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Keeping up with change in today’s fast-moving society means companies need to make sure their employees are well-equipped. An L&D strategy is a crucial part of building a more adaptable, resilient workforce.
Many organizations start implementing their L&D strategy but fall short either in their planning, execution, or measurement and optimization.
To help you out, we’ve compiled what you need to know about what a learning and development strategy is, what makes it successful, and real-world examples of successful L&D initiatives in action.
What is the purpose of a learning and development strategy?
Learning and development strategies outline how your organization aligns upskilling and reskilling initiatives with long-term business goals by investing in its employees’ skills, abilities, and knowledge.
As your organization invests in your team’s growth, the employee, in turn, adds more value to the company.
Depending on the size of your company, the HR department may be responsible for overseeing learning and development strategies, but more and more companies are recognizing the need for learning and development to be its own team.
Whether you’re in HR or L&D, you may be responsible for conducting a skill gaps analysis and building talent development strategies depending on what the company needs. This means creating, training, implementing, and leading the L&D strategy for the organization.
Manager and employee responsibilities in learning and development strategies
While HR and L&D are responsible for broader strategy and program delivery, managers also have a part to play in finding out the development goals of their team. Managers should act as champions for the learning and development of their staff by recommending employee development programs that would be a good fit for their team members.
Likewise, each employee should take ownership of their own learning and development. Employees should be able to access and explore learning opportunities in order to choose what will help them most in achieving their long term career goals.
A learning and development strategy framework
You don't need to start with a blank page when creating a learning and development strategy. When learning how to create a learning and development strategy, use frameworks crafted by leading companies and consulting firms that have done the hard work to determine what works. A framework helps make sure your efforts and budget are spent in the right places and in the right ways.
McKinsey’s ACADEMIES learning and development strategy framework provides a great foundation. In it are nine dimensions that contribute to strong learning and development strategies.
1. Alignment with business strategy
One of the primary goals of a successful L&D strategy is to align itself with the business's overall goals, strategies, and talent composition. The L&D strategy you choose will support the professional development and capabilities of the company’s talent in a time-efficient and cost-effective manner.
For many organizations, their L&D initiatives support the implementation of their business strategy. For example, if your organization’s business strategy involves digital transformation, L&D may focus on developing digital literacy as a skill in your workforce.
2. Co-ownership between business units and HR
L&D initiatives benefit most from governance structures where leadership between business units and HR share responsibility and ownership for skill-building initiatives.
Since technology is always changing, building agility and adaptability into your initiatives is a key component. You need to be able to launch learning and development strategies as new needs become apparent. For example, if a sudden need emerges for people trained in cloud-based collaboration tools, a training program can be rapidly created and implemented.
By using a framework for learning and development strategies that includes a thorough assessment of skill gaps and estimated value, you can address those gaps and build new capabilities into your workforce to remain competitive and meet the demands of your customers.
3. Assessment of skill gaps
Understanding what your company needs to succeed from a skills standpoint is a crucial step. Working with internal subject matter experts and department managers can help you identify what skills are needed for organizational success and find areas where those skills need more development.
Once those key capabilities are identified, you can build your L&D strategy with the goal of further developing those core skills in your organization.
4. Design of learning journeys
Traditional classroom-based learning programs, which typically happen over a short time span, are being replaced by learning journeys. Learning journeys represent a continuous learning process that unfolds over an extended time frame and incorporates a variety of L&D initiatives. These can include pre- and post-classroom learning, digital learning, practical fieldwork, social learning, workshops, and on-the-job mentoring programs.
5. Execution and scale-up
When it comes to learning and development strategies, execution is everything. Especially if you want to stay on time, on budget, and sustain support stakeholders.
In order to ensure you have support and funding from leadership, maintain an ongoing discussion with stakeholders and start small.
How can you start small? Target a limited audience in the form of a small pilot before targeting the whole organization.
Successful execution of a small pilot can lead to a huge impact once the initiative is rolled out across the entire organization. The program’s cost-per-person declines as the learning and development strategies benefit from economies of scale.
6. Measurement of impact on business performance
The execution of an L&D strategy should be measured using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
Your organization can track several KPIs depending on priorities, needs, and what indicators are necessary to make data-driven decisions in the future.
In general, it’s a good idea to include KPIs that account for three categories:
- Business Excellence (how closely aligned all L&D initiatives and investments are with business priorities),
- Learning Excellence (whether learning interventions change people’s behavior and performance), and
- Operational Excellence (how well investments and resources in your learning and development strategies are used).
The most high-performing organizations focus on outcome-based metrics, such as:
- Individual performance
- Employee engagement
- Team effectiveness
- Business process improvement
7. Integration of L&D initiatives into HR processes
Many learning strategies examples aren’t connected to annual performance reviews.
As L&D leaders, it's vital to deeply understand the core processes of HR management and work closely with HR leaders. The most effective learning and development strategy examples integrate program feedback directly from performance reviews to inspire your skill-building initiatives.
More and more we're seeing a shift from annual performance reviews to more consistent and frequent feedback sessions, reflecting a growing trend in the corporate world.
8. Enabling the 70:20:10 learning framework
The most successful learning and development strategies follow the 70:20:10 framework: 70 percent of learning takes place on the job, 20 percent is through interaction and collaboration, and the final 10 percent is through formal learning and development strategies, such as classroom training or corporate mentoring programs.
These percentages are just general guidelines and vary depending on your company’s industry and organizational needs.
9. Systems and learning technology applications
Learning technology has almost moved entirely to cloud-based platforms. Doing so provides virtually unlimited options to try different systems and access the most state-of-the-art tools, all without requiring lengthy and expensive onboarding and implementation of physical systems.
What makes a learning and development strategy successful?
There are a variety of things that make these learning strategies examples so successful. We’ll cover the most important factors.
1. Connected to business goals
A solid L&D strategy nurtures the growth of your employees, empowering them to contribute to the organization's ongoing success. When aligned with the overarching goals of the business, your L&D strategy helps to prioritize the skills and capabilities needed for achieving those specific targets.
2. Offers personalized learning for employees
Not everyone learns in the same way, so it’s important to offer learning opportunities that cater to individual employees' unique learning needs and styles. Employees that are nurtured and supported to develop get more out of learning and development strategies.
Take this study done on employees participating in L&D initiatives at different companies:
“We surveyed 247 employees, and we discovered that while employees’ satisfaction and enjoyment towards learning opportunities are high, learning and development initiatives are often not enough aligned to the individual needs as much as they are to the company’s ones.”
Therefore, when crafting learning and development strategies, you need to balance building the skills the organization needs and helping employees reach their goals.
3. Learning is social
Social learning (observing, imitating, and getting feedback from our peers) is the most effective way we learn. Incorporate social learning into employees’ day-to-day lives, such as project collaboration, mentorship, or peer coaching.
Examples of companies with successful learning and development strategies
Google is well known for the flexibility it offers its employees and aims to create a fun working environment. They also emphasize social learning in the form of peer-to-peer learning.
In fact, up to 80% of all their learning activity is delivered this way. They actually set up their own internal network called Google-to-Google (g2g). It’s a program where employees train and teach their fellow employees and where KPIs can be tracked to help make informed decisions on the effectiveness of their network.
Publix
One of the reasons Publix has thrived is their dedicated investment in their L&D department, known as the Education and Training Development, or ETD as it’s fondly called. As Publix continues to expand, the ETD team plays a crucial role in training employees and helping them navigate changes, making sure they’re equipped to excel in their roles. Their commitment is all about providing the most effective and supportive learning environments for their workforce.
FBI
The FBI has The FBI Training Division to offer L&D initiatives throughout their organization. The L&D opportunities are available to all branches of their organization, from the federal and state level, international level, and even the municipal level.
Cruise Automation
Cruise Automation is a great example of L&D mentorship. They emphasize internal career mobility and nurturing the talent within their own organization, rather than hiring externally.
In 2019 they started a pilot program for their engineering department that numbered more than 1000 employees. Their idea was that the best way to accelerate employee development is by pairing experienced employees with the more junior ones through a 1-on-1 mentorship program.
Standard Chartered
Standard Chartered, a British multinational banking and financial services company, began teaching its leaders to use a perspective of investigation, experimentation, and data-driven analysis when making decisions about their own roles and parts of the organization.
They wanted their leaders to make hypotheses, then test them, assess if they worked, and ask “why” or “why not” when looking at the end result.
Using this learning and development framework, they focused less on hard skills or capabilities and more on developing a mindset and behaviors that can help them navigate the unknown and constantly changing needs of their organization.
Cargill
Cargill, a privately held food and agricultural business, wanted to democratize learning within their organization.
They felt that their L&D strategy was skewed so that only executives in the company could access resources such as in-person learning.
Part of this democratization meant that they completely reversed the ratio of in-person to digital learning (which was previously 80 percent in-person to 20 percent digital learning).
Although there were some reservations about the restructuring to more digital learning, they discovered that the digital learning was so well received by their employees that participants engaged in more learning than was expected of them.
How top Chief Learning Officers think about learning and development
Successful Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) seem to hone in and focus on a few particular aspects of L&D.
In a survey of CLOs from 19 large companies conducted by HBR, they identified five mindsets:
Develop growth mindsets before specific skills.
A growth mindset can be broken down into two beliefs:
- That everyone’s abilities can and must be developed in order for the organization to thrive long-term.
- Innate talent is a starting point (but it must be developed).
Strengthen data-driven thinking.
In this quickly moving world, digital awareness is key for employee job performance. One way to foster digital awareness is by getting people comfortable using data in their decision-making.
Foster a “pull” model where employees set their own agendas for learning.
A “pull” model requires an environment that sparks enjoyment and curiosity and ignites the desire to learn and grow.
Incentivize employees to teach and coach others.
One of the ways humans learn most is when they are teaching others. Incentivizing employees to teach each other will strengthen the hard and soft skills of all employees involved.
Tie learning to mentorship.
These learning strategies examples are made much stronger when they include mentorship. When done right, the value of mentorship at an organization is incredible. Mentors can offer support to newer employees, help them develop the skills they need, and hold them accountable for growing.
Pairing senior employees with junior employees and helping them have growth-focused conversations can increase engagement for both parties.
Jennifer Petrela, a mentoring expert, connected with our team to discuss inclusive mentoring. During the conversation, Jennifer emphasized that mentorship is a great way to close the skills gap between the skills new graduates enter the workforce with and the skills they need to thrive:
Mentorship is often seen as another corporate marketing gimmick, but when organizations run an employee mentorship program that meaningfully pairs relevant mentors and mentees, the results are phenomenal. There are numerous examples of companies launching successful professional mentoring programs that drive impact across the organization.
Enable connections.
Learning from peers is an essential component of employee development. Companies that foster and encourage employees to connect with one another not only accelerate learning, but also build a strong company culture.
More informal, colleague connections, cater to diverse needs and learning styles and are a great compliment to mentorship.
Bring it all together in a development program.
A cohesive development program allows for a seamless employee experience. Bring all learning formats together to create learning tracks for groups like Leadership, high potentials, ERGs, or new hires.
Take your learning and development strategy to the next level
Investing in an L&D strategy is something that can pay dividends, both directly and indirectly. It’s important to make sure that the L&D strategy is aligned with the overall business goals of the organization.
Together helps companies grow their learning and development strategies through development programs, colleague connections, and mentorship software. Book a demo to learn how Together can help you!
