A new white paper outlining how organisations can increase the return on their learning investment by up to 238%, through cost savings as well as efficiency and effectiveness improvements, has been published by KnowledgePool, the managed learning company.
Called Ten Steps To Optimise Your Learning, the white paper claims that L&D teams struggle to manage learning because they lack the technology to monitor learning effectiveness and the time to stay abreast of what’s new in the market. The paper provides advice and insights that can help organisations to reduce the total cost of their learning by almost a third and to significantly enhance its effectiveness.
“Learning and development is central to creating a high performance culture and to building an organisation that is great to work for,” said Kevin Lovell, Learning Strategy Director at KnowledgePool and author of the paper. “Measurement, analysis, prioritisation and a focus on people, processes and technology are the keys to optimising learning.”
The ten steps for improving learning, detailed in the white paper, are:
- Prioritise and plan your learning for the coming year and ensure it is aligned to the organisation’s goals.
- Recognise that other alternatives – such as process redesign, job role changes or restructuring – may be a better solution for addressing the business needs that are presented. Training is not a panacea. It should only be prescribed if it will positively impact business goals.
- Consider the best way to deliver the learning; the one that will address the business need with the most impact. Informal learning may be better suited than more traditional approaches.
- Streamline your training management processes. Research by KnowledgePool shows that efficient training processes can reduce training administration costs by 42%.
- Optimise the delivery of training, by discouraging ‘no-shows’ and late cancellations.
- Automate manual processes to avoid the re-keying of data. Centralise the storage of learning activity data.
- Rigorously manage your ‘preferred supplier list’, ensuring that each provider merits their place.
- Transfer the learning and derive maximum performance benefit by ensuring learners use what they’ve learned. The best way to embed learning is to make it measurable.
- Use online surveys to capture reactions to the training and how the learning has been applied. This will help you to better understand where training does – and doesn’t – impact performance. Use the results to influence your future learning provision.
- Assimilate your data on learning delivery, supplier performance and learning evaluation. Create key performance indicators and use these to further improve effectiveness.
“Without constant improvement actions, the learning provision in large organisations undoubtedly becomes less efficient and effective over time,” said Kevin Lovell. “Quite simply, these are the ten areas to concentrate on if you want to give your organisation a greater competitive edge. Our research shows that the potential for optimising learning in large organisations is considerable.”
Ten Steps To Optimise Your Learning can be downloaded free from http://www.knowledgepool.com/downloads/home.html
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
For more information, please call KnowledgePool on 0844 630 9000 or e-mail [email protected].
