The enterprise learning community is a collaborative one, and many companies look to their more established peers for the most workable best practices to implement in their learning organizations.
Unfortunately, many market surveys can take anywhere from six to 12 months from participant input through data collection before any benchmark data is available for consumption and use. The Institute of Executive Development has reduced that time to fewer than 15 minutes.
It also has developed two sets of simplified benchmarking surveys to offer CLOs and other learning professionals’ real-time feedback and insights into executive leadership and development market conditions.
The news surveys are “Executive Transitions” (which examines the transitions that executives make as new hires or when promoted) and “Innovation, Growth and Entrepreneurship Through Leadership Development.”
The Institute of Executive Development offers six market surveys. Other topics include:
- Excellence in Asian Executive Development
- High-Potential Leadership Selection and Development
- Executive Coaching
- Leadership Development: Challenges and Best Practices
Each of the online market surveys has about 20 multiple-choice questions. They are free, available to anyone and offer instant aggregate data, which Regional Director Nancy Thomas said is important because learning professionals are looking for quick benchmark data and insights from a variety of companies across industries and regions.
“The data is used to help learning professionals understand what’s going on in other organizations and to help identify best practices that they may want to apply in their own organizations,” Thomas said. “The data is also used when people are making a proposal or a presentation and want to include some actual facts to support their point of view. It’s also important for leadership and executive development professionals to have this type of information as a way to keep themselves abreast and in the know about what the trends are.”
The Institute of Executive Development began offering its simplified benchmarking surveys a few years ago, and it continues to add surveys as relevant topics arise.
For example, the most recent surveys on executive transitions and innovation and growth were launched in February. Selected survey topics are selected based on topics for which users have requested more information, as well as industry expertise and revelations from the field.
“When people take the survey, their data is added into the aggregate data, and that total number of responses is continually growing as more people take the survey, so it’s always fresh,” Thomas explained. “This gives relevant and timely data in a very easy accessible way. Anybody who can log onto the Internet can take a survey and see the results, and the surveys are often done in partnership with another market leading firm (such as Marshall Goldsmith Partners, RHR International and The Danish Leadership Institute), which we think is important because it brings even more expertise to the topic.”
