How to make your learning sustainable.

Learning Strategy Master Plan

If you don't have time to read the report online and want a checklist that you can use to assess how you are currently doing in your organisation, you can download it.

Introduction

This is the fourth and final part of our set of Kineo Briefings that look at what you can do to create a truly learning organisation. Kineo consultants have been involved in creating many successful learning strategies and have studied effective implementations all around the world.

The broad lessons we have learnt are captured in these briefings which look at the four main characteristics (identified by ASTD) that are consistently present in the most successful learning organisations.

These are alignment (to overall organisational goals), effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability. If you look at them all, you will have a comprehensive, high level plan to deliver a learning strategy that really delivers results.

This briefing builds on what you will have achieved by making your learning aligned, effective and efficient.

Your initiatives are delivering the goods but will they continue to do so, when you turn your focus to other areas of your organisation?

Read on and you’ll find out how you can make your training initiatives sustainable.

Once you have achieved effective and efficient alignment, the job is only half finished. There are many instances in which organisations have built up a highly responsive and effective learning and development operation only to take their eye off the ball. This can happen through complacency, or more often, because it was reliant on a limited number of key players making it all work. The key is to build in sustainability into the whole learning and development infrastructure.

You do this by enshrining best practice in transparent processes and procedures, engaging the whole organisation in taking responsibility for the continued success of the learning operation and creating self-perpetuating networks of champions and supporters of learning within the organisation.

ASTD research shows that:

“Possessing sustainable learning cultures, processes and procedures is a consistent characteristic of ASTD BEST (Award Winning) organizations. Most of the BEST have a chief-level learning officer and involve leaders as teachers and role models.”

ASTD 2005.

This is where you have to put in the hard work, getting the rest of the organisation to follow through every initiative you introduce. We will look at a number of high level recommendations that were recently developed by Mark Harrison of Kineo in consultation with over a hundred learning professionals in the UK.

He conducted the same exercise for the other components (Alignment, Effectiveness and Efficiency) and those recommendations are listed in the other three companion briefings. At the end of this Kineo Briefing, you’ll get a checklist that can help you work out for yourself the sustainability of your learning strategy.

1.  Plan sustainability in all your learning initiatives

Outside the comfortable world of a workshop, there is often little support and encouragement for learning. The problem is most of the learning we do happens in the workplace over a period of time and relies on people outside the learning and development world. To deal with this, one-off events are being replaced by blended learning solutions which have sustainability built into their design.

You need to:

•  Always ask what happens when a formal programme is finished, how is learning supported and sustained
•  Make learning a continuous process and not single activity based
•  Ensure the processes are kept going even if individual topics may be removed and replaced

2.  Embed the learning processes as business as usual

Once anything is called ‘learning’ or ‘training’, people find it hard to make the time to build up their skills and knowledge. It is often because there is an artificial barrier between self development and doing the job. This is changing though embedding learning in the everyday working environment.

You need to:

•  Enshrine best practice in documented and consistent procedures and processes
•  Make the processes alive by linking them to constantly updated shared resources and assets
•  Show that using the formal processes and templates will make life easier and deliver more effective solutions
•  Benchmark and share with other organisations to continually improve your ideas

3.  Create self-sustaining values

You often see learning initiatives fail when the main stakeholder moves on. You can avoid this by creating a wider group of supporters who understand what you are trying to achieve and are then empowered to make local decisions to sustain the initiative.

You need to:

• Make sure that processes are able to evolve but always against a consistent ongoing core vision for learning in the organisation – the values stay the same but the way you do things may change
• Reduce reliance on a few specific individuals by creating champions committed to the overall vision of learning in your organisation
• Ensure that no programme can be suddenly cancelled by a single individual – spread ownership throughout the business area it is supporting

4.  Build morale and retain talent within your learning and development teams

You will only achieve your goals if the whole learning and development team are behind you. A strong and highly flexible in-house team should be the core of plans.

You need to:

• Outsource where it is sensible but retain capability in-house for all your key functions
• Make training managers involved at all decision-making stages
• Constantly encourage learning and development teams to be exploring new and more effective methods – create multi-skilled deliverers
• Make sure you have regular development planning sessions with all learning and development personnel

5.  Make it easy to get access to learning

Informal and workflow learning (where learning is found just when it is needed) is on the agenda of most forward thinking learning organisations. If you want performance improvement to be sustained people need to have learning in the workplace.

You need to:

• Embed learning into day-to-day work routines
• Offer short learning opportunities
• Build informal learning approaches models within the organisation (with communities of best practice, easy access to content and real support from managers/coaches)

6.  Show your value to the organisation to maintain reputation and credibility of learning

You want your internal customers to buy into your long term plans. They will only do it if you can convince them that they are getting real value from their investment in time and money.

You need to:

• Spread the success stories of formal and informal learning throughout the organisation
• Regularly report on the evidence of organisational impact
• Raise the profile of learning and development by attending key meetings and using regular road shows and learning days for employees to see the opportunities for learning that are available

7.  Develop a strong learning culture within your organisation

If there is a strong learning culture, your initiatives will be far more sustainable.

To ensure this, you need to:

• Always push the importance of learning (both formal and informal) as the key to responding to change
• Decentralise the ownership of learning
• Review learning programmes on a formative and summative basis and widely publicise any improvements you make – show you are continually improving