13 Vital Tips For Creating A High Impact Learning Function

13 Vital Tips For Creating A High Impact Learning Function
Summary: Check out these tips from leaders in top learning organizations and find out what kind of benefits and impacts they are having on the business, as seen through the eyes of Towards Maturity's in-depth research program.

How To Create A High Impact Learning Function

The Towards Maturity Benchmark™ helps organizations focus on improving performance of the Learning and Development team. We do this by helping compare the outputs of an organization’s learning strategy with their peers. More importantly, the Benchmark helps Learning and Development (L&D) leaders compare their tactics for achieving those outcomes against the top performers.

The Towards Maturity Index™ is the lead indicator at the heart of the Towards Maturity Benchmark™ process. Organizations in the top 10% of the index are twice as likely to achieve the benefits they seek from a modernized learning strategy and in 2014 reported 30% fewer barriers than their peers.

We asked some top performing organizations for their tips on how to create a high-impact learning function. This is what they said:

  1. Involve learners up front by understanding their requirements.
  2. Create opportunities for all to access (we included learning zones for our manufacturing plants).
  3. Run a pilot that focuses on both technology and user engagement.
  4. Ensure senior management give visible support from the beginning.
  5. Align the organizational development plan with the business plan.
  6. Engage the business, listen and set up in-touch strategically aligned Organizational Development (OD) - Learning and Development senior steering groups.
  7. Develop an Organizational Development - Learning and Development operating model to align with the business plan and develop a Learning and Development Toolkit and up skill Learning and Development professionals to deliver impact.
  8. Lead from the front – build opportunities for your Learning and Development team to accelerate and expand their capacity (to avoid being overlooked by the community you serve).
  9. Model community and sharing and influence leaders to embrace it too.
  10. Start adding value to your learner community by curating useful existing content in meaningful ways.
  11. Consider how to build once and share across a variety of platforms – give staff choice by placing your learning in their own hands so it is accessible to them when and where they need it.
  12. Create interactive job aids and templates to provide support and encourage consistent application of learning at the grassroots or at the moment of need, on the job.
  13. Use existing internal social sharing platforms to not only share information and formulate discussion, but also to access global tools and templates.

The DNA of a Top Deck L&D Team infographic below shares some of the data from our Benchmark about the characteristics of Top Learning organizations:

Infographic: The DNA of a Top Deck Learning and Development Team

This infographic shows us how those in the top 10% (the Top Deck™) are getting more benefits from a modernising learning strategy.

Find out how to become a Top Deck Learning Team

Download your free copy of Modernizing Learning: Delivering Results (2014) today at http://towardsmaturity.org/article/2014/11/05/modernising-learning-delivering-results-2014/

Thanks to the following Learning and Development leaders for sharing their top tips with us:

Sarah Lindsell, Director, Global and UK Learning Technology and Transformation, PriceWaterhouseCoopers; Kandy Woodfield, Director of Learning and Enterprise, NatCen Social Research; Jane Daly, Head of Head Office L&D, Marks and Spencer; Stuart Miller, Global IT Director, Worldmark.

The Towards Maturity Benchmark™

The Towards Maturity Benchmark™ is a useful tool to help you understand how effective your Learning and Development strategies are and how you compare to peers and top performing learning organisations.

If you are keen to find out how effective your Learning and Development team is, make sure you benchmark this year: it’s open until 31 July. More than 3,500 organisations have taken part to date, so there is plenty of data for you to benchmark against.

Start Your Benchmark