What is a learning and development (L&D) strategy?

An L&D strategy framework guides how an organization achieves its goals through training. It involves identifying skill gaps, setting objectives, choosing learning methods, and measuring impact. This ensures L&D aligns with strategic objectives, boosts employee skills, fosters growth, and enhances competitive advantage.

Here's the difference between a good, great, and winning L&D strategy:

• Good L&D strategy = shifts the focus from only employees to implementing management training initiatives
• Successful L&D strategy = better professional development, building new skills for employees and managers while actively upgrading the quality of existing skills
• Winning L&D strategy = cost-effective, invest in the human capital of its employees, reaps the benefits of increased employee performance, and enhances employee

What else can your organization expect to receive by implementing a winning learning and development strategy?

Benefits of a learning and development strategy

A well-built learning and development strategy framework help leaders and employees define goals for human capital building, prioritize them, and design programs to build them effectively. This corporate learning strategy will do several things for an organization, including: 

1. Attracting and Retaining Talent 

Historically, traditional workplace learning focused on improving employee productivity. However, in the digital age, education must also focus on employability. 

Companies no longer keep employees for decades, and employees no longer stay with companies for their whole careers. 

Because employees must develop and grow to stay relevant, they are often attracted to companies with robust opportunities for learning and development. Moreover, such options boost employee retention, while a lack of such opportunities lowers retention. 

A winning learning and development strategy is key to attracting and retaining talent. Developing and keeping the people already with a company is much more cost-effective than continuously hiring and losing people through a high turnover rate. 

2. Motivating and Engaging Employees 

Providing employees with opportunities to learn, grow and develop new competencies is an important and effective way to engage their interests. In addition, research indicates that people with the benefit of lifelong learning are happier. 

Similarly, employees who are allowed to learn and grow are more engaged and satisfied with their organization. Engaged employees are even more productive! 

3. Building a Company's Brand

A company's brand conveys a lot about its corporate strengths, products, and success (or lack thereof). Investing in an effective learning and development strategy can enhance a company's brand as an employer of choice. 

Employees seek learning and development opportunities. This means that they are often attracted to companies known for learning and development. Thus, a strong brand image begins with brand-based learning and development opportunities.

4. Creating a Values-Based Culture 

In the digital age, a company's workforce may be virtual or dispersed across many different locations. Therefore, having a sense of community-based shared values increases employee cohesion. 

A learning and development strategy can help create a value-based culture that extends beyond the borders of the traditional office. Admirable values are increasingly important to employees, particularly those in younger cohorts. 

5. Developing Better Human Capital

The development of human capital requires ongoing employee instruction. Outdated knowledge rapidly leads to a decline in human capital, which compromises a company's ability to meet the performance markers associated with success. 

Investing in employees and leaders provides a return on investment in the form of more robust human capital. This translates into an increased likelihood of hitting performance targets and achieving core business goals. 

How to create an effective L&D strategy

There are several key considerations when you want to develop a solid L&D strategy. After all, the process can be complex, and there are many factors to consider along the way. Through an effective learning and development strategy, both employees and the company can quickly become more knowledgeable and competitive. 

1. Create a flexible L&D structure

A learning and development strategy must be flexible. Successful organizations are not static; they are dynamic. 

Winning learning and development strategies are equally nimble and agile. An organization's learning and development strategy framework must be evaluated and revised from time to time to stay relevant. Continuous analysis and improvement are critical. 

2. Identify organizational priorities

A learning and development strategy needs to be an organizational priority. In essence, it should be an organizational development plan. Training should be formalized, which means senior management needs to buy in and promote participation. 

The human resources department or an enterprise learning team will need to plan and develop clear goals and objectives. The formal learning and development strategy should include benchmarks for key performance indicators that fit with organizational objectives.

3. Recognize the overall business strategy

A company's learning and development plan should align with its overall business strategy.

For example, if marketing is important to the company's business goals, the learning and development strategy should include marketing-focused courses.

4. Adopt a tailored approach to learning

It is important to understand that a one-size-fits-all approach to an organizational learning and development plan won't work. Different positions within the company have distinct training and knowledge needs. 

A winning strategy is relevant to everyone. However, it has to account for the different roles employees and managers play in the organization and how to develop each role best. 

5. Improve employee recruitment and retention 

Recruitment and retention go hand-in-hand. An effective L&D strategy factors recruitment and retention as part of the value proposition to employees. If employees are learning and developing, they are more likely to stay. 

6. Assess internal stakeholders  

To make a learning and development strategy effective, buy-in from employees is essential. Training has to be relevant and useful to win workers over.

The chances are that you've personally experienced mandated company training that wasn't particularly interesting or useful — instead, it was part of ticking off a box on some company form. Such training is an ineffective use of paid employee time. It can even be demoralizing. 

An excellent way to know what employees hold relevant is to conduct assessments. For example, what do workers feel they're learning and development needs are? 

As the Gallup poll indicates, employees want training and development. However, these need to be relevant and valuable, or employees will see it as ineffective use of their time and attention. 

Consider conducting ongoing assessments. The business environment changes rapidly, and employees need evolving training and development to keep up. What is relevant as an organizational learning and development plan today may not work next year. 

7. Provide sufficient resources and budgeting

Resource and budgeting considerations must be part of a quality learning and development strategy. For example, will employees gain more from internal training management courses and workshops, or would providing access to quality business classes be better? 

In some cases, perhaps a mix is optimal.

8. Choose correct learning tools and techniques 

There are many learning techniques and tools that integrate into a learning and development strategy. Some examples include:

• Leadership exercises
• Leadership coaching
• Distance learning
• On-site learning
• Real-world learning
• Guided case study analysis

An effective organizational learning and development plan usually incorporates programs and tools specific to the skills being taught and refined.

9. Examine future requirements 

When you're devising an effective learning and development strategy, future requirements are an important consideration. Therefore, management development goals and objectives should be woven into the organizational learning and development plan. 

Just as a business needs to adapt to future considerations, a learning and development strategy framework needs to evolve and adapt to new requirements. Predicting future workforce needs can help to guide this process. 

‍Implementing a learning and development plan

Both learning experience and learner experience are keys to building and implementing an effective learning and development strategy. 

While each organization's learning and development strategy will be unique, companies can follow some basic steps to develop and implement an effective organizational development plan:

1. Define learning and development goals, vision, and training metrics
2. Inventory existing learning and development activities
3. Consult with stakeholders and define key areas of team development based on organizational needs, not individual wishes
4. Perform a training needs assessment
5. Analyze the gap between current learning and development activities and the defined curriculum with a training needs analysis
6. Organize a learning and development process and a delivery strategy, including scheduling and tracking
7. Identify priorities for expanding the design and select vendors if applicable
8. Establish and execute a learning and development plan
9. Measure benchmarks, assess, and update content as needed
   

A good learning and development strategy should include a mix of on-the-job learning, collaborative learning, and formal training. 

On-the-Job Learning 

On-the-job learning should encompass the necessary skills and mastery of employees' essential tools to do their jobs. A learning platform can streamline this process as long as it provides resources to answer all questions that arise. 

Collaborative Learning 

Collaborative learning can include mentoring, coaching, apprenticeships, or job-shadowing. Businesses should also have cross-team and cross-department interaction activities to give employees a more comprehensive view of their value. 

Formal Training

Formal training may include courses on a learning platform. It can also involve hands-on learning and the ability to earn certificates by meeting specific performance or learning objectives. 

Continu, the best LMS for learning and development

Continu's learning management system can help companies successfully implement an organizational learning and development plan. It can do this through features such as:

• Onboarding new staff members
• Creating learning tracks and courses
• Implementing employee development plans
• Setting strategic learning objectives
• Monitor training outcomes
• Gather learning and training feedback
• Issuance of course certificates

Onboarding new staff members

Learning platforms, like Continu, will integrate new staff into the company more efficiently than an HR employee. Onboarding training can be consistent across the board with the same learning and development strategy incorporated for each employee from the start. 

New job training can be overwhelming, but having a clear plan can make the process more effective and less stressful for new employees. 

Training should include things every new employee needs to know and train specifically based on the company's roles or departments.

Creating Learning Tracks

Learning tracks are personalized journeys that help give learners an immersive learning experience. An online learning platform can help businesses develop learning tracks with as many training components as necessary to complete learning objectives.

Tracks can also incorporate deadlines and benchmarks. Tying learning tracks to the broader learning and development strategy helps employees grow and develop new skills and knowledge that benefit the company. 

A learning platform can enable employees to request certain types of training, tracking requests, and management responses. The training team can then add to employee learning tracks as appropriate. 

Strategic Learning Objectives 

Employee learning should continue even after new employees have completed the onboarding process. 

Incorporating new learning tracks and mapping out new strategic objectives can enable employees to keep learning. Longer-term training objectives can be tied to the company's overall learning and development strategy, too. 

Personal Development Plans

An online learning platform makes it easy to design specific, personalized training plans for employees under the overarching learning and development strategy. For example, if employees want to chart a path to grow a particular set of skills or aim for a specific promotion, they can adapt their training regimen. 

Having weekly training goals can motivate employees, especially if they have input into training topics. In addition, a learning platform can track learning progress and objectives, and it can generate reports showing where and how employees are progressing. 

Monitoring Outcomes

Using Continu to implement a learning and development strategy can allow the employee development team to monitor employees' training, progress, and outcomes. Monitoring will ensure that employees are learning what has been planned. 

If it's found that they are not, the platform can enable the team to identify and address any issues with learners or the training, saving time and money. 

Comprehensive reporting offers quick visibility of all learners' tracks and ensures employees meet designated benchmarks for the learning and development strategy. 

Continu offers a way to retain standardized training records for all employees. Management can then verify that employee training meets the desired objectives and examine how the acquired skills are being applied to daily tasks. 

Employee Feedback

Employee feedback is important to gauge how employees feel about their learning, but it can also empower employees. 

If incorporating feedback into the training process is routine, employees are assured that their opinions about their learning and development matter. Workers get to feel as though they are being heard. 

The right learning platform asks for feedback from employees regarding the efficacy of implementing the learning and development strategy. 

For example, customizable feedback surveys can capture details about the effectiveness of the internal training far better than pre-set questions that may or may not gather accurate data. 

Feedback allows companies to make improvements to employee learning and development constantly. 

If a company has many courses, sending manual surveys can be time-consuming. Continu can streamline the process significantly. The surveys can be attached to pre-created custom email templates and sent out as needed, like at the end of a training module or course.

Ready to implement a winning L&D strategy?

A winning learning and development strategy is beneficial for both companies and their employees. The digital business world is fast-paced, demanding, and above all, dynamic. 

Employees need to upskill and develop to stay relevant continuously, and they look for companies with robust learning and development opportunities. 

Businesses with employee development strategies in place are better able to draw and retain talent. In addition, their employees are more motivated, engaged, productive, and loyal, with a higher job satisfaction rate. 

If your business is ready to develop and implement a winning learning and development strategy, book a demo of Continu. Our comprehensive online learning software your enterprise L&D strategy to the next level.