What is Learning and Development?
Learning and Development evolves a business's internal capabilities to remain competitive within the marketplace. By increasing individual and group performance through honing skills and knowledge, learning and development forms part of an organisation's talent management. In doing so individual and groups goals are aligned to the business's overall mission and vision.
Why is Learning and Development important?
Effective Learning and Development strategies successfully reinvest in existing business employees to deliver an enhanced internal skill set that is part of an overall organisational learning culture. This culture encourages personal development and innovation to expand the skill level of employees at all levels within a business. Fundamentally, this position assists in a business's success through up-skilling its employees and future-proofing against the evolving external environment through maintaining pace with change.
Focus areas for Learning and Development
As businesses enter the new world of work, internal skill gaps can prove detrimental to a business's competitive edge within the market. As technology and automation become more commonplace in today's working world, there is a need to ensure existing employees are party to training programmes to maintain business efficiency through the productivity of its employees.
Key areas include:
Soft skills training
Prevention of future skill gaps
Full understanding of the impact of technology
Consistent global training
Provision of insights and solutions on internal skill gaps
What does a Learning and Development Manager do?
Advancing a business's capabilities and productivity by reinvesting in their people is a core objective of a learning and development manager.
Responsibilities include:
Create training programmes aligned to the business's objectives
Partner with managers across the business to improve performance
Fully understand departmental training requirements and action implementable training initiatives
Embrace various styles of training techniques, such as coaching, tutorial sessions and e-learning
Build relationships with 3rd party providers
The Future of Learning and Development
The delivery of learning within an organisation is changing. Over time, an expectation of mobile-first, innovative, and on-demand tailored learning experiences have risen among professionals. Partially this is to reach new generations entering the market place who have a experienced a unique schooling environment to senior leadership within an organisation.
Adapting from traditional methods to new innovations to maintain engagement from those entering the workforce will be key to retaining a strong position within the talent market.