be as brave in suggesting different solutions, because we will have the evidence to back it up. Some people will still expect L&D just to dispense training......(groan)
• L&D are able to engage stakeholders in order to leverage essential resources and achieve the results required. This requires building up those relationships that make the biggest difference and saying no to those stakeholders who neither have impact nor support L&D.

Helps people make intelligent decisions - using data ...... means that....

• L&D makes decisions informed by the organisations’ purpose and it can only do that if it has done a lot of the things outlined in the paragraph above.
• L&D develops others capability in decision making by providing the appropriate tools and skill in data collection and analysis. This also means that L&D as part of its new identity needs to learn how to do this too!
• L&D helps people use data to track performance and also the impact of learning on peoples performance. This then drives the organisation towards efforts that have impact and stops the organisation from putting energy into things which give no return.

During the podcast Kevin threw in 3 questions which are crucial for L&D to ask in order to become more data driven:

1. What is happening in the organisation?
2. What is the organisations goal?
3. What performance requirements are needed to achieve your goal?

Once we have asked these questions we need to look at how else we can develop our skills in line with the new identity. Who is interested in discussing this further? We have a LinkedIn group called the L&D Revolution- take part in the conversation and join the group!

My book 'How Not To Waste Your Money On Training' digs further into how L&D can align themselves and find the story in the data they collect. I would love to hear what you think!