Corporate Learning Strategies For Accelerated Business Growth

“Start by aligning the training of your employees with the broader goal your company follows, and then turn this into a solid, formal learning and development strategy to ensure success. Continue reading to learn ways to help your employees grow and develop faster.”

What Is A Corporate Learning Strategy?

Corporate learning strategy or learning and development, often known as L&D, is a role inside an organization that is responsible for fostering the personal development of workers as well as the growth of their professional expertise, knowledge, and abilities to improve the overall performance of the company. The function can be structured centrally, either independently or as part of human resources (HR), dispersed among several business units, or as part of a hybrid organization, frequently referred to as a federated structure.

Learning strategy refers to a structured approach by a company to provide professional development and social learning to its personnel. It's a crucial aspect of human resource management, and it's also known as training and development, learning and performance, or talent development. A learning and development team or department may provide

• Onboarding and new hire learning programs
• Career development
• Active learning pathways
• Abstract learning concepts
• Peer learning programs
• Continuous learning
• Corporate universities
• Leadership development programs
• Skill set development
• Personnel planning
• Training classes
• Mandatory courses such as compliance training

The Significance Of Corporate Learning Strategy

Several factors have caused changes in the global workforce throughout the last decade. The millennial workforce is being reshaped by a more competitive business environment, increased complexity, and the digital revolution. In the meanwhile, the need for reskilling and upskilling has grown due to various factors, including an increasingly diverse workforce, the reduced shelf life for information, and so on. Digital and information-based economies necessitate a thriving workforce. Research shows that a significant portion of market value in publicly traded organizations is dependent on the intangible assets of people, great leaders, and expertise.

The leaders of learning and development are becoming more aware of the challenges that are presented by the fourth industrial revolution (solutions that incorporate the real and virtual worlds). Still, only a minority of institutions have implemented massive transformation strategies. Instead, the majority are progressively adjusting their techniques as well as their educational programs in order to adapt to the shifting realities. Capital invested in people is more important now than ever, and it will be the primary factor in deciding whether or not a company can keep its advantage in the market over the next few years. This is owing to the fact that advancements in technology are being made at an ever-increasingly rapid pace. The L&D executives cannot afford to put off implementing this advancement any longer.

In light of this, let's shift gears and discuss the importance of corporate learning strategies for businesses, both now and in the future.

Retaining and attracting top-notch employees is essential

Lack of a learning culture is one of the most prominent reasons given by workers for leaving a company. In the past, the learning framework was only concerned with increasing output. In today's world, being able to study is also helpful in securing a job. Workers are no longer expected to stay with one business for the rest of their careers; instead, they are only expected to stay as long as they can bring value to the organization. Employees are increasingly responsible for their own professional and personal development, which is why continuous learning opportunities are frequently cited as one of the most critical considerations in job searches.

Invest in a learning culture

Human capital must be subjected to constant learning function expenditure to maintain a business's worth. Increasingly, the value of human capital falls when information is out-of-date or forgotten, which is happening more frequently nowadays. If a company invests in the next generation of leaders, it reaps significant benefits. The level of monetary pay does not necessarily determine an employee's level of happiness. Most workers are looking for better benefits, such as learning new things, improving their leadership abilities, and expanding their critical skills. In the business world, the most qualified professionals and human resources are often on the lookout for an employer that will cater to their educational and professional growth requirements. It is imperative that your business enacts an approach to learning that promotes employee training and development programs concurrently with regular work duties.

Assemble a group of people who share a standard set of core principles

Active learning strategies may assist foster a feeling of shared values and belonging among a company's increasingly virtual and geographically scattered workforce. The millennial workforce, in particular, is interested in working for organizations that have a positive business impact on society and are committed to long-term sustainability.

Build a company's reputation

It is critical for a company's performance in the market, financial strength, position in the industry, and goods and services to have a strong brand. Employer branding and the company's status as an "employer of choice" can benefit from learning investments. Employers will have to work harder to compete for a shrinking talent pool as large segments of the workforce prepare to retire. For this, companies need to make a clear case for why they are a great place to work.

Encourage and enthuse your workers

Learning and honing new skills is the most effective strategy to keep employees engaged. Happiness appears to be linked to lifelong learning, according to recent studies. If given the opportunity to learn and develop in their chosen career path, an engaged employee is more likely to be enthused about new opportunities at work and pleased with their current company.

How To Create A Successful Corporate Learning Strategy

Identify your business goal and objective

Your corporate learning strategy must be aligned with the entire business objective, just like any other corporate initiative. In order to discover the return on investment (ROI) with your strategy, offer guidance to the L&D and HR teams responsible for designing your corporate learning strategy and what forms of upskilling and reskilling they'll need to accomplish. If your leadership team is on board with a strategy to spend resources on developing your internal talent, your business goals give a template for how to do it.

Affirm responsibility for the development phase

Defining unambiguous project authority is a corporate training difficulty that companies face before they can begin establishing their corporate training strategy. Dedicated L&D teams have been established in several big corporations since COVID. HR is still in charge of the learning materials for other small and medium-sized businesses.

Incorporating members from diverse parts of the company, regardless of the ownership structure, is a must for any cross-functional team so that you may receive input on the different business functions' upskilling and reskilling needs, as well as buy-in from the whole company.

Define specific learning, development, and training objectives for the organization

Set specific, attainable, and measurable goals. It's time to create specific objectives for your workforce's holistic learning experience. Share your learning strategy's objectives with the organizations you work with so that everyone knows what you're trying to accomplish. People-centeredness and a connection to business growth should be the focus of these initiatives.

Each department should have a separate learning and development strategy

It would be best if you had a specific learning and development strategy for each role in the workforce. No two jobs can be treated the same. A great leadership team can only be built by ensuring that your learning strategy matches the right individuals with appropriate leadership training. Organizational progress and financial returns are two distinct but intertwined aspects of every successful corporate learning strategy.

Assess Capability Gaps

Determine the areas in which your corporate learning strategy will be most effective by doing a skill gap analysis of your workforce's abilities. Each business department can have its own unique set of skill gaps, so you'll need to conduct several different evaluations and performance reviews to determine where your company is in its workforce's readiness to take on critical roles.

Create learning pathways that are contextual for various roles

After completing the skill gap analysis, utilize this information to build tailored learning experiences for your team members based on their abilities. It will help if you try to combine diverse staff training techniques, as well as numerous multimodal learning forms such as video, audio, text, and interactive digital learning content. In 2022, L&D information will be repurposed into interactive, e-learning courses that provide employees with answers to their problems while working.

Decide on the learning strategy's delivery method and mode of execution

You'll need to invest in employee training material solutions to construct these different learning paths and to analyze the impact of your training accurately. As a development team, you'll be able to build and publish learning courses in various forms, track progress, host courses, and measure knowledge retention with these tools.

It's time to roll out your Learning strategy

It's essential to acquire leadership's feedback before implementing it across the entire business. It will help if you also try to beta-launch your learning program with particular, restricted audiences, such as one or two pre-selected teams. This allows you to focus on the growing pains of an initial program launch and make those modifications before a full-scale launch.

Make your employees aware of their learning resources

Once your learning program has been rolled out across the company, be sure to publicize it. In order for your company to prosper, you'll need the cooperation of your employees. Having L&D champions in important roles across your company will make it simpler to implement this strategy. Therefore, be sure to have leadership buy-in from all of your business departments.

Make good use of learning platforms to track the performance of every employee

As indicated earlier, adopting a learning software offers you the tools to assess your training program's efficacy effectively. Define key performance indicators (KPI) such as the percentage of employees who complete courses, the percentage of employees who proceed through the training, the percentage of employees who achieve a certain level of competence or productivity, and the percentage of employees who embrace digital technologies, etc. This will help you identify and address any weaknesses in your learning program as soon as they are discovered. Also, you'll be able to keep track of your progress and create objectives for future advancement. You should also compare your learning program's success to your company's overall KPIs to determine if there are any correlations between the two. Big data gathered from your team's L&D software can assist draw insights, but tying correlation to cause can be challenging.

Get active feedback from your employees to patch any educational anomalies

Qualitative data from employees participating in your learning program should be collected in addition to quantitative data. There may be places that need work, but it's also an excellent way to gauge the overall effectiveness of the approach. If employees regard your program as an HR obligation or not helpful, you will be unable to reach the goals you have set.

Look to get input from diverse stakeholders and employees at various periods, including:

• In-the-moment of learning
• Post-training surveys after essential courses have been completed
• In one-on-one meetings and employee performance evaluations

Adaptability and improvement are essential to the learning program

You'll need to take early learnings, training progress, team member feedback, new business objectives, and more into consideration and utilize them to develop and enhance your program constantly. Fostering an agile development practice for employee learning and development will help you find new data analytics companies and insights and pivot to new learning opportunities.

Integrate learning and development into your business's core strategies

Finally, companies should search for ways to incorporate learning and development into all of their company goals. This relates to the first step in this list - knowing your company goals and objectives.

Personnel development, training, and assistance can all help to fuel organizational growth. Start implementing components of your learning program throughout your organization to encourage a healthy learning culture.

Examples Of Top Corporate Learning Programs

Career Choice Program by Amazon

The onboarding process at Amazon comprises a substantial amount of training. Every recruit goes on a month-long trip to help them get to know the organization, increase their confidence, and improve their skillsets and knowledge base.

By 2025, Amazon intends to spend a heavy sum on improving educational and training opportunities for its American workers. Full college tuition, General Education Development tests (GED), and English as a Second Language (ESL) competency certificates will be paid for by the firm for its front-line employees, including those who have worked for Amazon for only a few months. Along with these changes, Amazon is expanding its educational offerings to include three new tracks in IT infrastructure, user experience, and user research.

A total of $1.2 billion will enable more than 300,000 of Amazon's workers in the United States to obtain new, high-growth positions by providing free education and training opportunities. In addition, they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver free cloud computing skills training to 29 million individuals worldwide through public initiatives.

As part of the initiatives, individuals are able to follow their professional ambitions as the retail giant fills talent gaps. Additionally, participants gain valuable certificates that they can take with them if they decide to look for a new job, making them more marketable.

Googler-to-Googler by Google

Interactions between different Google employees form the backbone of the company's training and development programs. This method accounts for up to 80% of all learning activity that takes place.

They call it g2g, which stands for "Googler-to-Googler," and it has contributed to establishing a culture at Google that places a high priority on education. To begin, the company respects the right of its workers to further their education and enables them to do so while still employed there. Additionally, the company encourages its workers to share what they have learned with their peers in equal proportion.

It is common knowledge that Google is able to attract and retain some of the most talented and sought-after workers in the world. They state that "your employees are possibly the best-qualified educators available to you." This indicates that they have the most knowledgeable professionals. They actively encourage those specialists to share their expertise with others.

Corporate University by Schneider Electric

Specialized schools are available for executive development, leadership, customer education, energy and solution, sales excellence, and functional skills at the Schneider Electric University. Additionally, the organization provides access to Energy University, a cost-free online training resource that covers issues pertaining to energy saving as well as data center operations.

Learning & Development Programs by SAS

In addition to being the market leader in analytics software and services, SAS is also well-known for the staff training and development programs that it offers throughout its over 20,000 locations globally. Candidates that showcase the ability to adapt to an environment that is constantly shifting yet do not wish to become overly focused on a single aspect are sought after by the organization.

Leadership development and professional advancement are the primary focuses of the programs made available to their staff. By offering various training programs, SAS intends to help its workers improve their abilities and talent to the point where they are qualified for higher management positions.

The primary focus of the SAS Academics Program is the cultivation of sales and technical abilities. In this way, the program ensures that recent college grads are up to the task of meeting the day-to-day demands of a full-time position. Other examples of training programs for SAS employees include the following:

• Leadership development programs that emphasize professional training and growth
• Career resource center
• Mentorship programs for customer service, sales, technical skills, and marketing.

AT&T University by AT&T

AT&T is a forward-thinking corporation that offers cutting-edge services to its clientele; hence, it does not believe in employing conventional methods to identify qualified candidates for open positions. The Internet, mobile devices, entertainment, and phone services that AT&T offers are among the best in the world. It also provides a fantastic illustration of a training program, which the corporation makes available to all of its more than 280,000 workers.

Training and retraining each employee hopes to increase the employees' overall understanding of the new digital environment as well as their ability to compete in the market. The AT&T University program focuses on leadership and management studies and is centered in Dallas, where the company's headquarters are located. However, AT&T University also has satellite campuses located around the United States.

Match Your Modern Workforce's Needs With An Equally Modern Holistic Learning Experience

L&D teams in the modern-day offer use of these techniques and unique solutions that are in line with the requirements of their respective organizations. They provide their workforces the ability to access knowledge and resources when needed, and they harness technology and curation processes to make formal and informal learning more accessible. And by making use of the data, companies build a constant feedback loop to analyze how successful their products and services are, which eventually helps them improve their performance outcomes, drive innovation, and cut down on the expenses of retraining and rehiring employees.

A successful business understands the significance of its role in addressing its staff's learning and development requirements and does not underestimate that responsibility. It contributes to the development of skills gaps that are abundant in terms of both number and quality, which directly influences the bottom line. Better management of the talent pipeline can be achieved through human capital development if an effective learning and development plan is implemented.

Taking an active learning approach will result in a comprehensive curriculum that makes use of every practical and currently available teaching strategy and educational technology. The most successful companies invest in cutting-edge professional development programs, preserve agility and flexibility, and build the human skills required to succeed in today's digital age.

After gaining an understanding of what corporate learning strategies are as well as the significance they play within an organization, you will be able to begin taking even the most minor efforts toward enhancing the role that learning and development play within your institution. Even if you manage a small business, training is essential. The benefits of making these adjustments much outweigh the potential hazards.