Maximize the talent in your learning department.

Many companies are facing layoffs. Get ahead of this and provide a plan for how your learning department staff members can act in a more versatile manner or be more flexible with their current jobs. Consider some of these options.

1. Encourage job sharing among learning department staff members.

2. Offer sabbaticals to learning department staff members.

3. Provide essential training to learning department staff members to ensure that they are at the top of their games.

4. Allow trainers to rotate between jobs within and outside of the learning department. Trainers are typically subject matter experts from a particular discipline. A sales trainer today may be a sales account manager tomorrow. 

5. Review other alternative work arrangements that may satisfy your employees while simultaneously working in favor of your reduced budget. 

Ensure that all learning programs have strategic links to business goals.

During a time when business leaders find it difficult to project future success, they are no less accountable for the stability and profitability of their organizations. Help your business leaders make decisions by determining the resources required to reach and end goal. If implementation of the goal requires a human resource, it is more than ever to make sure that human resource has the skills and training to get the job done. Keep these things in mind.
 
1. Focus the learning opportunities on strategic goals of the organization. When you focus on the core goals, you can identify the competencies you need to develop and ultimately spend your training dollars more wisely.

2. Gain support and active engagement from the C-suite before launching any learning strategies. Everything is being watched these days. It’s worth your time to get business leader buy-in before taking a plunge.

3. Align every learning program with business objectives and understand how to calculate the financial impact of the performance improvement achieved as a result of the learning. Understand and report the program’s return-on-investment. Business leaders used to live by it and then we found some more creative ways to interpret successes or quantify projects in other ways. Now, we’re back to basics. Make sure your learning program has a positive ROI.

Keep in mind that you, your department, the learning profession, and your company are not alone in this crisis. ASTD will help to bring you best practices across industries to help you triumph as conditions improve. The bottom line is that multiple systems are broken and there is now a change to rebuild. Let learning be a leaders in the renovation of business infrastructure.

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