The 2016 Learning and Development Poll

At the end of last year we asked you for your Learning and Development priorities for 2016 – and over 100 people took the time to tell us. The LPI’s Alan Bellinger summarises the results.

The key outcome – how to balance operational and strategic priorities?

It’s always difficult when it comes to prioritising issues; if you’re given a list by your manager and told to put them into an A-B-C priority list, the temptation is to come back with the “they’re all As!” response! But, in this survey, the system forced you to rank them – as there was only one entry in each column.

Let me give you an example of this operational/ strategic conundrum. Your number one priority for 2016 was for a successful new system roll-out; and that’s an operational priority. However the strategic view (technology adoption), was actually down at number 6. But when you think it through, that’s exacty the way it should be if there’s a new roll-out coming up; it’s critical to focus on the immediate challenge and allow the ‘big picture’ to sort itself out in the longer run.

All-in-all we listed 14 possible priorities, and here are your top half:

1. Successful New System Roll Out – in the past, the adoption programme has tended to focus on the technology itself, rather than the impact of the technology. Today, the temptation is to buy rather than build, and therefore the impact of the new technology is on processes and workflow rather than on the way the system is used.

2. Developing Better Learner Engagement – we all want learners to be engaged, and if you can put the learning into context so that they can see its relevance to their day-to-day job, then they will be engaged. But you can always put icing on the cake through gamification.

3. Demonstrating the Value You Create – when the learning is associated with new technology, the value-add should be fairly simple to demonstrate. It’s around earlier adoption by the users of the new system. Simple dashboards should do the trick here.

4. Improving Stakeholder Engagement – and those dashboards are a real enabler in building stakeholder engagement. Stakeholders are generally far more interested in the outcomes than the means, and if you can show that by enhancing the capability of an employee group they have a greater probability of meeting their objectives, then they’ll be ‘on side’.

5. Facilitating Effective Change Management – making change stick will always be a real challenge – and the conscious-competent model may be useful in helping you to assess it.

6. Ensuring Effective Technology Adoption — there’s an interesting maturity model for technology adoption; and it is definitely one of the areas that we will be looking at further during the course of 2016.

7. Meeting Certification Goals - for quite a number of the responses we received this was either their first or second priority, whilst for others it was some way down the list. However, after aggregating all of the responses it came in as one of the ‘top half’ priorities.

So – you’ve had your say now, and that’s the outcome. We’ll explore a number of these high ranked issues in greater detail in forthcoming blogs.

Alan Bellinger is Executive Consultant at the LPI and can be reached at abellinger@gmail.com

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