Finding the Right Training: Strategies for Agency Success

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, identifying talent gaps and ensuring competency and skills that are aligned to the needs of an organization are crucial in developing the workforce of the future. Centrally managing our training budget involves a collaborative, grassroots approach that identifies training needs. This process begins with the employee, incorporates supervisor input, is vetted by directorate leadership, and then prioritized against organizational needs by human capital.  And like most organizations, we find that having an organization-wide picture of needs and priorities improves strategic training-related decision making and increases collaboration and communication. What’s more, this approach can shift the paradigm of training to a strategic investment versus an employee benefit.  This can move an organization away from the silo approach, and it maximizes the investment in learning and development.   

There are also options to strengthen an organization from the inside: 

• Mentoring and coaching programs within an agency can be an effective means of organizational development and facilitation that doesn’t require outside training.  

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• Employee engagement ratings from viewpoint surveys and organizational and employee assessments can provide valuable information and help open doors to both individual and team-based training. They also can help agencies discover long-term development needs and contribute to strategies that will meet those needs three to five years into the future.  

• Diversity and inclusion has become a prominent value for a number of agencies. Leveraging diversity to bring innovation and creativity to the workforce is an important goal, and an achievable one. 

One of the drivers for the implementation to centrally manage our training budget and training needs assessment was to ensure that the principles of FIAT—fairness, inclusiveness, accountability, and transparency—were applied to learning and development decision making. As the human capital function reviews and prioritizes training needs, issues concerning FIAT are part of the prioritization process. 
Bottom line:  Developing a multimodal learning strategy is a highly specific process. For more advice on how to use the right training for the right task, join me for the session, “Skill Setup: Choosing the Right Training for the Right Task,” at Government Workforce: Learning Innovations. We walk through the steps you can take to choose the right strategies and tools for your agency.