by KenboxTech
Organizational agility is the foremost requirement for organizations to remain sustainable. The Training & Development department – traditionally a subset of larger HR Function, is off late getting due attention & a separate identity. Organizations have realized importance in being quickly responsive to ever-changing market needs. This importance has been re-emphasized by the pandemic Corona, globally.
Training & Development has come up in a new avatar as Learning & Development (L&D) and is rightly covering a larger area than ever before, due to technological advancements in process improvements and coverage.
With renewed emphasis and technology in the bay, L&D function has to meet the following challenges:
- Truly identifying training needs of employees, matching up with the current and future business requirements of organizations.
- Providing mechanism that shall continuously help organizations to pick up training needs on the way and support Intermittent & Spot Trainings.
- Ensuring content validity to remain relevant to employees’ needs.
- Designing transfer platforms & modalities, suiting to various kinds of participants.
- Delivery mechanisms should be engaging in nature and motivate employees for better grasping.
- All learning & development interventions should effectively guide and support the use of acquired new knowledge and skills.
The above challenges can effectively be rendered into opportunities in case L&D professionals give a due eye for in detailing training needs vis-à-vis organizational business requirements, irrespective to shape and size of an organization. Gap identification will not only help in identifying training needs and curating content around the gaps.
1. Nailing Organisational Needs to remain Sustainable
The business needs of organizations are changing due to many reasons. These reasons may include the market type, shape of an organization, targeted customer base, geography, business cycle-a company is in, etc. It means, even before initiating the employee training needs identification, L&D professionals must seek information from the top brass of a company on the areas mentioned above.
Once, relevant business information is sought, a briefing is given to all those managers who shall be involved in training need identification process and are near to frontline employees. This will help organizations not only to pinpoint needs but get involved their future leaders in the nitty-gritty of the business.
2. Adopting an appropriate vehicle of Training Need Identification
Training need identification is not once a while process. Organizations that do adopt such a mechanism, fail to align themselves with the ever-changing needs of the market. Training needs get erupted daily, as managers and executives encounter challenges in their day-to-day routines. Therefore, they are facilitated by a vehicle that should not be a constraint to their needs but in fact a supporting vehicle to take care of their challenges effectively.
3. Ensuring Content Validity to remain relevant to employees’ needs.
The effectiveness of vehicular support is compromised if the content is not demarcated and framed in the right manner. Mostly, training failures can be attributed to this gap. Employees who are ‘pushed’ to attend trainings, may lose interest as they may find that the content is either irrelevant to their needs or not properly framed. Resultantly, organizations suffer on two accounts; first, expenses incurred by them remain unproductive and second, employees lose faith in the entire Learning & Development process. Keeping in view, the importance of content, organizations should adopt to a comprehensive platform that can help them collate, analyse, and frame content accurately.
4. Designing a transfer platform for various kinds of participants.
The content loses its effectiveness if it is not rightly transmitted to a targeted audience. It therefore means, the efficacy is dependent on content and choosing the targeted group correctly. L&D Managers must involve themselves in choosing the right platform as they know their people better than anybody else. Interestingly, this part of the training & development process is left to trainers who may choose to pick up a platform which they are strong upon and not as per the needs of the targeted audience. To make it more effective, L&D Managers can pick up technological intervention to remain authentic to their profession.
5. Choosing appropriate Delivery Mechanism
Delivery plays a very critical role in successfully transmitting content to a targeted audience. The delivery mechanism even helps in motivating participants in getting them to immerse into learning and grasping the real objectives of new learning. L&D Managers, therefore, have to look at trainers and their style of delivery and select appropriate trainer to ensure effective delivery to participants.
6. Supporting environment around for new learners
Incurring expenses on training & development of employees may go waste in case the new learning is not getting transferred to the work. It, therefore, means that L&D professionals have not only to look at the identification of needs, but also the environment in their respective organizations and take appropriate interventions to make it more and more supportive to new learning implementation & engaging to employees.
