Perhaps you're successfully holding on to your training dollars and
have not had to deal with major cuts to your training budget.
Perhaps you have been struggling to keep your training budget
intact and are being forced to do more with less. Or perhaps your
situation lies somewhere between these two opposites. Wherever you
find yourself in today's challenging business environment, it is
clear that in your role as a learning professional, your training
content and your applications must create proven and ongoing value
for your organization.
The learning advantage: Create value - and be able to
communicate that value
Once you align your learning efforts to bottom-line metrics, your
case for learning initiatives becomes stronger. If you are viewed
as a strategic enhancer, your value to your organization increases.
At given intervals, monitor the pulse of what value means for your
decision makers. Their priorities represent a moving target. Keep
your plan current, vital, and reflective of what value means
today. At a time when business skills are more important
than ever, show yourself to be an agile, flexible, and vital 21st
century workforce development professional who understands business
and the need to provide value to the bottom line.
Use technology to support learning
Think about what options and opportunities exist to leverage
technology to achieve learning outcomes. The great thing about
technology is that each method of distribution can be used for so
many different purposes. Take webinars, for example. How many
different ways can you brainstorm to use webinars to target
strategic learning events and outcomes? Instead of allowing the
myriad technology choices to become overwhelming, isolate each
technology available, and review it to see how it might support
your strategic plan. Then, watch your ideas flow.
Plan for success
The constant barrage of technology applications and solutions
coming at us can seem mind-boggling. You may find it helpful to
keep a planning document at your fingertips, in which you can
capture information and ideas and track possible learning
applications for your employees, customers, and partners. A
planning document can help you organize your thoughts so that you
can ask the experts the right questions. With that as your starting
point, you can then identify the elements that support your
strategic and workforce development plans. It's a powerful and
simple way to chunk a lot of information at one time, and over time
you will develop your own template to identify technology options
that will support your success.
Your goal is to keep your training budget intact because you
understand that learning can provide a true competitive advantage
to your organization. When that happens and you find yourself
holding on to training dollars that might have otherwise been lost
in budget cuts, this book will have served its purpose.