When you are building out your Learning and Development strategy, it’s important to pay attention to the blockers and obstacles that you are likely to encounter over time. For some companies, that’s aligning expectations, or managing resources, but an often-unforeseen challenge relates to quality of your L&D products. Outdated content, poor quality, and irrelevant content can all be issues, but when you dig deeper into the problem, there are often higher-level problems that need to be addressed to make sure your employees are getting the training and skills they need to succeed in the long term.
Here are the top 3 limits commonly experienced by companies trying to drive quality L&D products and experiences.
1) The Subjective Definition of Quality
When it comes to training and learning, good products can look different to different stakeholders. Quality is naturally subjective, and your team members might have a different perspective on the usefulness and relevance of a product than corporate leadership. The key is to solicit and listen to as much feedback as you can. Taking a critical eye to your content, evaluating its quality is important for you as a business leader, but also for your employees. Build a feedback process into the training program itself so you can see how good new products or services are from a learner’s perspective. Gathering that information proactively will help you quickly overcome challenges as they relate to quality.
2) Limited Recognition of Organizational Expectations
Expectations can make or break a good L&D program. If you don’t have a full understanding of those expectations, you will inevitably run into issues around quality. It’s critical to clearly define internal (and external) expectations and align them with the realities of the training scenario. Sometimes there really is only so much one training product can do given the situation and resources. But by communicating those expectations early and often, you will be more likely to succeed overall.
3) Multiple Measures of Success
Another challenge as it relates to quality simply relates to finding alignment on what success actually means. Again, different stakeholders are likely to have different measurements of success when it comes to training and learning resources. This stems from differences in experiences, roles, and even expectations (see point #2 above).
In order to have a good standard of quality, you need to know what success looks like. Ask how are you measuring success? How is corporate leadership measuring it? How are your employees measuring it? Then ask, how you can align those measurements. Keeping teams involved closely throughout the planning process as well as the feedback and evaluation stage is important. But also, do what you can to help all stakeholders understand what the overall goal of the learning program or product is. Sometimes just a clearer understanding of the mission or an outline of the skills or knowledge expected as an outcome can help get everyone on board.
Are you looking for L&D talent who knows how to build an effective L&D structure?
Our instructional design consultants work with your leadership and subject matter experts to help develop talent and implement performance management practices. For more advice on how to ensure you are building out high-quality learning and development programs, connect with the teamat Clarity Consultants today.
When you are building out your Learning and Development strategy, it’s important to pay attention to the blockers and obstacles that you are likely to encounter over time. For some companies, that’s aligning expectations, or managing resources, but an often-unforeseen challenge relates to quality of your L&D products. Outdated content, poor quality, and irrelevant content can all be issues, but when you dig deeper into the problem, there are often higher-level problems that need to be addressed to make sure your employees are getting the training and skills they need to succeed in the long term.
