Getting more out of your training and talent as a company!

STEP 1: DEFINE THE PATH TO BE FOLLOWED BY YOUR ORGANISATION

Outline the path that your organisation wants to follow in the short and medium term. Is it the aim to conquer a new market segment, digitalise customer processes or green your production process? Only when you know your company’s strategy can you get down to work. The best way to achieve this is to talk to as many job groups as possible, from the CEO and middle management to staff in production, marketing and customer service.

STEP 2: IDENTIFY URGENT SKILLS

What knowledge and skills does the organisation need to stay on course? Here again, it is essential to talk to various internal parties, from business developers to the support team. Examples of urgent collective skills may include project-based working or the application of lean and scrum working methods.

STEP 3: SCAN THE EXISTING SKILLS

Which skills that are crucial for your future strategy are already available? You can find an answer to this by means of an internal skills scan, for example a digital survey. If you know what talent you have in house, you can draw up tailor-made learning initiatives.

STEP 4: ORGANISE FURTHER TRAINING COURSES

The next step? Up- or reskilling the current human capital in your organisation. The skills scan shows you the training needs among your staff. This allows you to set up targeted further or retraining initiatives. Another option is job crafting, whereby employees restructure their jobs themselves.

STEP 5: LOOK FOR EXTERNAL REINFORCEMENTS

Does this process reveal certain blind spots? If so, don’t hesitate to call in outside help. For example, is there insufficient knowledge of the digitalisation of your service offering? Try looking outside the boundaries of the organisation. During this step, managers and HR professionals are often confronted with the question of whether every member of staff can stay on board. What if certain roles have become superfluous or there is no scope for retraining? In that case, a rational choice has to be made. It becomes clear which learning needs are priority and these should be adapted per target group. Is adopting a customer-oriented approach an important collective skill for you? In that case, the contents of a course on this subject will be different for the marketing department and customer services.

STEP 6: PUT THE TRAINING INTO PRACTICE

As an HR or L&D professional, you naturally want your training initiatives to yield a real result. So determine who are your stakeholders. They help ensure that the knowledge and skills learnt are anchored in working practices. They support the training initiatives before, during and after the course. So learning becomes a shared responsibility. The team consultation is an ideal time to share training knowledge. What tip do you take with you to your next customer meeting? What have we as a team drawn from the training together? Of course, staff also need to have the time and space to put new insights and skills into practice. This is the only way the training course will be anchored in the organisation in the long term.

TRAINING OF TOMORROW: making the difference with your training

The staying power of hybrid learning

Many companies have moved towards hybrid learning. And it is proving successful. Research indicates that in many companies, more hours are spent on formal and informal learning than in the past. Using scientific brain-based learning principles and hybrid learning design keys properly during online training courses yields more effective results. Evaluations show that knowledge and skills are processed better with hybrid training than with exclusively classical training.

Ongoing training

Of course, there is no magic formula for achieving your training goals. We have to make sure that training leads to the desired impact that customers want to see and at the same time that we stay close to the experience of trainees. We use brief reflection and processing assignments to give participants the opportunity to try out the new knowledge and skills in practice. This encourages the new, desired behaviour at the workplace. In addition, dare to divide learning times into shorter periods. For instance, a one-day training course can be converted into a coaching path consisting of three two-hour sessions spread over around four weeks. One week before the start, the participants are given an assignment as preparation, such as some questions to think about after they have watched a TED Talk. For the sake of a feeling of psychological security, it is best if the first contact remains conventional. In the interim, trainees are given a digital learning stimulus when a message from the course is repeated. In addition, they work on the material in sub-groups to prepare for the final contact. As a trainer, your role is to create a context in which the dialogue between participants and their peers, managers or sparring partners is encouraged. The role of the mentor is crucial here.

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