Learning and development is often deployed in response to a documented variance in actual performance versus needed performance or organizationwide assumptions and analysis of needs.
But when we apply a three-pronged approach to learning strategy to encompass individualized learner skills gap analysis, organizational/team/role strategic needs and personal learning and career interests, the outcome lends to a stronger learning approach with more engagement and higher retention and application.
The question of “what’s in it for me” should be clearly answered when using a three-pronged learning and development approach, as well as “How does this benefit your team/organization” and “How does this increase competence in current role functions but also prepare you for career growth and opportunities in the future?” to gain the most buy-in from participants. As you partner with stakeholders in your organization to create individualized L&D plans, visually map out these three areas with employees so they can see how the three areas overlap for maximized engagement and application of learning.
For example, if you have a new talent acquisition specialist who has about a year of experience supporting front-line recruiting efforts for a small organization—but not full-scale talent acquisition for a global company currently struggling to fill roles quickly to meet production needs—and the employee’s ultimate goal is to grow into a broader talent management function, how might a three-pronged approach apply to curate a very personalized development plan that excites the employee help to meet company objectives and hiring needs and addresses skills gaps at the same time?
First, we begin by mapping out the strategic needs of the organization. In this case, the company operates and recruits on a global scale and is currently struggling to fill critical production roles so they are not meeting output goals and are unable to fulfill consumer demand.
Next, we conduct a detailed skills analysis for the recruitment function for this organization: Are there particular HRIS skills needed? This would include: The ability to guide hiring managers through the requisition function in the applicant tracking system, a need for training hiring managers on compliant interview techniques or crafting behavioral analysis questions and developing realistic day-in-the-life interview scenarios, which would lead to less turnover of candidates once they accept a role is the specialist comfortable with global hiring requirements, laws, and cultural norms for the geographic areas they may recruit from.
If there are skills gaps in these areas, this could place the recruiting function at a disadvantage, leading to more time to fill the critical production positions and hiring managers feeling unsupported by the HR team.
Lastly, we look at the third area, personal interests. In this scenario, we know the talent acquisition specialist would like to ultimately grow into a broader talent management role, including L&D. By developing a plan for this specialist that teaches them the global compliance needs, then evolves further by taking the compliance information learned and helping the specialist create a training session for hiring managers on compliance requirements and cultural norms, as well as how to use these in the hiring process impacts the quality of and time to hire, we can evaluate the next round of hiring to see if this impacted metrics like time to fill, turnover in the first 30 days, and quality of hire.
All three needs areas are targeted and included in this approach, helping solve a strategic issue for the company while simultaneously providing learning to fill a skills gap for the specialist that also aligns with their personal career goals. If we had simply approached this as “Here is a list of compliance requirements, share with hiring managers,” this would have left out the crucial engagement piece of their personal interests and long-term career goals/skills gaps by not teaching them how to develop a quality training session and delivering/evaluating the training efforts.
In every section of the personalized development plan, dedicate time to discussing how a suggested training, resource or skills development exercise meets the overlapping needs to reinforce the benefits of the three-pronged approach and strengthen engagement and retention of learning. This type of approach also enforces foundational adult learning principles through application of relevant material to solve problems, leverage existing experience and directly correlate learning to future goals and growth for improvement, and provide avenues to measure impact—meaning this approach can lead to stronger retention of concepts and on the job application, building efficiencies in problem-solving over time, and increasing excitement for additional opportunities to engage in upskilling.
Another benefit is that you can directly correlate L&D activities to solving business needs and problems, enhancing succession planning through this three-pronged approach as you broaden employee skill sets, and clearly tracking ROI for the organization as a result of L&D and investing in personalized learning, in addition to other important metrics such as employee retention, satisfaction and engagement that stem from taking a very individualized approach to L&D.
Perhaps you start small with this approach, mapping out templates for your direct team to see what their intersection of the three areas would look like, finding exercises and resources that would help meet those needs and interests, and then work through a business problem to solve that aligns with filling a skills gap and personal interest for career growth, track and share the results, and use this as a case study for other departments in your organization to gain buy-in for other leaders and teams to also start adapting this approach and reaping the benefits!
