How do you prioritise learning and development needs in your business? Do you have a clear process as well as a policy?
We have a policy with a form to be filled in, but the process to be followed and the basis upon which decisions are made are not obvious.
I want to draft a clear process for our site ready for Learning @ Work week and thought it would be interesting to see how you all prioritise development needs in your workplaces. I am hoping you might give me some good ideas or remind me of points I would otherwise forget.
At our site some staff make use of available opportunities for development but others don't seem to, and I fear it is because they are not clear what is available and how to go about accessing it.
L@W week will give me an opportunity to make the available opportunities clear to all and provide a transparent process that is easy for all to use.
It relies on line managers on our site, as L&D needs are identified as part of the 1:1 pdp process, but I want to make sure that everyone understands the role of line managers in this. I want to make clear the timeframe that forms have to be handed in so that timely decisions are made, to ensure that budget prioritisation meets academic calendar requirements.
Anything else I need to remember?
Many thanks for any thoughts on this important process.
Replies
Due to a change in our organisation, things at our place will be changing and I have a feeling that the " business partner" approach will be used. It will be very interesting to see how things pan out.
Do you fancy that type of role Alison?
It would depend upon the scope of the role, but yes I think I would Mike. I am not sure if the role I have in mind would necessarily be described as Business Partner or whether it would be described as Head of a Centre of Excellence. Either way it would need to key into what the business needs to deliver into the future in terms of people (skills and experience), organisational structure and change.
My current role as compliance training manager (working from within the Quality directorate) is interesting and challenging for now, but assuming that all the changes I am currently making are delivered in accordance with my plan (devised following a gap analysis that I did when I started 2 years ago), then I would like to take on responsibility for a much wider remit at the start of next year (latest).
L&D, competency frameworks, personal development planning, succession planning and talent management all sit with our HR team at the moment, but they don't have the resources to deliver them and they have other priorities at the moment. I would love to be involved in planning and delivering these things but they are outside of my remit. (I do advise and mentor staff on their development options and career opportunities, and run small "pilot" workshops or developmental training sessions when I see a real need to fill a gap, but that is on a personal basis outside of my official job role).
One of the reasons I started the L7 HRD course was to refresh and increase my knowledge and skills to enable me to confidently deliver much more than just compliance training within the business. We have been going through a major change since the start of the year and I could foresee the possibility of an opportunity arising that I wanted to be able to apply for.
The L7 HRD has so far been brilliant as it has taught me many new things and the networking opportunities it is providing (along with our local CIPD branch) are so valuable - I have been really delighted to have met some amazing people in both HR and L&D fields who have really been great in sharing their experience and opening my eyes to different perspectives. It is all very exciting. I now want to use my knowledge and skills and develop my experience in new areas.
:)
Hi Alison,
In my old role in financial services I worked in a centralised L&D model -
We had a Learning Business Partner (LBP) who would basically work with the leadership teams across our Sales & Service sites and it would be their responsibility to identify learning needs or potential requirements for training. The LBP would complete a form that would include the background, requirements for training and priority & resource required. This would then be presented at a weekly meeting and discussed and either - more information would be requested or it would be agreed.
If agreed it would be passed to the relevant L&D project managers ( i was one of these ) who would complete a more thorough LNA and work out if it was training (system/behavioural), procedural, coaching etc - I would create a design plan and suggest the relevant means to approach this and this would then be assigned to a designer to complete design and then passed to the delivery team to delivery.
It wasn't the most effective approach or model - quite disjointed however we're talking a 15K population with a training team of 8 PM's, 20 designers and 100 delivery trainers so it needed managing quite tightly really.