Contemporary HR issues Blog #10 - What are the most important HR issues facing your organization today?

Learning & development strategy

CIPD (2018) define Learning & development strategy (L & D) as the methods used by an employer to help their HR assets to learn new skills in order to motivate them & to reach higher productivity level.

L & D is a broad subject & it can include many activities related to skill development such as mentoring, coaching & training. L & D is focused on supporting, developing & accelerating learning to build prompt & responsive work force to execute the organizational strategy.

L & D strategy should be aligning with corporate strategy & other strategies of the organization. It should be prepared based on the business & employee skill development requirements of the organization. Some organizations might restrict learning opportunities only to some key employees & some might offer learning opportunities to every employee considering that everyone as a talent employee. An organization can earn several benefits by having effective L & D strategy which supports the corporate strategy. Some of those benefits are providing vision that helps the management of change, increase employee engagement & it will also support the organization reach higher performance level in long term. Since it is important to have L & D strategy align with other strategies “RAM approach” is used to align the L & D strategy. “RAM approach” can be described as below.

R – Relevance: How strategy will meet business opportunities & challenges.

A – Alignment: How strategy is going to align with other strategies.

M – Measurement: How the evaluate the effectiveness consistently.

(CIPD, 2017)

Once the strategy is prepared it is important to implement the strategy effectively. Some key factors that should be concern in implementing L & D strategy are given below.

• Should identify L & D needs & have to decide who is going to set the priorities for L & D needs.
• Performance appraisal should be used to identify the capabilities & to set learning goals.
• Planning of budget & resources.
• Learning methods should be decided such who is going to be learning consultant, what are the expected methods to carry our learning.
• Should decide how to review & evaluate of L & D activities.
• Since the innovation is a critical fact for the development of the organization L & D strategy should encourage the innovation.
• L & D activities should be fair & equal.

(CIPD, 2018)

In present competitive environment organizations are more concern on productivity, efficiency & profitability. Hence they try to get the maximum potential of employees in order to meet above goals. To have a highly capable workforce L & D activities are essential. Providing new knowledge & skills through L & D can be a competitive advantage for the organization. (Towler & Dipboye, 2009)

References

CIPD, (2017) Learning and development strategy: An introduction. Understand how to create and implement a learning and development strategy to support organizational success.

Available at https://www.cipd.asia/knowledge/factsheets/learning-development-factsheet

(Accessed: 30^th of June 2018 at 3.30AM)

CIPD, (2018) About HR and L&D: Spanning every industry, the HR and L&D profession covers a huge spectrum of jobs, specialisms and careers. Take a closer look to see what path’s right for you.

Available at https://www.cipd.co.uk/new-hr-learning-development/about

(Accessed: 30^th June 2018 at 3.30AM)

Towler, A.J. & Dipboye, R.L. (2009) ‘Effects of Trainer Expressiveness, Organization and Training Orientation on Training Outcomes’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(4), pp.664-673.