Mar 20, 2006

Making learning strategic

Had an interesting talk by an ex-CLO of a strategy consulting firm. The firm itself has been nominated for the best Training group by Training magazine. Go figure it out for yourself !

Back to the talk. Some of the interesting and provocative ideas that he shared were the following:

1. Do not credit a training program for an employee unless that learning has been deployed on the job. That puts the onus of the application of the learning to the employee and ensures that only relevant training gets undertaken.

2. Nominate a 'learning buddy' for all new employees, whose job it is to help and mentor the new employees to learn on the job and to help them network within the organization. The learning buddy gets a annual bonus if the employee sticks to the organization every year. This is based on Gallup's research that find that people remain with an organization longer if they have a friend. To help the friendship the learning buddies need to be matched to the employees with regard to educational qualification, skills and age.

3. Create immersive programs. Most of the training gets seen as one-off feel good events. But programs themselves should be the start of networking process where participants form sub-groups after the program to meet as small learning circles along with a senior manager to mentor them, and to strategize how to implement the learnings at their workplace (remember point 1 above?)

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