As a learning professional and technologists I find that most organizations are ill prepared to align their organizational strategies to learning. Often you will find a spitball approach or reactive priorities. As a consultant and adviser to such organizations it has been my job to help them achieve a high level understanding of what it takes to begin the sometimes daunting process of learning and strategy alignment.
Over the years I have collected and compiled a simple one page question sheet. It is not just for executives. Anyone can take this to help them plan. It is process and methodology agnostic, so that you can use what is available in your organizational culture. If you want some suggestions on how to approach or answer some of these questions please don't hesitate to leave a comment.
Employee Learning & Alignment to Strategy Considerations
- How much will you invest on this initiative? Executive Sponsors, Staffing, Budget.....?
- What is your organizational strategy? Define it or identify it.
- What business impact do you want to see? e.g. Student Success
- How will you measure the business and learning impact?
- Have you adopted competencies and created competency models?
- Develop process to align employee goals to organizational strategy?
- Develop process to align employee competencies to organizational strategy?
- What development opportunities will be available for employees to reach their highest potential?
- What existing learning will contribute to the success of organizational strategy? Scrap training that will not contribute.
- What new learning programs will contribute to the success of organizational strategy? Develop or purchase only if they contribute and align to strategy.
- Develop tools and process to assign relevant competencies to training offerings?
- Have you created a strong reporting process to pull daily dashboards, weekly reports, and trend data?
- Have you allowed enough time to pull relevant data and be able to validate trends? This is usually 3 to 5 years.
- Did you fulfill your organizational strategy? If yes then celebrate but if no then re-calibrate.
These questions will give you plenty to think about. You can create a timeline from this or a checklist. Most of all consider each one to gauge the magnitude of what needs to be accomplished and how prepared your organization is to begin aligning performance pieces to learning.
