To Do or Not To Do: Learning and Development Outsourcing
Learning and development teams have a lot to do. However, your bandwidth is often limited. As teams rapidly expand, evolving training needs arise due to technological advancements, and people want to see an impact before they move the budgets ahead; it’s a lot for an L&D team to handle.
Given the wide range of learning and development needs, L&D strategies need to make space for external providers. Is it the right choice for your team? To answer that, let’s try to understand learning and development outsourcing in detail below.
Learning and development outsourcing means hiring an outside company to manage employee training. Instead of just using your own staff, you can use the skills and resources of special L&D providers.
This teamwork lets you access more knowledge, the latest technologies, and new training ideas that you may not have on your own. By outsourcing some L&D jobs or even complete training programs, you improve training efforts and reach your strategic goals more efficiently without overwhelming the function. It becomes important when we note that about 87% companies surveyed by McKinsey were either experiencing a capability gap or expecting it pretty soon.
So, the question is, how do we outsource L&D?
L&D outsourcing can take many forms, such as:
Fully outsourced L&D ops: As the name suggests, the entire training and development program is managed by an external provider. This service is most commonly used by companies that lack the internal resources and bandwidth to conduct required training. It includes collaboration with your leadership to develop effective strategies and then complete the execution of the action plans with analytics, reporting, and feedback.
Project-based outsourcing for L&D: As the name suggests, this includes hiring relevant specialists, consultants, and/or vendors to meet your company’s learning and development needs in a specific area. The applications of outsourcing work like this commonly include instructional design agencies, content development houses, video production companies, eLearning development specialists, and assessment design experts.
Individual contractors: You can also use L&D outsourcing to complement your organization’s internal learning development initiatives. For instance, you can hire an instructional designer to turn the know-how of subject matter experts into easily understandable learning content. Similarly, individual contractors and freelancers are available for many functional areas of L&D, such as technical writing, LMS administration, and learning experience design.
Moreover, certain tasks in L&D are good for outsourcing. This is often because these tasks need special skills or extra resources, like:
Content Development: Creating training materials that are helpful and engaging takes a lot of time. It also needs special skills in designing instruction. By outsourcing content development to experts, you get high-quality, tailored training materials for their specific training needs.
Compliance Training: It is tough to keep up with changing rules and compliance standards. This task takes a lot of time and resources. Outsourcing compliance training makes sure your workforce receives the correct and current training in a fun and effective way.
Technology Implementation and Support: Setting up and managing systems for learning, like Learning Management Systems (LMS), needs technical skills. When you outsource these tasks to experts, you enjoy smooth integration and ongoing help. This also allows your IT team to focus on other important business systems.
Why should you consider outsourcing L&D?
One big reason why more companies are choosing to outsource L&D is the many benefits it provides.
In the survey cited above, McKinsey also notes that half the people noticing skill gaps put “reskilling” as the most important combat move for their teams. But, that means an intense run for already burdened L&D teams! Thus, when you hire experts for certain training tasks, your internal teams are free to focus more on important business tasks. It keeps your operations smoother and improves overall work efficiency. Plus, reskilling ensures cost savings as compared to hiring.
Outsourcing also allows you to work with top L&D professionals and new technologies without the hassle of hiring people, investing in infrastructure, or dealing with training costs for your internal staff. Whether it’s leadership development, technical skills training, or compliance programs, you can find specialized help to create effective learning experiences. It’s a great way to develop talent in new areas which are not already present in your team. This, in turn, boosts employee satisfaction and helps you curb turnover.
Things to consider before L&D outsourcing
But, there are costs to manage when your are thinking of learning and development outsourcing. First up, you have to pay the vendors and contractors you will engage. You will also need to ensure that they have an open communication channel with your team, potentially bringing up costs for managing the vendor relationship, communication, and tracking performance.
Think on both the fronts: the benefits you get and the costs you pay before deciding.
Primarily, consider these questions when you are thinking of outsourcing L&D ops:
What is the cost structure, and how are fixed versus variable costs managed?
What quality control processes are in place to ensure consistency?
Who holds IP ownership, and what are the terms around it?
How will this integrate with our internal teams and existing workflows?
Can this solution scale to meet growing demands or needs?
Are there any specific geographic or cultural requirements we should consider?
Before outsourcing, you should carefully look at your Learning and Development functions. You need to clearly tell apart which activities are core and which are non-core.
Core L&D functions are those that are closely linked to the main business processes. These tasks strongly impact the your company’s goals. Usually, it’s best to keep these core functions in-house. This helps maintain the company’s culture, values, and long-term vision.
Non-core L&D functions, on the other hand, often require special skills or knowledge that may not be available within the company. These could include tasks like content development, platform administration, or parts of compliance training.
By outsourcing non-core functions, you can free up their internal resources. This allows you to focus more on important initiatives while getting help from outside experts. A few scenarios where you can outsource L&D are:
#1 You have to scale L&D ops rapidly
Sudden demands are not new. They happen often when a company rapidly expands operations or the competitive environment changes quickly. As a result, you need to roll out training yesterday and implement it today already. When growth outpaces the internal L&D capacity, you need support. Outsourced L&D operations are a great saver in such situations because you can reach more areas quickly with them. It’s a good way to get through a major product launch that requires everyone to brush up on their knowledge or a new offshore team that uses a different language than yours.
#2 Your team needs specialized training
Another scenario where learning and development outsourcing can help you is when the needed expertise is not core to your business. In such cases, you would hardly have enough internal experts to create and guide training programs for highly technical or regulated areas. These L&D programs are often shaped like one-off programs outside the core business focus, have certifications requiring accredited providers, or involve complex simulations or specialized learning technology. For most L&D teams, building such capacity is a big ask; thus, outsourcing is the way to go.
#3 You need to mitigate infrastructure cost
Not all training can happen quietly in rooms with just a whiteboard. When training involves high infrastructure costs that outweigh outsourcing, you should go this route. For instance, your company ideally needs leadership coaches for people managers. But you do not have enough senior leaders who can double up as coaches. Executive coaching is expensive. What’s the way out? An AI coach like Merlin for people managers fills in. Similarly, high infrastructure cost could mean investing in high-end video production needs or VR/AR content development. Large-scale content localization projects are another area you can outsource instead of building in-house capacity.
When should you not outsource L&D?
On the flip side, some scenarios exist where learning and development outsourcing does not make sense, such as:
#1 Your core business knowledge is involved
When learning directly relates to competitive advantage, you must keep it in-house. Why? At this stage, you are likely delving into proprietary processes and methodologies. These could include company-specific employee development practices and strategic capability-building programs that are closely tied to your team’s context and challenges. As noted above, core L&D areas directly impact business outcomes and maintain the company’s culture, values, and long-term vision. Hence, they need to remain under your purview.
#2 Your sensitive information/IP is involved
Like culture and core values, your company’s sensitive information, such as IPs and internal processes, must remain confidential. In such instances, you must not outsource learning and development initiatives. It includes programs involving unannounced or unreleased products, strategy-related training, competitive intelligence, and market positioning.
#3 Your L&D plan needs continuous evaluation and updates
Training needs are often dynamic. Contacting vendors to update learning programs as your business priorities shift would create a significant burden. It is commonly observed with agile learning initiatives tied to product development and programs closely tied to employee feedback. A high degree of integration with internal processes and workflows can impede synergy with external L&D service providers. In such cases, you should stick with in-house learning and development plans.
To sum up
Making smart choices about which parts of L&D to outsource is important. It helps you use outside skills while keeping control over key learning projects. First, look at which L&D tasks take a lot of resources, need special skills, or can be done better by outside teams. You should think about some things like how complex the training materials are, whether you have the skills in-house, how urgent the training is, and the possible cost savings from outsourcing.
Successfully handling the challenges of L&D outsourcing needs a well-organized plan based on industry standards. It’s not just about handing off tasks. It’s about building partnerships that match your organization’s values, goals, and focus on promoting a culture of ongoing learning.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Build your L&D plan with a free template!
Grab free resources to boost L&D and leadership development functions with Risely.
Horse Leadership Training: A New Approach to Leadership Development Leadership development and training is suffering heavy stress under today’s business…
Learning and development are critical to professional success. It is not just yours but that of your team when your job role includes the word L&D. However, the big question is, what should someone learn? Is that course on AI enough for the whole company? Or does the matter merit more consideration? I’d say it surely does. Learning needs are not exactly easy to spot. At times, they are hidden behind layers of team hierarchy, sloppy task completion, and performance reviews that always indicate a moderate level of achievement.
In this blog post, we will track down learning needs—what they are, what they look like, and, most importantly, how can we spot them from a mile away with solid analytical processes.
Any organization has a key set of objectives that it wants to accomplish. To ensure that the motion goes forward, every employee needs a certain set of skills, knowledge, and capabilities. Yet, some teams or team members might sometimes fall short of the requirements. These gaps that L&D needs to bridge are termed learning needs.
Learning needs at work refer to the skills, knowledge, and competencies that your people need to effectively contribute to organizational objectives.
Your team’s learning needs can be in many areas including the hard and soft skills they possess, leadership and management capabilities, industry knowledge, cultural competence, and compliance issues to name a few.
We can also look at learning needs in a three tiered structure based on what scope they have.
Organizational learning needs: These concern the entire organization and often arise from bigger reasons like technological advancements calling for shift in how people work or new compliance training needs coming from legal changes.
Operational learning needs: These are broadly concerned with the day to day activities of your particular team members and the knowledge, skills, and capabilities needed to accomplish them properly.
Individual learning needs: At the last level, the learning needs are about the individual employee who might be facing performance issues or undergoing job transitions.
Learning needs show up at different points of time. For instance, let’s assume we have a team member named Lily taking up a leadership role after working as an individual contributor for about four years. Lily is an excellent person and professional, and her tech skills have no match.
But there’s some problem: Lily often likes to stay away from trouble. Why is that? Upon some probing, you learn that Lily avoids confrontation and would rather not be assertive. It can lead to problems when Lily becomes a manager, has to handle team conflicts, and even address mismanagement. This is not a unique issue at all, most managers remain unsupported at work with corporate learning strategies overlooking their needs even when they are out in plain sight.
Here, learning needs arise from professional changes. But that’s not all; there are more reasons behind learning needs arising.
Why do learning needs arise at work?
Learning needs are essentially caused by a shift:
Changing organizational objectives: Performance objectives and the learning and development plans needed to support them are defined by what the organization aims to achieve. Thus, new learning needs arise when an organization undergoes a major strategic pivot. For instance, if an insurance provider decides to offer all of their services online, their employees need to enhance digital literacy.
Changing organizational context: A company’s objectives are not moved in isolation. More often than not, they result from some external movement, such as shifting customer expectations, competitive pressure, or changes in their external environment (which includes political, social, legal, economic, and technological movements.)
Evolving technology and industry: This must be the most evident because AI now seems omnipresent. Several organizations are trying to use AI to cut down on expenses and support operations. The HR tech giant Lattice even set up digital employees with similar calendars to humans. But what do all these changes mean for people? We have all learned to interact with AI with safety and privacy considerations. Those in roles like content writing and software engineering have integrated AI into their processes. L&D teams are also catching up to speed with AI training for workers.
Changing job roles: Learning needs also arise when one changes jobs. This can include learning a new industrial context while performing similar hard tasks at a new company, taking up a leadership role within the same team, or switching departments internally. In these scenarios, employees need to learn more to effectively perform their roles.
Performance gaps: The discrepancy between current skills and expected skills leads to performance gaps, which are also the biggest and most common informants of learning gaps at work.
Why do learning needs at work matter?
If learning needs remain hidden in the workplace, it can lead to a host of negative consequences. Employees may continue to underperform, leading to decreased productivity and satisfaction. Unaddressed learning needs can also result in missed opportunities for growth and innovation within the organization.
Moreover, if these needs are not identified and addressed promptly, it leads to higher turnover rates as employees feel stagnant or undervalued. Ultimately, the organization may struggle to adapt to changing market demands and maintain a competitive edge.
Finding hidden learning needs is important for promoting individual learning and reaching learning outcomes. We can create better development plans by looking deeper than just surface-level observations. This allows us to meet the specific needs of each employee, which leads to effective and meaningful learning experiences. Let’s understand each of these in detail.
What is a learning needs analysis?
A learning needs analysis is a systematic process used to identify the gap between the current knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees and what is required for them to perform effectively in their roles. It involves assessing individual and organizational learning requirements through methods such as surveys, interviews, observations, and data analysis.
Where will a learning needs analysis help you?
A learning needs analysis will help you figure out:
What skills, competencies and knowledge areas does your team need to work on?
Who needs to work on what aspect and till what extent?
What learning gaps are causing performance issues on the team?
What are the vital learning needs for your organizational objectives?
Training needs vs. Learning needs: Which way to go?
They sound similar. They are somewhat similar, but they are not exactly the same. Learning needs offer a broader scope of activity and allow you to think of long term L&D and organizational objectives and tie in with the employee’s personal growth objectives too. Training needs analysis is concerned with answering what training should be offered to who and for how long.
Primarily, we can sum it up as:
Training Needs
Learning Needs
Training needs focus on the specific skills or knowledge employees must acquire to perform their job effectively. It is more task-oriented and relates to immediate job requirements.
Learning needs encompass a broader scope, including personal growth, long-term development, and overall career progression. They go beyond job-specific skills to encompass continuous learning and future readiness in a rapidly evolving work environment.
To be honest, neither approach is entirely right or wrong. Depending on your context, you need to pick and choose the right one for you.
Symptoms that your team has hidden learning needs
Before we start searching for learning needs, there are a few basic symptoms that can give us a head-start. Consider that your team needs help, if:
Decreased motivation or enthusiasm for work tasks.
Difficulty adapting to changes in processes or technology.
Low confidence in tackling new challenges or projects.
Poor communication or collaboration skills within teams.
Increased errors or lack of efficiency in daily tasks.
Methods of spotting learning needs at work
There are several effective methods that you can use to identify learning needs at work, such as:
#1 Skill gap analysis
A major part of discovering hidden learning needs is doing a thorough skills gap analysis. This means figuring out the difference between the skills needed for a job and the skills the employee currently has. By identifying these gaps, you can create focused training programs that aim at certain areas for improvement. You can use templates and guides for these processes, like Risely’s free skills gap analysis template for individuals and Risely’s free skills matrix template for teams.
Ignoring the real issue is like putting a bandage on a serious cut. It may give short-term relief, but it doesn’t fix the problem. Likewise, just adding training to a skills gap without knowing why it’s there will not give lasting results. On top of gap analysis, using techniques like a root cause analysis to understand not just the what and why of the problem but also the how aspect of it will help you in turning insights into action.
#2 Observation and overviews
Another helpful method is to watch employees in their daily tasks. This can show hidden signs of skills gaps. For example, you can check how good they are at using new software, how they communicate in teams, or how they solve problems when they face challenges. The best part is that you can outsource this job to their managers. The direct managers often have insights and ideas on how their employees can perform the best. This goes in tandem with using performance reviews as a source of information.
#3 Employee inputs
Surveys are a good way to collect a lot of numerical data. When you make surveys for a needs analysis, try to use different types of questions. Include multiple-choice questions, rating scales, and open-ended questions. This will help you get plenty of feedback.
A good method to add a qualitative angle to the above information is to hold focus groups with employees, especially those who are directly affected by the issue. These talks can show what challenges employees face every day. They help find out if there are deeper problems that stop workers from doing their best. For instance, if the onboarding process is wrong or if employees don’t have the tools they need, this could cause a performance gap.
Interviews, on the other hand, let you gather detailed information. They help you understand what individuals think and feel. One-on-one interviews give employees a chance to share their career goals, learning styles, and where they think they need help, but it could mean a lot of workload for you!
Integrating learning needs with L&D strategy
Gathering data is just part of the challenge. To really make the most of this exercise, you should organize your findings into useful insights. This means not just listing the gaps, but also grouping them into clear categories. Not all learning needs are equally important for business success. It is vital to match learning efforts with business goals. Showing this clear link between L&D programs and real business results will help you get support from senior leaders. This also makes it a strong argument for more investment in your L&D programs.
This matching means understanding what is important for the organization and how each team helps meet those goals. For example, if a company wants to improve customer satisfaction, skills like communication, product knowledge, and customer service should be the focus. Plus, when employees see how their personal learning paths relate to the company’s goals, they are likelier to be engaged. When they are committed to their growth, this leads to a more invested and motivated workforce.
Identifying and addressing hidden learning needs at work is important for helping employees grow and for the growth of the organization. You can find skills gaps that are not easy to see using effective methods like surveys, interviews, and data analysis. It is important to focus on these learning needs based on their impact and connect them to business goals. This way, employee training can be more targeted. Combining learning needs with the overall learning and development (L&D) plan and including clear success metrics helps you effectively demonstrate impact.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Get started with a free skills matrix template!
Grab free L&D resources and more for holistic growth of people managers. Only on Risely.
Horse Leadership Training: A New Approach to Leadership Development Leadership development and training is suffering heavy stress under today’s business…
How To Build Learner Personas For L&D? Free Template
For every learning designer, the root question is who will use this content. All your actions to ensure that the learning plan and content match the ultimate goals at every level stem from this answer. But we cannot design tailored courses for every learner out there, can we? Not in the traditional sense. AI is changing this by including hyper-personalization in its action plans. Yet not every type and form of training takes well to it, and learner personas act as a great starting point in the design process for learning and development teams.
By knowing your learners’ journey well, you can create learning experiences that really connect with them. This is where learner personas help. These are semi-fictional images of your best learners based on real information. Using learner personas helps you build training programs that are personal and effective. It leads to real results. In this blog, we will learn all about these personas of learners at work.
Think of learner personas as models that show the typical traits, backgrounds, and aims of the people you want to reach. They provide more than just basic details.
A learner persona is a fictionalized representation of your target group or audience. It is used extensively in designing learning and development programs.
They give important clues about your learners’ needs, dreams, worries, and goals. When you understand these different parts, you can design your training content and the way you deliver it. This will help meet the special needs of your target audience and improve the overall learning experience. Ultimately, you get an impactful L&D strategy!
Learner personas are similar to the profiles of ideal buyers and consumers that marketing professionals use to tailor their recommendations and fine-tune the offerings for better matching. The use case of personas in learning follows the same principle by creating programs for a hypothetical person who is an average summation of your learners.
Where can learner personas help you?
Effective learner personas are more than just demographics. They show real details about your target audience, like how they learn, what drives them, and what challenges they face. By doing thorough audience analysis and creating clear learner personas, you set up a strong base for training programs that work well.
These personas help you go beyond basic training materials. You can create content that truly fits your audience’s needs and learning styles. You can understand common characteristics, like how they prefer to learn, what they already know, and where they need help. This way, you can make training that is engaging and relevant. The outcome is better learner involvement and improved knowledge retention, because you design with empathy for the learner.
That gives us many use cases for learner personas in L&D, such as:
Curriculum Design: They help connect your training content to specific learning outcomes, making sure it is relevant.
Content Creation: You can adjust the format, language, and examples to connect better with your target audience.
Delivery Optimization: They help you choose the right delivery methods and technology.
But that does not mean that learner personas are the best thing out there. There are many pitfalls associated with misuse and overuse of learner personas in the L&D function. While learner personas are incredibly valuable tools in most training scenarios, there are instances where their use may not be as beneficial. One such scenario is when dealing with highly homogenous learner groups where individual differences are minimal. In such cases, investing time and resources in creating detailed personas may not yield significant returns.
What are the common pitfalls for learner personas in L&D?
Overgeneralization: Developing overly broad personas that do not accurately represent the diversity within your target audience makes them powerless as a tool.
Static personas: Your audience evolves and changes. Similarly, the level of learning maturity in your organization also grows over time. Thus, your personas of learners need to evolve with these. Otherwise, you will continue to design L&D with a non-existent person in mind.
Neglecting feedback: Not incorporating feedback from learners to refine and adjust the personas over time is another major issue. Remember, learner personas should be dynamic tools that adapt to changing needs.
Lack of validation: Relying solely on assumptions or limited data to create personas without validating them through research or direct input from the audience creates trouble as it can make you biased and stereotypical.
Ignoring outliers: Disregarding unique or outlier characteristics within your audience that could impact learning preferences and outcomes.
How can you build and use learner personas for L&D?
Creating effective learner personas is a smart process. It focuses on collecting, studying, and understanding data to clearly show who your target audience is. Let’s break it down into a few simple steps:
It’s about changing plain data into valuable images of your learners.
#1 Gathering and Analyzing Data for Your Personas
The success of good learner personas depends on having rich and detailed data. It’s important to collect both numbers and personal stories to fully understand your learners. You can use surveys and data analysis for facts about demographics and learning likes before averaging them out to get the profile.
But that’s just the beginning. Go deeper by gathering personal insights through interviews and focus groups. Ask participants to talk about their experiences, struggles, and hopes related to learning. The aim is to discover the ‘why’ behind how they learn.
Looking at this valuable data shows patterns and trends. It helps identify different groups in your target audience. This could lead to finding one main learner persona, along with secondary personas that represent other key parts of your learners.
#2 Validating Personas with Stakeholders
Once you make your first learner personas, it’s important to work with others to confirm them. Get ideas from subject matter experts, team members, and even future learners. This helps make sure your personas are correct and relevant.
Working with stakeholders helps catch any unrealistic profiles or unconscious bias that might slip in during development. Open talks and feedback help you make your personas better and more useful for training decisions. Keep in mind that creating learner personas is a process that changes over time. Be ready to adjust based on feedback from others.
There are two main actions here:
Stakeholder Feedback: Seek input from subject matter experts, team members, and potential learners. Specifically ask for feedback on whether the personas resonate with their experiences and observations.
User Testing: Conduct interviews or focus groups with actual learners to see if the personas align with their behaviors and preferences. Observe how users interact with your learning materials and compare it against the persona traits.
#3 Crafting Your Learner Personas
Bring your learner personas to life by transforming data-driven insights into relatable, easy-to-understand profiles. There are many ways to do it. You can use a Word Doc, or a slide deck, or even ready to use templates for learner personas like the one we have.
Structure the information using a clear and concise format, providing a snapshot of each persona. A learner persona should include details such as demographics (age, gender, location), learning preferences, motivations, goals, challenges faced in learning, preferred learning styles, tech proficiency level, and any other relevant information that gives a holistic understanding of the individual’s learning journey.
These insights create a vivid representation of the target audience, guiding the development of tailored development strategies. The key is to humanize the data and make it relatable for effective decision-making in training and educational planning.
You should consider incorporating elements like:
Element
Description
Example
Persona Name
A memorable name representing the persona
Tech-Savvy Sarah
Job Title
Reflects their role within the organization
Marketing Manager
Skill Level
Indicates their proficiency in relevant areas
Intermediate
Pain Points
Highlights key challenges they face
Struggles to keep up with the latest digital marketing trends
Learning Preferences
Describes their preferred learning methods
Enjoys interactive online courses and video tutorials
These tangible representations make it easier for your design team to relate to and understand the diverse needs of your learners. For instance, let’s try to create the learner persona of Andrew Antonoff, a Marketing Manager at XYZ Corp.
Learner Persona Example (with Free Template)
We start the process by obtaining hypothetical personal details for Andrew. Since he is a marketing manager, we develop educational and professional information that is in tune with that. Further, we attempt to understand Andrew’s personality type, which can help you judge the person’s openness to learning, likely reaction to different training methods, and preferences.
Similarly, the professional goals and challenges showcase what impacts the learner regularly as they carry on their daily business. All of this context comes together to help us summarize who Andrew is and add a quote that goes with his personality.
In the second part, we focus on learning-specific details. This is a critical area since we are designing the persona for L&D-related issues.
Does that sound good? You can do the same with our free learner persona template, which is packed with more insights and support for L&D teams.
Conclusion
In conclusion, creating accurate learner personas is crucial for successful learning and development (L&D) strategies. By knowing what your audience needs and likes, you can adjust your learning materials. This helps keep them engaged and helps them remember more. Use the step-by-step guide to collect data, check it with stakeholders, and make detailed learner personas. These personas serve as a guide for making personalized and effective learning experiences for different styles. Embrace learner personas to improve your training programs and make your organization’s learning culture better over time.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Grab Risely’s free learner persona template now!
Start solving critical L&D challenges with Risely holding your hand.
Think Of These 4 Trends In Your Corporate Learning Strategy
Think of corporate learning, and the picture in your mind brings the worst of two worlds together:
It’s too rigid, like workplace structures.
It’s too boring, like some classroom lectures.
It’s often outdated, like educational curricula.
But the story does not need to turn out the same way every time. In fact, it happens because of some long-standing beliefs and behaviors among the designers and providers of corporate learning experiences. As an L&D professional, making them effective is a key part of your success; that’s why you should tune into the corporate learning trends of 2025 to keep up with the new and let go of the old.
In this blog, we will explore four key corporate learning trends to shape 2025.
This blog will highlight four main trends that are changing corporate learning. It will also show how you can use these trends to meet your company’s strategic objectives and reach your business goals.
#1 AI is more than a buzzword!
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how companies teach their employees. It provides new and creative ways to make learning more personal. This is improving the learning experience for workers. As AI technology becomes better, we will likely see more advanced uses in corporate training programs.
In a recent conversation with Inna Horvath, a learning strategist, we understood that the scope of corporate learning strategy is frequently misunderstood. Many L&D teams assume AI is about creating content at speed and scale, but that’s where the trouble comes in. AI struggles with originality and authenticity.
The effective ways to integrate AI into a corporate learning strategy are sometimes different and surprising, such as creating personalized learning experiences for your employees or scaling up initiatives that rely on human presence right now. Inna’s shared a way to best sum up the idea: “The goal is not to substitute humans but to make AI your thought partner.”
One of the biggest benefits of AI in corporate learning is how it delivers personalized learning experiences. Instead of using a one-size-fits-all style, AI can look at learner data. This includes skills, learning preferences, and career goals to make custom learning paths.
The changes have been coming since a while. For instance, Air Methods, a helicopter company that trains pilots in-house ditched conventional training for a more modern cloud-based platform that leverages AI to support learners as and when they need. The program is adaptive, it stays on a topic as long as the learner needs, until they are prepared to ace it. And this was back in 2016!
We keep a similar idea in mind while working on leadership development solutions at Risely. Given the number of variables that shape up a leader’s context (team size, reporting structure, years of experience, industry, learning preferences, time and financial constraints, openness, etc., to name a few), finding the right fit for a coach is a hard task. An AI coach like Merlin cuts down the struggle here by adapting to the leaders’ context and providing learning at their pace.
In the same vein, AI platforms can suggest online courses, learning resources, and development opportunities based on what each employee needs. LinkedIn Learning is putting this into action quite effectively. This tailored approach makes learning more interesting. It also helps employees gain the specific skills needed to succeed in their jobs and reach your strategic objectives.
#2 Corporate learning or employee development?
It looks like a semantic difference, but the impact is bigger. Learning at work is not just another check box you can tick if you are able to. It’s doing much more for organizations in 2024. Your corporate learning strategy:
shapes experiences of employees
contributes to employer brand
is a factor in turnover and talent attraction
offers you a competitive edge
That’s too much value to leave on the table with yet another cookie-cutter program. According to a survey, the post-COVID distributed workforce believes heavily in developing their skills outside the workplace. Their career paths matter greatly and even affect whether they say yes or no to your job offers.
And yet, only about one-fourth of the people surveyed by Gartner felt confident in their career progressing at their current organizations. The rest seek opportunities that promise better career growth and higher care toward their long-term development. In 2025, you cannot let your team feel unsure and insecure if you want them to remain 100% committed.
Thus, a corporate learning strategy for 2025 calls for integrating business plans with the learner’s plans. Your broad L&D strategy stems from business objectives, and it needs to join hands with your team members’ personal and professional goals. When this synergy is established, conversations about mutually contributing to a learner program and seeking participant buy-in become much easier. 9 out of 10 organizations are committed to this idea, wherein they are using a corporate learning strategy as a part of their retention strategy.
#3 How’s the manager?
At least a few job tasks are set to be eliminated by AI; that’s true for managerial roles, which are assumed to be safe from technological advancements. AI in management is obviously not going to be a decision-maker. Still, it can be your team’s analyst or auditor with the capabilities it possesses today and will have shortly. Management jobs are also prone to layoffs quite heavily recently.
The second point is that the new workers from the Gen Z are not keen on becoming managers. Wasn’t it the marker of success two decades ago? It surely was when my professional journey started. This disillusionment stems from the fact that people managers appear to be one of the most over-blamed and least supported parts of an organization. Did you get a layoff to announce? Call the manager. Two people argued? Call the manager. Everyone asks where the manager is, but no one asks how the manager is.
It’s high time we think of that question more while planning a corporate learning strategy. This is particularly true for the people managers down in the trenches, sitting away from attention and watching yet another assigned webinar without any real-time support to overcome the emotional burden and stress that their role creates.
A holistic learning approach looks at more than just technical skills. It includes emotional intelligence, social learning, and well-being. Companies are starting to see how important it is to create a learning culture. This culture helps workers grow and develop. When you focus on the whole person, they can build a more involved, strong, and flexible team. This method matches the idea of putting employee well-being first because it is key to success in an organization.
Plus, training people to manage and lead others better brings twin benefits:
They can effectively manage teams and build further value for your organization. They are already attuned to your company’s norms and practices. They understand what good performance looks like and how it is created after experience as an IC (individual contributor). They can put themselves in the position of their team members. So you get good managers for your organization from a new generation of people known for being digital natives and curious, open minds.
The second is great internal mobility and career progression. When such a system is in place, your employees know they have opportunities to grow, so they focus on achieving them rather than investing time searching for better avenues. Very few organizations are leveraging this effectively (the number stood at 15% as per a LinkedIn Learning Report), so you can stand out quite easily as a great place to work with a corporate learning strategy that offers holistic avenues for professional growth.
#4 Make yourself heard.
Cut down on training. That’s not the whole idea. Cut down on training that is proving ineffective. There’s little point in keeping up with annual training retreats, or three-day workshops, or webinars with that specific expert if you cannot see ROI. As per a CIPD survey, proving ROI and working with limited resources are among the top challenges in effective L&D at work.
Training budgets are tightening up. The pandemic brought bad news in terms of steep budget cuts. A lot of learning programs regressed to online, in-house, one-size-fits-all models that advertised themselves with high distribution. Impact matters more than ever, so keep one phrase in mind for your corporate learning strategy of 2025: optimization.
The key to getting this right lies in aligning with the business strategy (which LinkedIn also puts at #1 among L&D priorities) and focusing on bridging gaps (which CIPD highlights among the top priorities of the L&D function.) Tying up learning opportunities to performance management then becomes the first step. It calls for effectively identifying current skill gaps in the workforce, and predicting the future ones that are yet to arise.
Don’t measure the success of your corporate learning strategy the old school way. Think of a holistic picture when it comes of ROI of training.
Quantitative ROI
LinkedIn’s survey has clearly outlined that the voice of L&D is growing. The C-suite wants to hear it out. Show them what corporate learning can really do, and make your impact felt at the right level. That means:
investing in the measurement of outcomes, repetitively
collecting data along the right metrics, don’t fall into the trap of vanity metrics like completion rates
creating advocacy for learning from the participants themselves
developing your analytical and human skills to present these cases strongly
considering the value of risks you prevented (turnover, man-hours saved, etc.)
Qualitative ROI
Beyond that, the corporate learning strategy should also cater to the employee’s context. You need to ask questions like this before establishing an overarching corporate learning strategy:
Do they have the two hours to invest in a workshop? Or would giving them microlearning modules for a month be better?
Is the area being taught more compatible with PowerPoint presentations or one-on-one coaching?
How am I going to assess the impact of this? (Only about 5% of learning initiatives reach the measurement stage)
How does this particular training impact our business objectives?
A positive ROI here looks like employee advocacy for learning initiatives, higher engagement rates, training satisfaction scores, and cultural changes.
Corporate learning strategies in 2025 are living documents that evolve with your organization. Make them alive and attuned to the present.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion, accepting the changing trends in corporate learning is key to keeping up in today’s quick world. We see more AI-focused personalized learning and ways that include emotional health. The scene is changing fast. Using short learning sessions, mobile tools, data tracking, and game-like elements can make learning more lively and effective. By adjusting to these trends, businesses can build a culture of continuous learning that supports growth and new ideas. Stay updated, stay flexible, and see your corporate learning strategy succeed in this digital age.
Leadership development is critical in your corporate learning strategy.
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Horse Leadership Training: A New Approach to Leadership Development Leadership development and training is suffering heavy stress under today’s business…
In this blog post, we’ll discuss why creating fantastic learner experiences is crucial for learning and development success at work. We’ll also discuss what could go wrong if it is overlooked and offer some tips on how L&D professionals can develop effective strategies to ensure every student has a positive journey through education.
Let’s explore ways we can give our employees top-notch educational experiences at work
Learner experience refers to the holistic journey that your team undergoes throughout an educational course or training. It includes all the touch points and moments of interaction, from the small ones, like the look-and-feel of an online quiz, to the bigger, more visible factors, like a classroom lecture’s atmosphere. These learner experiences are critical in ensuring the transfer and application of knowledge.
Learner experience (LX) design is all about making learning experiences that really change how learners see things. It’s when you plan and make learning activities with a clear goal in mind, focusing on the learner to keep them interested and help them learn better. LX design takes bits from instructional design, user experience (UX) design, and cognitive psychology to ensure these learning experiences are not only effective but also meaningful.
Why do Your Learner’s Experiences Matter?
Does your organization invest in creating a meaningful learner experience? If not, you are missing out. The learning experience is not just a vanity metric; it carries a valuable impact that can often be hard to notice. First up, learner experience is vital to the success of learning and development efforts. Picture it yourself: where would you enjoy learning more, in a boring recorded video lecture or with a subject matter expert seeking your questions?
A well-designed learner experience enhances knowledge retention and skill acquisition. Learners who are engaged and find the learning process intuitive and enjoyable are more likely to absorb and apply new information effectively. This undoubtedly means that your ROI for training is better when the LX is solid.
Plus, there are secondary benefits to investing in training experiences at work. With a good learner experience, your teams are happier, and you can curb turnover because your employees see your company’s investment in their long-term growth. Over time, this adds up to a competitive advantage.
Show you positive impact on employee satisfaction and engagement
Make internal mobility and career progressions easier
The role of engagement in the success of learning cannot be underestimated. Research shows that up to 75% of learning is lost within the next six days, as Janis Cooper highlighted in our conversation. This phenomenon, tracked well by the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, leads us to the core question—what’s a good learner experience, and how can we build one?
How are Delightful Learning Experiences Made?
Corporate learning = boring. That’s a common enough perception. And not one without reason.
According to a Forbes article, nearly half (47%) of workers are dissatisfied with the training they receive at work. Corporate learning experiences are often dull, disconnected from real-life applications, and sometimes distracting from deadlines. The area is in for a rehaul.
In conversation with Janis Cooper (VP, HR at Best Friends of Animal Society), we uncover how they make corporate training effective by focusing on experiences. The secret ingredient? Horses. Equine-facilitated learning is ushering in a new realm of leadership training for many companies.
Experiential learning engages the learner directly in an incident that focuses on a particular area, such as leadership skills. The experience is profound and memorable for the employees. For the team, it offers a quick ROI because learners need to collaborate with the horses to accomplish specific activities designed for them, as Janis explains.
What else adds up to good learner experience? Let’s narrow down on the essentials –
6 Factors of Good Learner Experiences
Multiple ingredients shape a solid learner experience:
Addressing existing pain points
Do you want to create a good learning experience? Why don’t you start by understanding what is making it bad? Addressing the existing pain points in a learning journey is key to creating an experience that the team loves. For example, simplifying complex navigation in e-learning platforms or providing clearer instructions for assignments. Addressing pain points shows learners that their needs are understood and valued. This feeling of being heard already adds to positive workplace experiences.
Building relevance
If you have ever been part of bad training, you know this question eventually pops up: Why am I here? A good learner experience answers it effectively. Within the learning path, build relevance for the user. Using real-world, relatable examples helps learners connect new information to their existing knowledge and work context. It could involve industry-specific case studies or scenarios that mirror common workplace situations, making the learning more applicable and memorable for your employees.
Explore custom learning journeys on Risely.
Don’t jam as much content as possible
Unsurprisingly, no one likes being bombarded with content. That’s plain old cognitive overload. A good learner experience considers this and creates balance. It focuses on high quality and the right quantity of inputs so that the learners can retain and apply ideas effectively.
Adapts to user needs
It’s a no-brainer that learning styles, needs, and moods differ. What suits you may not suit another. However, being stuck in rigid learning experiences designed without considering unique needs is frustrating. Adaptability saves from this by tailoring content, pace, and difficulty to individual learners. It could involve allowing learners to choose their learning path or using AI to adjust content based on performance. Adaptivity ensures that learning is neither too easy nor too challenging.
Checking for understanding
Pushing content constantly without seeing if it is getting understood or useful for the end-user is unhelpful. After all, how do you measure impact here? Effective learner experiences have elements that reinforce whether the user has understood or not. Regular knowledge checks, quizzes, or interactive elements help here. Based on this, you can ensure that learning gaps get detected and filled rather than overlooked.
Your organization’s culture
Learning does not happen in isolation. Even the best programs could be a waste of time if senior leadership declares them so. This has been felt in the failure of leadership development programs over the years. Your team’s culture is critical in motivating people, shaping their attitude toward learning, making opportunities accessible, and even providing the support a learner receives in addition to the content they consume.
Now that we know what shapes a good learner experience, let’s dive a bit better into the making of learning experiences.
Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
To make learning really work, it’s all about planning carefully and designing with thought. Here are a few key steps that you should take to ensure it all goes well. First, let’s design the experience for our learners. For simplicity, we have broken it down into four steps.
Analysis
Everything starts by understanding where you are and where you are headed. So, think of the current learner experience. What does it look like? Try to evaluate against the factors we saw listed above.
Further, take a look at your learning and development objectives. Learner experiences differ based on what goals you are moving toward. You will also need to understand your target audience.
For example, what’s the best way of teaching a new skill to ten teams of developers? Create a uniform and structured course with standardized assessments. But what about the team leads who need to work with a new tech? Help them build a growth mindset that opens them up to continuous learning with the help of one-on-one leadership coaching.
Design
In step two, identify the building blocks of a solid learning experience. Start with a broad outline (read more about learning and development strategies). Next, finalize the components. What are those? Think of training methods, training delivery modes, subject-specific modules, and so on. Remember that we spoke of checking to understand to ensure LX’s success? We will need assessments, too!
At the end of this step, you have all these placed along a clear roadmap.
Development
In the third step of building learning experiences comes developing the training materials and methods we spoke of earlier. This is where you can create the most impact by focusing on the small details like:
Use good UI practices to create helpful learning pathways.
Mix in media and interactive elements to cut down monotony in learning material.
Use an understanding of psychology to plan lessons better. You might need to equip the trainers with resources and training, too.
Keep the schedules and priorities of learners in mind to ensure that you are not overburdening them.
Build a digital and physical learning environment, including setting up the LMS and the culture that supports growth
Update training materials and assessments to reflect the latest know-how and boost your team’s expertise.
Implementation and evaluation
Now comes the real deal. Put your plans into action and observe the rollout. It is the right time to ask yourself how much you score on the factors of a good LX we saw earlier.
Grab the template here and conduct a before-and-after evaluation of your organization’s learning experience with your employees.
But this is just one side of the equation! Learner experience has a broader impact that must be evaluated. Where can you find that?
Look for performance changes. Improvements in regular reviews with direct managers are a good way to track the impact. A few one-on-one discussions can further help you gain clarity on the early patterns you might notice.
Search for behavioral changes, too, such as meeting more deadlines or handling conflicts better.
Assess against the learning objectives. You can do this using in-house assessments or external resources like Risely’s leadership skill assessments.
Based on these inputs, you can identify areas of improvement to feed back into the broader L&D strategy. With all this done, think ROI because that’s ultimately where L&D teams have a battle to fight.
A healthier learning experience enhances learners’ interest in participating in training (you might observe these in higher completion and participation rates, more detailed answers during focus interviews, interest toward more learning opportunities, not needing to send multiple reminders, etc.), which show a more significant positive business impact.
3 Pitfalls to avoid while designing a learner experience at work
We all make mistakes. So let’s prevent some before they happen.
#1 You threw strategy and objectives out the window
Not really, but figuratively, it happens plenty while learning programs are being designed. An essential feature of good learning experiences is that they tie the company together into one. How does that happen? Ensure that learning objectives are derived from strategic ones and that learners’ needs are assessed before they are handed a plan. Not meeting learners where they are is setting your L&D strategy up for failure, as you will not be able to conceive the ideal learning experience.
#2 You did not modernize with time
It’s 2024, and learning is no longer located in tall halls alone. It’s often happening at the moment, in small bursts, and likely through a mobile device. For instance, video is losing momentum across the US as a learning delivery mode. It’s scalable, available on demand, and saves you from arranging schedules. That sounds like a great thing, right? It’s not. Video learning is found to be the least engaging. As the content is pre-recording, there’s no stimulation to perform, and little mechanism to engage with the whole material.
So the question is, what’s in?
AI, hyper-personalization, microlearning, are some of the defining words of learning today. The world of L&D is more focused on the ultimate user, i.e. the employee, than ever.
Similarly, there are new trends in L&D that you need to watch out for. Incorporate microlearning, hyper-personalization, user-centered planning, and the power of AI in learning experiences to make them a class apart.
#3 You ignored the context of the learner
How one perceives the same lesson depends a lot on the context. Thus, it’s a powerful consideration of how a particular experience turns out. You could have designed it with the best intentions, but it can still be a misfit. Sounds confusing? It’s not. Employees need learning that helps them in some way – either empower them, improve their performance, or add to their long-term goals. If it does neither, no fancy illustrations will lead to a great experience. So first, keep their goals in mind.
You also need to consider that they often don’t have three hours to put into learning after work and don’t like working with a mentor who probably gossips about them later. Plus, does your sales manager, with a chaotic team of five, need conflict resolution training? Would delegation skills be a better area to work on? All of this needs to be thought out before being planned out. Thus, the second point is to keep their needs in mind. It creates psychological safety and support, that are needed to learn successfully.
You might not get all of this right in one go. That’s why this process of developing a learning experience for your team is often iterative, with feedback loops allowing for continuous improvement. Many instructional designers use specific models like ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation) or SAM (Successive Approximation Model) to guide their process.
Let’s Tie It All Up: How Does Learner Experience Align Within The Wider L&D Strategy?
Learner experience is just one part of the wider L&D strategy. There are more elements in the play. Primarily, learners’ experience is one of the two critical enablers along with the organization’s culture and learner personas developed by the L&D teams.
Learner Personas and Learner Experience
These two work together pretty directly. Learner personas are important in curating learner experiences. They help create user-centric and informed designs that are more helpful and impactful.
As we see in the learner experience platforms, many of them focus on personalized learning journeys, which are designed with personas in mind. In your role, you can use learner personas to make learner experiences more tailored and interactive for particular users. There are many ways to do it:
curating relevant content for the user
using appropriate modes of training delivery
designing the suitable UI and interactions throughout the journey
addressing specific concerns using precise communication and goal alignment
exchanging feedback in the right medium
Now, what about the learning environment?
How does that tie in with learning experiences? Let’s understand this with a simple example:
Environment 1
The team manager wants you to learn. They have pointed you toward some free online resources in your niche. And that’s pretty much it. However, your schedule does not allow for much free time. Plus, another colleague is working in the area you are learning. When it comes up in the performance review, you are marked low for not learning enough.
Environment 2
Your team manager shared some resources that their friend from your professional area vouched for. A week later, they ask you about it. How did it go? Did you get time to surf through the material? The team manager also makes you shadow a colleague working on a project in that area. By the time reviews roll in, you are all set. You have learned and applied it hands-on; your manager knows all this.
Feel the difference?
That’s the influence of a company’s environment on learner experiences. When a proper learning environment is facilitated with the collaboration of L&D, HR, and supervisors, the employees have an easier time handling personal learning goals.
As your employees can find support at the right moments and see others going on similar learning journeys, reinforcement and motivation occur naturally. Overall, it builds psychological safety, allowing your team members to learn by doing and make mistakes when they are at it.
In essence, the learning environment sets the stage for the learner experience. While a great environment doesn’t guarantee a positive experience, it provides the necessary conditions for one. Conversely, a poor learning environment can significantly hinder even the best-designed learning experiences.
To Sum Up
In wrapping things up, remember that it’s super important to put the learner’s experience first when creating workplace educational content. By ensuring learning is engaging and sticks with learners, we boost what they get out of training. If we don’t pay attention to how learners feel, they might lose interest or not want to join in as much, which hurts the efficiency and success of L&D initiatives.
When we fully commit to principles focused on giving learners an awesome ride through education—thinking deeply about experience design, focusing on learner experience design, and ensuring everything works effectively—we make learning something truly special.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
Learning and development is one of the most critical yet hard-to-get-right areas within HR. A learning and development strategy ties together everything about your plans—from the goals to the people and even the actions you are going to take. Having a solid plan for learning and development is key not only to drawing in top-notch talent but also to boosting the engagement and productivity of employees, which in turn helps meet company objectives.
A successful approach to learning and development does more than just offer basic employee training. It provides chances for professional growth, helps people develop new abilities, and ensures these educational efforts support the bigger picture of your company’s goals. The goal here is to create an environment where everyone is encouraged to continuously learn better themselves.
This blog will develop an effective strategy that matches your company’s aims while promoting staff advancement. When you finish reading, you will know:
What’s an L&D strategy, and why it matters?
What goals can you achieve, and how do you set them?
What are the common learning methods and designs?
How do you design an effective learning and development strategy for your team?
A Learning and Development (L&D) strategy is a comprehensive plan designed to improve individual and organizational performance through the continuous growth and development of employees’ skills, knowledge, and abilities. This strategy aligns with your organization’s overall goals and objectives and ensures that employees have the necessary tools and opportunities to excel in their roles.
How does a learning and development strategy impact your team?
L&D strategies are crucial for ensuring a company’s success because they match learning with the business’s goals. A good L&D strategy means a plan is in place to help employees improve their jobs, which improves the whole organization. But is that all? Absolutely not! Learning and development plans have a strategic role to play; primarily, it can create an impact at three levels:
Organizational level
First, learning and development boost the value of your human capital. You get employees who are ready for the challenges of the present and the future. It also ensures greater employee loyalty, engagement, and satisfaction. What’s the ultimate result? Great talent sticks with you, and turnover reduces, and you can attract better prospects.
Department level
At the team level, a good learning and development strategy is the best boost to employee performance. Picture a manager getting training for effective delegation or a team member building their functional skills. All of it boils down to better performance and productivity. It also curbs internal tensions, creates shared experiences, and prepares the pipeline for succession planning.
Individual level
Employees cherish valuable workplace learning opportunities, especially when they support their growth ambitions and needs. For the new generation of talent in the market, learning and development opportunities are among the top three considerations before choosing a job. Thus, with a solid learning and development strategy, you can unlock a great employee experience, high satisfaction, and a long-term career for them.
Let’s narrow this down further.
What does a learning and strategy do for you?
Align employee learning and development plans with the strategic goals of the organization by overcoming the skill and competency gaps in your organization.
Build resilience and future readiness in the organization’s human capital, thus safeguarding from redundancy.
Building a Solid Learning and Development Strategy
A good plan makes sure we know exactly what skills we want folks at work to learn. These should match up with both what the company wants and what employees feel they need. It lays out the steps and tools needed for these learning goals, acting like a map that keeps everyone moving forward.
Let’s explore this in further detail:
#1 Recap Organizational Objectives
Where does your learning and development strategy begin? At the strategic goals of your organization. Think of what your company wants to achieve in the next year, the next five years, etc. There are multiple considerations here.
For instance, AI is entering many industries, even unexpected ones like people management. Is expertise in that area something valuable for your team? Technological advancements and evolving job roles are some of the many factors that shape your learning and development strategy.
There’s more you will need to think of, like:
What are your company’s goals? Your organization’s direction will define the mix of skills and competencies you will need to succeed. Get in touch with the vision and goal setters to understand what your future looks like.
What are your competitors doing? People can be the differentiating factor between an average and an amazing company. Are your competitors investing in talent development across innovative or impactful areas? Keep an eye on what can make you special.
What do the stakeholders think? We are considering the senior management who need to approve plans and sanction budgets, the middle managers who will be critical to implementation, and even the individual employees who will undergo training—each of these players has a goal and vision they would love you to fulfil.
What’s the climate? Rains need an umbrella, but sunscreen might save you on a rather sunny day. Keep an eye on the factors that can impact your business (as per the PESTLE framework) and align your learning and development strategy with the wider world.
Once you have found this edge, you need to break it down into department and individual-level goals and actions.
#2 Derive Learning Objectives That Align and Feed Into Organizational Objectives
Alright, now you know what your organization wants. The next question is: How can learning and development do it? From the key organizational objectives, you will need to derive learning objectives.
For example, if your organizational objective is to expand into new markets, your learning objective can enhance cross-cultural communication skills. Otherwise, if your organization wants to improve product quality, you might want to check out learning and development methods to gain knowledge of quality control methods and Six Sigma principles.
You can also examine skills that you want people to strengthen in addition to competencies or specific areas. This means figuring out which skills people need to help reach those business goals and ensuring that training sessions boost these abilities in team members.
Thus, before saying yes to anything on the learning and development strategy, play the devil’s advocate and ask yourself: is this adding up to the goals outlined in #1?
#3 Identify departmental learning needs
At this point, you are one level down from the three-step framework we started with. After outlining the learning goals at an organizational level, the next step is to break them down into departmental learning goals and plans.
Let’s continue with the earlier example. Suppose your organization wants to expand into a new market. What does your learning and development strategy look like across departments?
HR department: If you hire people in the new market, there are legalities and environments to assess before forming compensation packages that meet local expectations. Recruitment could need a new strategy.
Marketing: It includes compliance with new laws and rules, gaining know-how of societal norms, and language skills to create content in a familiar language for the new market.
Tech: There are cybersecurity laws, vendors in the new market, infrastructure limitations, and so on.
The point is that a single goal can create multiple areas of learning and development across the teams. Each department’s learning needs should be tailored to its specific role in the expansion, ensuring it can effectively support the company’s growth in the new market.
#4 Skill Gap Analysis
A skill gap analysis is the process by which organizations can assess the gap between the skills they need and their current skills. You can do this at the team or individual level to get high-level or precise results. Essentially, this exercise informs how much of a gap needs to be bridged before moving toward your goals.
Further, you can classify where to work and fine-tune your L&D strategy accordingly. Simply put, a skill gap analysis should track needs across:
Functional skills
These skills directly impact job performance. We can further divide functional skills into two categories –
Hard skills: They include hard skills like technical know-how and tangible abilities like proficiency with a particular coaching language, software tool, or writing ability.
Soft skills: The other part, soft skills, includes non-technical areas like objection handling in a sales team or adapting at speed.
People skills
These skills impact relationships and people. They include areas like active listening or the ability to handle conflicts involving emotional and social intelligence.
How can you identify skills gaps in your team?
Analyze performance reviews: Performance reviews record details about the missing competencies as well as the team members’ goals and aspirations, thus giving a great starting point for building a skill profile for them. You can also look for common themes and consult their managers to understand skill gaps.
Feedback and one-on-one sessions: Make the most of these meetings by consulting employees on skill gaps and better understanding their needs. If you are running short on time or handling a larger organization, you can also turn to focus groups, where several employees discuss training needs together.
Self-Assessments: These help you identify particular skills or areas that need improvement. For instance, you can look at assessments offered by Risely to examine the critical people management skills in your team.
Along with a formal skill gap analysis, think of the areas where the particular individual wants to shine. Do they want to grow as a team lead within the product or switch to the design team if they can? These are the questions you need to answer and the mobility you can enable with effective learning and development plans. Employees best receive learning and development that aligns with personal goals or fuels ambitions.
Grab your free copy of Risely’s skills gap analysis framework now!
Inside you’ll find an easily adaptable template to track the skill needs of your team effectively.
#5 Bottom-up Analysis to Identify Core Training Areas
Now that you have identified your team members’ skills gaps, the next step is putting these together. Based on the skill gap analysis, understanding of company objectives, and forecasting future skills needed, you have many skills and learning initiatives to focus on. But budgets and time are limited. You cannot invest in all. That’s why we refine and pick the important fruits in building an L&D framework.
Let’s understand this with an example.
As the L&D manager, you have conducted the skills gap analysis through self-assessments and manager evaluations. At this point, you have three ideas for every employee:
Areas where they excel and could potentially teach others
Skills crucial to their current role
Skills they need to develop for future roles or projects
The second and third points are where we need to focus further. For this, you will need to look at skill gaps from a bird’s eye view to understand the entire organization’s context. It involves aggregating the data from individual assessments and identifying which skills most frequently appear in the top 3 lists. Then, you calculate the proportion of employees needing development in each skill area.
This approach aligns with the Pareto Principle. In essence, you focus on the top 20% of skills that will create an 80% impact. These become the core training areas where you invest your effort, time, and resources.
#6 Design and Deliver Learning Experiences
Till step #5, you have outlined everything you need strategy-wise. The next steps take us to implement this learning and development strategy, so let’s collect the materials for that.
Let’s briefly understand learning design first. What does it include?
Picking the right Training methods
There are plenty of them! Your job is to figure out what matches your organization’s needs and culture. Moreover, different skills or teams could need different training methods. For instance, while a hard skill like advances in a programming language is best delivered with a combination of lectures and projects for the entire team, leadership development needs a coach who can take one-on-one sessions.
Balancing In-house and outsourced L&D programs
The answer depends on your team once again. If you have the bandwidth, expertise, and interested SMEs, in-house training can do wonders as the team can access learning easily. Plus, you save some hassle. But it’s not the best fit for every context. You may need expertise that your organization does not have, or you would need people trained in delivering learning, or you could simply not have enough human resources to expend on training. Depending on these factors, you’ll need to balance between deploying the people and content you have and external ones.
Developing great content to facilitate learning
A repository of resources like webinars, handouts, and ebooks facilitates learning and development. You can also design skill and competency assessments internally based on the overall strategy. With this all comes the ultimate job of organizing, managing, and updating the organizational learning content.
Cool, we have gathered the material. What’s next?
Delivering the training
As with design, delivery is varied and context-dependent. You can choose from blended learning approaches that mix online and offline resources, attend seminars to hyper-focus on particular areas, or create a job shadowing program. In the newest developments of learning and development, learning delivered in the flow of work through nudges is an innovative approach shaking the world.
This step is about translating the identified needs into actual learning experiences that will effectively develop the required skills and knowledge within the organization. The key is creating engaging, relevant, and impactful learning experiences that align with organizational goals and individual needs.
#7 Track and Measure Experiences, Performance, and ROI
Once you have put things into action, the next step is to monitor their progress. It involves tracking employee experiences, measuring performance improvements, and calculating the training initiatives’ return on investment (ROI).
First, you will have to examine the reception of your learning and development strategy. The primary question is whether it resonated with your employees. If not, then there are certain improvements in learner experience that you can make. Again, returning to the employees can help you understand what’s happening and how to tackle it. This exercise is known as collecting training feedback, which you can do immediately after the learning is delivered and later through surveys or discussions.
Then, could you observe any behavioral changes as the learning took place? The right place to search for this impact can be performance reviews, everyday instances in the case of soft skills, etc3. Remember the goals you set in early steps, you need to track against those. Pre and post-training assessments are a great way to handle this.
Ultimately, comes the important part of the equation: evaluating the ROI of training. It is a critical metric, as it lies at the core of your evaluation as a function within the organization. Training effectiveness in terms of visible impact on employees is one part. Also, think of the costs of initiatives and what you get in return. If the balance seems off, it’s time to head back and tweak some things in the initial steps.
#8 Feed the Learnings Back to The L&D Strategy
All done? Pretty much.
As we saw in our example, we had cross-cultural communication training. Let’s assume a couple of participants felt it was lacking and they were unprepared to handle a real-life situation. You went back and evaluated the learning plan for that specific area, only to find that it was delivered primarily with lectures. There were no coaches to guide through conversations or enable role plays for practice. You can go back and add them now because you know that the need is present.
This final step closes the loop by using the insights gained from the implementation and measurement phases to refine the strategy. Depending on the outcomes, you might need to revisit the organizational objectives (step 1) or just adjust the learning objectives (step 2).
Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
Let’s have a look at what major companies are doing with their learning and development strategies in these examples.
Making an impact with peer learning at Google
The company behind this brilliant idea is not unknown. In fact, you are likely availing yourself of its services right now. Google has a peer learning program called Googlers-to-Googlers, abbreviated as g-2-g, that focuses on delivering learning to your peers. The idea is simple: whatever area an employee is passionate about, they can teach to others around them. It’s a voluntary teaching network with thousands of members and hundreds of subjects being covered. The best part is that the buck doesn’t stop at learning: this program adds value in many ways:
It allows people to cut down monotony by investing up to 20% of their time into teaching and mentoring others in an interesting area. Thus, employees are genuinely fulfilled with their workplace experiences.
It makes learning accessible to all, even in areas where they might not be able to explore conventional learning opportunities. For employees, it opens new doors, leading to internal mobility and growth.
And lastly, there’s the aspect of having a community and support that meets you where you are. The program facilitates high-trust relationships among peers, which enhance employee loyalty.
Keeping the employee at the center at Salesforce
Salesforce leads the training game with its unique program for learning from anywhere, known as Trailhead. Trailhead simplifies learning for skills in Salesforce and allied areas by enabling free learning content that users can access anytime. With this come two additional benefits:
First, it brings recognized credentials. Upon taking up assessments, the learners can earn globally acceptable credentials, a major factor motivating learning at work.
Second, learners can join a global community that supports and guides each other. The sense of belonging and community is another factor greatly improving the program’s reception and success.
The key lesson to learn from Salesforce’s learning and development strategy example is the user-centricity and focus on their needs. Key areas such as widely acceptable recognition, support from other learners, and integration with wider career opportunities are embedded as features within this journey.
Democratizing data science at Airbnb
In their own words, data is at the center of everything at Airbnb. Every employee needs those skills, and that’s how Airbnb’s data university was born, with a motto to take them to every employee amid rapid expansion. When this happened, there was momentum to work with, and that’s how the learning and development strategy was made with a focus on scaling and accessibility.
With a strong aim to reach every employee, here’s what the data university got right:
They started from the basics and created over 30 classes on different topics. This allowed the team to explore topics from foundation to advanced levels as they felt comfortable. The learning was designed to meet the learner where they were.
Airbnb did this with the help of their in-house data scientist, who came with the most experience. As a result, they leveraged internal resources and eventually supported the program with volunteers. It resulted in a sense of belongingness.
What Drives Success? Building the Enablers of an L&D Strategy
So far, we discovered some key steps in developing a learning and development strategy. Then, we proceeded to look through some examples of L&D strategies. Did you notice something more between this? What was the defining factor in the three success stories we read? Let’s explore the enablers of a learning and development strategy or the long-term prep you need to do before setting a learning plan in place.
The Team Culture Needs to be Learning Ready
Is your culture ready for learning? That’s one question you need to ask before heading toward plans and modules. Organizational learning culture impacts learning at all levels, be it the program’s reception, engagement, or ultimate impact. As per McKinsey, embedding L&D strategies into the culture fulfills the vision and long-term goals. Otherwise, there would be resistance and roadblocks on the way.
What does a learning-ready culture look like?
Your team is open to asking questions, accepting that they do not know certain things, and expressing interest in learning.
Your leadership actively participates in learning through on-hand presence during sessions and putting L&D as a strategic priority.
At a team level, mistakes mean opportunities to learn. Skill gaps are discussed, planned, and filled.
Supplementing this, mentorship and coaching are considered people management competencies, and team leads are encouraged to support others.
Your employees are recognized for learning new things. This recognition could take the form of better opportunities and keeping the talent pipeline aligned with their learning.
Learning budgets are accessible and available to all team members.
The impact of learning is measured and optimized. It’s not just a box to tick with one webinar a month.
Provide an Environment That Enables Learning
In the next step, we need to look at the hard metrics and ask ourselves again – is this workplace ready to learn? Picture this: you have to attend a webinar after work hours. It eats into the two hours of family time you finally had after a long day. Or, you learned a new coding language, but there’s no use for it at the time. Your manager is asking what the point is. These situations are hard to face. More than that, they are demotivating and prove that the workplace is not effectively accommodating the learning and development strategy.
How can you create the right learning environment at work?
Think of what frames a learner at work: their desk, emails that notify deadlines, colleagues, resources, etc. This environment is key to a good experience. For instance, visible cues toward the role of learning in success, like a quote in a common area, can be a great nudge.
For bigger workplaces, dedicated areas for learning equipped with resources are an excellent way to signal the value attached to learning. Or, as we saw in the case of Google above, this environment develops as the cultural context. When everyone around you engages in learning, it becomes second nature and propels positive peer influence.
Embrace technology to make the most impact
Tech can differentiate between a good and a great learning and development strategy. And no, we are not just talking about an LMS! You can build a solid tech stack to support the strategy at all stages and increase its robustness in many areas. We saw this in the example of Salesforce above, which created an online solution to ensure that learning was not limited. Similarly, Airbnb reached 1/8th of its employees in its initial run as the platform worked independently of physical location.
There’s more to tech in L&D than assessments. Think visualization of data and relationships across big numbers, faster update of learning content, engaging formats (quizzes, videos, downloadable cheat sheets), super-fast distribution, virtual walls of honor, personalized learning journeys, – these are just the tip of the iceberg.
Democratizing and increasing access is just one aspect where tech can have 10x the impact of L&D. There are more use cases in development. For instance, while delivering coaching to team leaders and managers via Risely, users can access an AI coach anytime, anywhere, and with any question. It offers them advice customized to their learning journey, personal challenges, and company policies.
To take this further, a unified dashboard empowers admins to view the people management skills of their team managers at a glance, thus dissecting the common challenges and progress at an organizational level easily. It is especially great for organizations that understand the value of leadership development but feel limited by traditional approaches and short budgets.
Try it all now: Sign up on Risely for a free trial!
Wrapping Up
To wrap up, a robust L&D strategy is crucial for driving organizational growth and enhancing employee capabilities. By aligning L&D objectives with business goals, setting realistic targets, and implementing diverse learning methodologies, companies can foster an environment of continuous improvement.
Overcoming challenges and facilitating personalized learning journeys are key to maximizing impact. Embracing emerging technologies and securing leadership buy-in are essential for a resilient L&D program.
By integrating continuous learning into the organizational culture, companies can maintain agility in our rapidly evolving landscape while staying aligned with business objectives. This approach ensures the organization remains adaptable, competitive, and well-positioned for future challenges and opportunities.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
Learning and Development Strategy Template
A complete framework by Risely to evaluate and re-energize your organization’s growth.
Go back to the beginning of your career. Fresh out of college and looking at the prospect of your new fancy job – what was on your mind? “Learning a lot” is a popular answer. And over the years, things have not quite changed; it’s still about learning and growth, with greater importance on the former as the speed of changes and advancements has increased rapidly.
Josh Bersin and LinkedIn teamed up to understand how much learning matters at work; unsurprisingly, they noted –
the opportunity to learn and grow is the second most inspiring thing about the job
the lack of opportunity to learn and grow is the foremost reason to leave a job
It is bound to happen as learning is closely tied to professional growth. Moreover, a rapidly evolving world creates redundancies and demands for new skills. To keep up, you need to learn constantly, even by stealing time from your full-time job.
It’s about more than just the employees who are seeking more; organizations that are not learning are losing their competitive edge with older methods and ideas. Learning as an organizational initiative has never been more pertinent and misunderstood at once. In between this chaos comes the cultural element – does your organization have a learning culture? One that enables rather than punishes.
A learning culture helps you thrive, not just survive, at your job. Think of a learning culture as one where everything is designed to enable growth and learning opportunities for employees instead of treating them like hurdles on the way to productivity. As a result, the average day in a learning culture looks quite like this:
You attend a stand-up call that focuses on the tasks and challenges of the day. Your colleague shares where they are stuck, another update about their progress, and the new skill they are learning. During a coffee break, you tell your team member about a solution you thought of. They listen, help you fine-tune it, and help you apply it when you encounter the following problem.
The day is going on, and you are stuck. There’s no way out, but your manager shows up and offers a solution. They also ask if you want to add something to the process. At lunch, there’s a session that mixes good food with interesting ideas. This week’s lunch and learn features an expert, and you can ask them about the latest happenings in your field. As the day closes, you have a list of books suggested by your peers and a course your manager recommends. Your company even pays for it! You are excited to know more.
Does that sound good? That’s what a learning culture looks like in action. To sum up, let’s see the key features of a learning culture in an organization.
Creating a learning culture: Key ingredients
First, a learning culture embraces a growth mindset that recognizes the value and opportunity of learning at every opportunity. It allows managers and team members to approach limitations as opportunities instead of roadblocks. As we saw in the example above, there are constant and omnipresent reinforcements toward learning, whether innovative ways of doing things or risk appetite.
Second come the resources and tangible ideas, such as books and lunch-and-learn sessions. These can take many forms depending on what your team needs—the key is finding something that creates value for them.
Third, as noted above, many opportunities are informal and created in situations that are not actively planned. It happens when learning becomes second nature to everyone. The effort is not just for L&D or the senior leadership; it’s a community effort for everyone.
Why is a learning culture important?
Although it sounds good as a concept, why should you invest in building a learning culture in your organization? Primarily, the reasons why a learning culture matters include:
Helps you retain good talent: Opportunities to learn and grow are top priorities in employee surveys. They are also critical determinants of your employees’ long-term growth and success. Moreover, learning and development can positively impact your employees’ self-esteem and safety, enabling them to work more stress-free.
Learning culture leads to a more developed workforce: When learning is a way of life, your people are bound to be on top of their game with constant updates and ideas from the world. Learning is reinforced through regular interactions as an aspect of your organizational culture. Consequently, you can keep innovating and getting better than your competitors.
Builds resilience and agility: The skills determining success today differ from a decade ago. Organizations that understood trends and moved with them could capture the market and get more done even when things kept changing. Constant learning makes your team resilient to changes and keeps your processes agile.
Improves business outcomes: Learning helps you advance and remain ahead of others, thus providing a competitive edge to realize strategic objectives rapidly. For L&D leaders, a culture that consistently reinforces this critical area of success is the most significant enabler.
What if my organization does not have a learning culture?
Let’s flip the table on the example we saw earlier: what would your day be like without a learning culture?
The morning huddles don’t really talk about challenges anymore, let alone overcoming them. The team does not share tips and tricks across the board. You are as stuck and confused as you were before the meeting, with some humiliation to accompany.
At coffee chats and lunch breaks, you are talking about the new employee improvement program that you need to sit through. It’s boring, and it’s been the same since the two years you joined.
You are thinking of your next job while leaving; there is no list of ideas or resources to consider on your way out. Plus, you might be wondering how much you need to pay for upskilling.
That sounds like a recipe for disaster. As we saw here, an employee improvement program is in place, too. The leadership does have development on its mind but cannot get it quite right without solid planning and culture to provide consistent reinforcements to those plans.
How does culture affect learning?
Culture gets your mind set on what you need to do. Think of it this way: your team has a list of resources available, and they are great. You encourage everyone to take those courses and even ask them for updates and experiences. But there’s hardly any response. Wonder why? Because they did not see their managers or peers do it, this was a little important in the bigger picture. Suppose someone even opened it to audit, another colleague’s passing remark, “Huh? Who does that?” would ensure that the tab closes soon enough. Putting learning on the minds of your employees is not just about setting the resources in front of them. Instead, you need to get them going.
Social expectations and norms are critical in determining what people do, as the seminal Hawthrone studies noted. Moreover, learning methods could be inaccessible, and you would not know until there is an active discourse on the matter. Challenges like special learning needs and different learning styles and practices clarify only after active use. Similarly, learners may need better teaching methods, a different set of resources, and more opportunities to apply things – all discovered during feedback and one-on-one meetings focusing on these issues.
Culture, thus, becomes a significant reinforcer of your tangible moves. At times, it is the most important determining factor for your success, as noted in this study on leadership development initiatives, which showed that the direct involvement of senior leadership and their focus positively impacts retention and change!
Signs that your team needs a learning culture
A culture is hard to diagnose, so how do you notice what changes are needed? Let’s look at some signs of the absence of a learning culture:
Your team members hardly raise questions about new things; there’s little talk about what they are learning.
Your team sticks to tried and tested ways of doing things; innovation and risk are missing.
You may not have a learning budget, or it is severely restricted, or the employees do not know about it.
Mistakes often become conflicts instead of opportunities to review and learn something new. Managers punish mistakes rather than encouraging a solution-oriented mindset.
Employees are not engaged and active at work. Your team sees high turnover and routine processes. Feedback is limited in terms of good or bad performance and not extended to the next steps.
How can you build a learning culture as an L&D manager?
When we talk of culture, we assume it’s about the simpler things—like how someone is speaking or their review of the latest skill-building session and how positive it is. We frequently miss the fact that culture also has complex and tangible aspects.
Bersin and LinkedIn’s research listed over 100 areas that contribute to culture. Some of these, like development plans and strategies, are easily assumed to be outside the area. That’s where the fun is: you are making culture unknowingly so far. A culture considers your methods, reactions, and processes that keep the organization going. While setting these up effectively, you will see the former aspects as a consequence – by being intentional about where we want to take our teams as L&D managers.
Hence, when discussing building a learning culture in your team, we are thinking holistically – what can you change, and what results should you expect? Let’s unravel a few key ideas:
Create informal instances of learning
First up, break the silos and systems that keep learning obscured. Your team wants the opportunities, but often at their own pace. Allowing employees to participate in defining their responsibilities and keeping the decision processes open to them helps empower them as substantial members of the team. It also ensures that they trust the system and own bits of it, thus being willing contributors and participants.
Moreover, learning shared over informal instances, such as cross-functional teams and lunch breaks, is a great way to collaborate and share ideas. It is even better that once the cycle is on, it reinforces itself further as team members add information, insights, and feedback. The best part is a community that learns from each other without thinking of limitations.
Focus on continuous learning instead of one-stop shops
It’s a no-brainer at this point that teams no longer appreciate the full-fledged workshop on the most important skill of their lives, which will throw them behind by two days with little retention or remedy for their issues. Then the question becomes, what do they really want? Most often, professionals seek learning in the flow of work, learning that does not disrupt their lives, be it professional or personal.
Second, they are looking for learning that they can apply at work and have the chance to do so. Many participants are dissatisfied with L&D initiatives because the knowledge is often not applicable or provided at the right time. Your team needs learning that suits their needs, be it the schedule, the type, or the purpose – keep the employee at the center of it all.
Notice and give feedback
Let’s go back to school. What did we love most after getting something right? A bit of appreciation, right? The principle stays the same as the years pass. Team members need appreciation and encouragement to keep going in the right direction. When you are designing learning experiences, incorporate two-way feedback mechanisms, too.
Moreover, reinforcements should be provided throughout the program in various ways. This can include recognizing someone for solving a problem independently or offering praise during a one-on-one meeting. In the end, it’s about seeing the effort and acknowledging it.
Feedback is not just a manager’s job, so don’t fill their calendars with review meetings for everyone they see. Instead, think of feedback as an ongoing and shared exercise. Along with reviews, encourage employees to give feedback to peers and show intentional action accordingly.
Encourage risks and errors
What stops us from trying new things? Often, it’s the fear of failure that we can blame. The fear of not getting things right in the first place is a huge hurdle. As learning managers, it becomes imperative to help our team members overcome this. Thus, consider how your workplace and leaders react to bad news and mistakes.
A leader’s openness to lousy news is featured in Bersin’s 40 features of a learning culture, thus making it a must-have for your team, too. When leaders are willing to hear what went wrong without losing it, the team can relax and be honest about their situations. All the heads can come together and solve issues. This reinforces employee empowerment and builds loyalty for the leadership team, too.
Similarly, mistakes and risks need to be encouraged among the team members. Let them have the space to apply what they figured out. Team members thrive in a psychologically safe environment. So think reflection, not punishment, when something goes wrong the next time.
Build an employee-centric community
What makes you trust someone and relax? Knowing them well, right? The same goes for your team. Visible openness and honesty in processes and outcomes are essential to ensuring that they place trust in you and your abilities.
One way of doing this is building context around your activities by regularly sharing stories from the organization that help employees connect with the “why.” Similarly, when leaders and managers show up for training sessions, it is an added boost because team members see them valuing the initiative. This establishes the importance and value of learning at work and thinking of it as more than just a chore that needs to be done.
Keeping the employee at the pivot and developing ideas around them—like career development plans, project leadership, and taking opinions in strategizing—makes their role very tangible.
To sum up
As we embark on this journey together, let us remember that building a learning culture is not just about ticking off boxes or implementing initiatives—it’s about igniting a passion for learning, inspiring curiosity, and nurturing a spirit of innovation. It’s about creating a workplace where everyone feels valued, empowered, and supported in their quest for knowledge. So let us dare to dream, explore, and learn, for in the journey of learning lies the promise of a brighter, more resilient future for us all.
Deeksha, with a solid educational background in human resources, bridges the gap between your goals and you with valuable insights and strategies within leadership development. Her unique perspectives, powered by voracious reading, lead to thoughtful pieces that tie conventional know-how and innovative approaches together to enable success for management professionals.
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10 Best Strategic Thinking Coaches to Speed Up Your Growth
In the fast-paced and ever-evolving business landscape, strategic thinking has become more than just a desirable trait; it’s a critical competency for success. As leaders strive to navigate through uncertainty, competition, and disruption, the ability to think strategically and make informed decisions has emerged as a defining factor in driving organizational growth and resilience.
However, mastering strategic thinking can be a challenging feat. It requires a combination of vision, analysis, creativity, and execution—a skill set that can be honed and developed by experienced mentors and coaches. In this blog, we explore the realm of strategic thinking coaching and introduce you to leading experts who specialize in helping individuals and organizations unlock their strategic potential.
From renowned professors and authors to seasoned consultants and thought leaders, these strategic thinking coaches bring a wealth of experience, insights, and methodologies. Through personalized guidance, practical frameworks, and proven strategies, entrepreneurs and leaders can think more critically, plan more effectively, and lead with greater confidence in an increasingly complex and uncertain world.
Strategic thinking is not just about making plans; it’s about envisioning the future and devising a path to get there. It involves analyzing current affairs, anticipating potential challenges and opportunities, and crafting innovative strategies to achieve long-term goals. Unlike tactical thinking, which focuses on short-term actions and immediate solutions, strategic thinking takes a broader view, considering the bigger picture and the implications of decisions over time.
Strategic thinking is essential for navigating the complexities of today’s competitive landscape in business leadership. Leaders who possess strong strategic thinking skills are better equipped to steer their organizations toward success by identifying market trends, foreseeing industry disruptions, and adapting their strategies accordingly. They are visionaries who can inspire and align their teams toward a common purpose, driving innovation and sustainable growth.
Why do you need Strategic Leadership Coaching?
Strategic leadership coaching offers numerous benefits for entrepreneurs and executives seeking to enhance their strategic thinking capabilities. Through one-on-one sessions with a qualified coach, individuals can gain valuable insights into their strengths and weaknesses as strategic thinkers. Coaches provide personalized guidance and feedback, helping you identify blind spots and develop strategies to overcome obstacles.
Moreover, strategic leadership coaching empowers leaders to adopt a proactive mindset to anticipate future challenges and capitalize on emerging opportunities. By honing their strategic thinking skills, executives can make more informed decisions, allocate resources effectively, and confidently navigate uncertainty. Additionally, coaching fosters a culture of continuous learning and growth within organizations, positioning them for long-term success in a rapidly evolving business environment.
Read more examples here: 8 Strategic Thinking Examples to Help You Succeed
Choosing the right strategic thinking coach is crucial for maximizing the benefits of coaching. When evaluating potential coaches, entrepreneurs and leaders should consider several key criteria:
Experience: Look for a coach with a proven track record of success in strategic leadership development. Ideally, the coach should have experience working with clients in similar industries or contexts.
Qualifications: Verify that the coach possesses relevant certifications or credentials in coaching and leadership development. A background in psychology, organizational behavior, or business management can also be advantageous.
Approach: Assess the coach’s coaching style and methodologies to ensure compatibility with your learning preferences and goals. Some coaches may employ a more directive approach, while others may focus on facilitating self-discovery and reflection.
References: Request references or testimonials from past clients to gauge the coach’s effectiveness and impact. Feedback from others who have worked with the coach can provide valuable insights into their coaching process and outcomes.
Alignment: Seek a coach who shares your values and understands your organizational context. A coach who aligns with your vision and objectives will be better equipped to support your growth and development as a strategic leader.
By carefully considering these criteria, entrepreneurs and leaders can select a strategic thinking coach who is well-equipped to help them achieve their goals and aspirations.
Follow the link to know more about how Managers can make or break company growth.
Top 10 Strategic Thinking Coaches
Now, let’s delve into the profiles of the top 10 strategic thinking coaches who have earned recognition for their expertise and impact in leadership development. Each of these coaches brings a unique blend of experience, insights, and methodologies to help you unlock their full potential as strategic thinkers. From seasoned veterans to rising stars, these strategic thinking coaches have distinguished themselves through their commitment to excellence and ability to inspire transformational change in their clients.
Dr. Richard Rumelt
Dr. Richard Rumelt is a renowned strategist and author known for his work on strategic management. He is a UCLA Anderson School of Management professor and has advised numerous Fortune 500 companies on strategic issues. Dr. Rumelt’s approach to strategic thinking emphasizes clarity of goals, alignment of resources, and identifying key leverage points. He is known for his book “Good Strategy Bad Strategy,” which outlines the principles of effective strategic thinking.
Dr. Betty Sue Flowers
Dr. Betty Sue Flowers is an executive coach, leadership consultant, and former Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum director. She has extensive experience in strategic planning and organizational development and specializes in helping leaders develop a holistic understanding of their organizations and the broader context in which they operate. She encourages you to think creatively and systemically to uncover innovative strategic solutions.
Dr. Roger L. Martin
Dr. Roger L. Martin is a professor and former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He is a leading expert on integrative thinking and has written extensively on strategy. Dr. Martin’s approach to strategic thinking revolves around integrative thinking, which involves synthesizing opposing ideas to generate creative solutions. He encourages leaders to embrace complexity and uncertainty as opportunities for innovation.
Dr. Rita McGrath
Dr. Rita McGrath is a professor at Columbia Business School and a globally recognized expert on strategy and innovation. She is known for her research on strategic inflection points and dynamic competition. Dr. McGrath’s approach to strategic thinking focuses on agility and adaptability in the face of rapid change. She helps leaders anticipate industry shifts, identify emerging opportunities, and pivot their strategies accordingly.
Dr. Gary Hamel
Dr. Gary Hamel is a management consultant, author, and professor at the London Business School. He is a leading proponent of management innovation and has written extensively on strategic renewal. Dr. Hamel’s approach to strategic thinking emphasizes challenging conventional wisdom and embracing disruptive change. He encourages leaders to cultivate a culture of experimentation and continuous learning.
Dr. Vijay Govindarajan
Dr. Vijay Govindarajan is a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and a leading expert on strategy and innovation. He is known for his research on reverse innovation and the three-box framework for managing innovation. Dr. Govindarajan’s approach to strategic thinking focuses on balancing today’s business demands with tomorrow’s growth imperatives. He helps leaders develop a systematic approach to innovation and strategic renewal.
Dr. W. Chan Kim & Dr. Renée Mauborgne
Dr. W. Chan Kim and Dr. Renée Mauborgne are professors at INSEAD and co-directors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute. They are best known for their groundbreaking work on blue ocean strategy, which involves creating uncontested market space. Drs. Kim and Mauborgne’s approach to strategic thinking challenges conventional wisdom about competition and value creation. They help leaders identify untapped market opportunities and develop innovative strategies to capture them.
Dr. Robert S. Kaplan & Dr. David P. Norton
Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and Dr. David P. Norton are professors at Harvard Business School and co-founders of the Balanced Scorecard Institute. They are best known for their work on the balanced scorecard framework for strategic performance management. Drs. Kaplan and Norton emphasize the importance of aligning strategic objectives with key performance indicators. They help leaders develop a comprehensive framework for measuring and managing strategic success.
Dr. Margaret Wheatley
Dr. Margaret Wheatley is a leadership consultant, speaker, and author known for her work on organizational change and systems thinking. She founded the Berkana Institute, a nonprofit organization that fosters leadership for transformational change. Dr. Wheatley’s approach to strategic thinking emphasizes the interconnectedness of individuals, organizations, and systems. She helps leaders cultivate a deeper understanding of complex adaptive systems and develop strategies for fostering resilience and innovation.
Dr. Amy C. Edmondson
Dr. Amy C. Edmondson is a professor at Harvard Business School and a leading expert on team dynamics and organizational learning. She is known for researching psychological safety and its impact on team performance and innovation. Dr. Edmondson’s approach to strategic thinking focuses on creating a culture of psychological safety where you feel comfortable taking risks and challenging the status quo. She helps leaders build high-performing teams capable of adapting to change and driving strategic innovation.
Conclusion
As we conclude our exploration of strategic thinking coaching, one thing becomes abundantly clear: investing in the development of strategic thinking skills is an investment in your organization’s future success. Whether you’re a seasoned executive looking to sharpen your strategic acumen or an aspiring entrepreneur seeking to chart a course for your venture’s growth, the guidance and support of a strategic thinking coach can make all the difference.
Working with one of the ten experts highlighted in this blog or exploring the broader landscape of strategic thinking coaching can help you gain invaluable insights, overcome challenges, and seize opportunities with greater clarity and conviction. Remember, strategic thinking is not just about making plans; it’s about envisioning possibilities, anticipating challenges, and shaping your organization’s future. With the right guidance and mindset, you can elevate your leadership, drive innovation, and achieve sustainable success in today’s dynamic business environment.
If you still feel confused about how and where to start. Risely is your answer. Risely helps by providing you personalized learning journey for skills like strategic thinking that enhance how you perform as a leader in your workplace. It starts with assessing your current skills and then moves on creating a learning plan that is unique to you and your challenges. Take the free 14-day trial and start your journey of leadership development.
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
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Top Time Management Coaches: Take Control Of Your Time Today
In the fast-paced world of modern business, effective time management is not just a valuable skill—it’s a necessity for success. Leaders and managers often juggle multiple responsibilities, deadlines, and demands on their time. Without proper time management strategies, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, leading to stress, burnout, and decreased productivity.
Fortunately, some experts specialize in helping individuals master the art of time management. These time management coaches offer invaluable insights, techniques, and strategies to help professionals optimize their time, increase productivity, and achieve greater life balance. In this blog, we’ll explore ten top time management coaches who specialize in coaching professionals, delving into their backgrounds, approaches, and expertise in helping you reclaim control of your time and accomplish more with less effort.
Whether you need help to stay focused, manage distractions, or prioritize tasks effectively, these coaches have the knowledge and experience to guide you toward greater efficiency, effectiveness, and fulfilment in your personal and professional endeavours.
Time management is the process of planning, organizing, and controlling how you spend your time to effectively accomplish specific tasks and goals. In today’s fast-paced world, entrepreneurs and leaders often juggle multiple responsibilities and face competing demands on their time. Without effective time management skills, it’s easy to become overwhelmed, leading to stress, burnout, and decreased productivity.
Effective time management involves more than making to-do lists or setting reminders. It requires a strategic approach to allocating time to tasks based on their importance and urgency. By identifying priorities, setting realistic goals, and implementing efficient workflows, individuals can optimize their productivity and achieve better work-life balance.
Understanding time management principles is the first step toward improving productivity and efficiency in both professional and personal life. By becoming aware of time management techniques and strategies, entrepreneurs and leaders can learn to make the most of their limited time resources and accomplish more with less effort.
Benefits of Time Management Coaching
While many people recognize the importance of time management, implementing effective strategies can be challenging without proper guidance and support. This is where time management coaching comes into play. Time management coaches are experts in helping you develop the skills, habits, and mindset needed to manage your time more effectively.
One of the key benefits of time management coaching is accountability. Coaches provide personalized support and encouragement, helping you stay focused and committed to your time management goals. Coaches offer valuable insights and strategies tailored to each individual’s unique needs and circumstances.
By working with a time management coach, entrepreneurs and leaders can learn to overcome common time management challenges, such as procrastination, indecision, and poor delegation. You can also develop sustainable habits and routines that promote long-term productivity and success.
Overall, time management coaching offers a structured and systematic approach to improving time management skills. This leads to increased efficiency, reduced stress, and better overall performance.
Choosing the right time management coach is essential for maximizing the benefits of coaching. When evaluating potential coaches, entrepreneurs and leaders should consider several key criteria:
Experience: Look for a coach with a proven track record of success in time management coaching. Ideally, the coach should have experience working with clients in similar industries or roles.
Qualifications: Verify that the coach possesses relevant certifications or credentials in coaching and time management. A background in psychology, organizational behavior, or productivity can also be advantageous.
Approach: Assess the coach’s coaching style and methodologies to ensure compatibility with your learning preferences and goals. Some coaches may employ a more directive approach, while others may focus on facilitating self-discovery and reflection.
References: Request references or testimonials from past clients to gauge the coach’s effectiveness and impact. Feedback from others who have worked with the coach can provide valuable insights into their coaching process and outcomes.
Alignment: Seek a coach who shares your values and understands your organizational context. A coach who aligns with your vision and objectives will be better equipped to support your growth and development as a time manager.
By carefully considering these criteria, entrepreneurs and leaders can select a time management coach who is well-equipped to help them achieve their goals and aspirations.
Top Time Management Coaches
Now, let’s delve into the profiles of the top time management coaches who have earned recognition for their expertise and impact in productivity and time management. Each of these coaches brings a unique blend of experience, insights, and methodologies to help you unlock their full potential as effective time managers. From renowned authors and speakers to experienced consultants and trainers, these coaches have distinguished themselves through their commitment to excellence and ability to inspire transformational change in your lives.
Laura Stack
Laura Stack, known as “The Productivity Pro,” is a bestselling author, speaker, and time management expert. She has written several books on productivity, including “What to Do When There’s Too Much to Do” and “SuperCompetent.” Laura Stack’s approach to time management focuses on practical strategies for increasing productivity and reducing overwhelm. She offers actionable tips for prioritizing tasks, managing distractions, and maximizing efficiency in both professional and personal life.
Rory Vaden
Rory Vaden is a bestselling author, speaker, and productivity expert known for his work on time management and self-discipline. He is the author of “Take the Stairs” and “Procrastinate on Purpose.” Rory Vaden’s approach to time management emphasizes the importance of prioritization and intentional decision-making. He helps you identify your most important tasks and focus your time and energy on activities that align with their goals and values.
Craig Jarrow
Craig Jarrow founded Time Management Ninja, a popular blog and resource for time management tips and techniques. He is known for his practical advice on task management, email management, and productivity hacks. Craig Jarrow’s approach to time management coaching is simple and practical. He offers straightforward strategies for organizing tasks, reducing distractions, and increasing efficiency, helping you take control of your time and achieve their goals.
Helene Segura
Helene Segura is a time management coach, productivity expert, and author known for helping managers and organizations overcome procrastination and overwhelm. She is the author of “The Inefficiency Assassin” and “The Time Management Survival Guide.” Helene Segura’s approach to time management coaching combines practical strategies with a focus on mindset and behavior change. She helps you identify and overcome the root causes of time management challenges, empowering you to work smarter and achieve better results.
Mark Ellwood
Mark Ellwood is a time management coach, speaker, and author who specializes in helping professionals increase their productivity and achieve work-life balance. He is the author of “How to Get More Done: 7 Secrets of Effective Time Management.” His approach to time management coaching emphasizes the importance of setting clear goals, managing priorities, and creating systems for staying organized and focused. He offers you practical techniques for overcoming procrastination, managing distractions, and making the most of each day.
Frances Booth
Frances Booth is a time management coach, consultant, and author known for helping leaders and organizations improve their productivity and effectiveness. She is the author of “The Distraction Trap” and “The Secret World of Productivity.” Frances Booth’s approach to time management coaching is based on research-backed strategies for managing distractions, increasing focus, and optimizing workflow. She helps you develop personalized systems and habits for maximizing productivity and achieving your goals.
Alexis Haselberger
Alexis Haselberger is a time management coach and productivity consultant known for helping busy professionals reclaim their time and focus. She offers individual coaching, workshops, and online courses to help you overcome overwhelm and achieve their goals. Her approach to time management coaching is rooted in neuroscience and psychology. She offers evidence-based strategies for increasing focus, managing distractions, and optimizing workflow. She also helps you develop personalized systems and habits to better manage their time and energy.
Tim Stringer
Tim Stringer is a productivity coach, consultant, and founder of Technically Simple, a company specializing in productivity and technology training. He is known for his expertise in leveraging technology to improve time management and workflow. Tim Stringer’s approach to time management coaching integrates technology tools and techniques with mindfulness and productivity principles. He helps you leverage digital tools effectively, streamline workflows, and cultivate habits for greater focus and efficiency.
Dave Crenshaw
Dave Crenshaw is a time management coach, speaker, and author known for helping individuals overcome overwhelm and improve their productivity. He is the author of “The Myth of Multitasking” and “The Power of Having Fun.” His approach to time management coaching focuses on eliminating time-wasting habits and optimizing workflow for maximum efficiency. He offers you practical strategies for prioritizing tasks, managing interruptions, and creating systems for staying organized and focused.
Conclusion
In conclusion, effective time management is a cornerstone of success in today’s fast-paced world. By working with a time management coach, professionals can gain valuable insights, techniques, and strategies to optimize their productivity, reduce stress, and achieve greater work-life balance. Whether you’re looking to overcome procrastination, manage your workload more effectively, or simply make the most of your time, these ten time management coaches offer the expertise and guidance needed to help you reach your goals.
Remember, time is a finite resource, and how you spend it can profoundly impact your personal and professional success. By investing in your time management skills and working with a coach who specializes in helping professionals, you can unlock your full potential, accomplish more with less effort, and create a productive and fulfilling life.
If you still feel confused about how and where to start. Risely is your answer. Risely helps by providing you personalized learning journey for skills like time management that enhance how you perform as a leader in your workplace. It starts with assessing your current skills and then moves on creating a learning plan that is unique to you and your challenges. Take the free 14-day trial and start your journey of leadership development.
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
Make the most of your time to be a productive leader.
Take our free time management assessment and review your skills to get started on your journey.
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Best Decision Coaches To Guide You Toward Great Choices
Effective decision-making is more crucial than ever in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape. Entrepreneurs, leaders, and professionals alike are constantly faced with complex and uncertain situations that demand strategic thinking and decisive action. However, mastering the art of decision-making is not always easy. It requires a combination of critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and the ability to navigate ambiguity.
Fortunately, numerous resources are available to help leaders and managers like you to enhance their decision-making skills and make better choices in both personal and professional contexts. From workshops to expert guidance from decision making coaches, there are countless opportunities to help you develop and refine this essential skill set. Let’s take you through some of these resources.
Effective decision-making is a fundamental skill for entrepreneurs and leaders alike. Every day, leaders like you in leadership positions face a myriad of choices that can impact their organizations’ trajectory. Sound, timely decisions are crucial for driving growth, mitigating risks, and achieving organizational objectives. From strategic decisions about market expansion to operational decisions about resource allocation, making sound decisions is crucial.
Understanding the importance of decision-making involves recognizing its role in shaping organizational outcomes. Effective decisions can increase competitiveness, innovation, and profitability, while poor decisions can result in wasted resources, missed opportunities, and even failure. By understanding the significance of decision-making, you can prioritize the development of their decision-making skills and seek out resources, such as decision coaching, to support their growth in this area.
Why should you get a Decision Making Coach?
Decision coaching offers numerous benefits for entrepreneurs and leaders seeking to improve their decision-making skills. One primary advantage is the opportunity for personalized guidance and support. Decision coaches work closely with you to understand your unique challenges, goals, and decision-making processes, providing tailored strategies and techniques to enhance their ability to make effective decisions.
Additionally, decision making coach can help you overcome common barriers to effective decision-making, such as decision fatigue, cognitive biases, and fear of failure. Coaches provide valuable insights and perspectives, assisting your approach to decision-making with greater clarity, confidence, and resilience. Through the coaching process, you can develop a deeper understanding of your decision-making strengths and weaknesses, enabling you to make more informed and strategic choices in the future.
Gary Klein is a cognitive psychologist and author known for his expertise in naturalistic decision-making. He has extensively researched how experts make decisions in high-pressure, real-world situations, such as firefighting, military operations, and emergency medicine. Gary Klein’s approach to decision-making coaching emphasizes the importance of intuition, pattern recognition, and experience in making effective decisions. He helps leaders and organizations develop decision-making skills by understanding the cognitive processes underlying expert judgment and decision-making.
Francesca Gino
Francesca Gino is a behavioral scientist and author known for researching decision-making, creativity, and ethics. She has published numerous studies on ethical decision-making, decision biases, and the psychology of choice. Francesca Gino’s approach to decision-making coaching draws on insights from psychology and behavioral economics to help individuals improve their decision-making skills. She offers practical strategies for recognizing and overcoming decision biases, increasing self-awareness, and making better choices in both professional and personal contexts.
Annie Duke
Annie Duke is a former professional poker player who has become a decision strategist and author. She is known for her expertise in decision-making, risk management, and cognitive psychology, which she applies to help managers and organizations improve their decision-making skills. Annie Duke’s approach to decision-making coaching is grounded in principles derived from poker strategy, such as probabilistic thinking, risk assessment, and decision analysis. She helps individuals develop a more rational and disciplined approach to decision-making, enabling them to make better choices under uncertainty.
Michael Roberto
Michael Roberto is a professor of management and author known for his work on decision-making, leadership, and organizational change. He has written several books on decision-making, including “Why Great Leaders Don’t Take Yes for an Answer” and “Know What You Don’t Know.” His research informs Michael Roberto’s approach to decision-making coaching on decision-making processes and organizational dynamics. He helps managers and teams improve decision-making skills by identifying and addressing common pitfalls and biases, fostering open dialogue and debate, and leveraging diverse perspectives to make better choices.
Chip Heath
Chip Heath is a professor of organizational behavior and author known for his work on decision-making, change management, and innovation. He has written several bestselling books on these topics, including “Switch” and “Decisive.” Chip Heath’s approach to decision-making coaching draws on insights from psychology and neuroscience to help managers and organizations improve their decision-making skills. He offers practical strategies for overcoming decision paralysis, reducing biases, and making better choices in complex and uncertain environments.
Sheena Iyengar
Sheena Iyengar is a professor of business and author known for her research on decision-making, choice, and psychology. She has conducted extensive studies on decision-making under uncertainty, choice overload, and cultural differences in decision-making. Sheena Iyengar’s approach to decision-making coaching focuses on understanding the factors that influence choices and preferences. She helps you improve your decision-making skills by recognizing and mitigating decision biases, clarifying values and priorities, and making more informed and intentional choices.
Gretchen Rubin
Gretchen Rubin is an author and happiness expert known for her work on habits, decision-making, and personal development. She is the author of several bestselling books, including The Happiness Project and Better Than Before. Her approach to decision-making coaching focuses on understanding the role of habits and personality in decision-making. She helps you improve your decision-making skills by identifying and changing habits that may hold you back, clarifying values and priorities, and creating systems and routines that support better choices.
John Mattone
John Mattone is an executive coach and author known for his leadership development, talent management, and decision-making work. He has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies and global organizations to help leaders and teams unlock their potential and achieve peak performance. John Mattone’s approach to decision-making coaching is grounded in his extensive experience working with leaders and teams across industries. He helps you develop your decision-making skills by focusing on core leadership competencies, such as self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and strategic thinking, essential for making effective decisions in complex and dynamic environments.
Heidi Grant
Heidi Grant is a psychologist and author known for her research on decision-making, motivation, and goal-setting. She has written several books on these topics, including “Reinforcements” and “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.” Heidi Grant’s approach to decision-making coaching draws on insights from social psychology and behavioral science to help you understand and improve their decision-making processes. She offers practical strategies for setting and achieving goals, overcoming procrastination, and increasing motivation, which are essential for making better choices and taking decisive action.
Conclusion
Effective decision-making is a cornerstone of success in today’s complex and dynamic world. By investing in your decision-making skills and leveraging the available resources, you can become a more confident and strategic decision-maker capable of navigating uncertainty and driving positive change in your personal and professional endeavors.
Whether you enroll in an online course, seek guidance from a decision making coach, or explore other learning opportunities, the key is committing to continuous improvement and growth. Finding a decision coach whose ideas aligns with you can be of great assistance in your journey of leadership development. By developing your critical thinking, problem-solving, and analytical skills, you’ll be better equipped to tackle challenges, seize opportunities, and achieve your goals with clarity and confidence.
If you still feel confused about how and where to start. Risely is your answer. Risely helps by providing you personalized learning journey for skills like decision making that enhance how you perform as a leader in your workplace. It starts with assessing your current skills and then moves on creating a learning plan that is unique to you and your challenges. Take the free 14-day trial and start your journey of leadership development.
So why wait? Start your journey to mastering decision-making today and unlock your full potential for success!
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
Be efficient in making quick and informed decisions.
Master the art of decision-making by reviewing your skills with a free assessment now.
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Ultimate Guide Of Active Listening Coaching For Managers
Active listening emerges as a beacon of effective communication in a world filled with noise. It’s more than just hearing; it’s about engaging deeply with the speaker, understanding their message, and responding thoughtfully. Active listening transforms conversations into meaningful exchanges with techniques like maintaining eye contact, paraphrasing, and asking clarifying questions. Mastering active listening is key to building trust, resolving conflicts, and fostering collaboration in personal or professional contexts. Join us as we explore the transformative power of active listening coaching and training in enhancing communication and relationships.
Active listening is more than just hearing words; it’s about fully engaging with the speaker and understanding their message on multiple levels. Unlike passive listening, which involves simply receiving information, active listening requires the listener to focus, comprehend, and respond to what is being communicated. By employing active listening techniques such as maintaining eye contact, nodding, paraphrasing, and asking clarifying questions, individuals demonstrate their genuine interest in the speaker’s perspective and foster deeper connections.
Active listening is crucial in building trust, resolving conflicts, and fostering collaboration in personal and professional settings. When individuals feel heard and understood, they are more likely to express themselves openly and work towards shared goals. Therefore, mastering active listening is essential for effective communication and relationship-building.
Understanding Active Listening Coaching
Active listening coaching is a specialized form of coaching that goes beyond basic listening skills training. While traditional training may focus on teaching general principles and techniques, active listening coaching offers personalized guidance and support tailored to each individual’s unique needs, challenges, and goals. Active listening coaching can help managers become great managers and make them lead their teams to success.
Components of Active Listening Coaching:
Personalized Assessment: Active listening coaches begin by conducting a personalized assessment to understand the client’s current listening habits, strengths, and areas for improvement. This assessment may involve self-reflection exercises, questionnaires, or even observation of real-life interactions.
Identification of Listening Barriers: Coaches work with clients to identify any barriers to effective listening. These barriers could include distractions, biases, preconceived notions, or emotional triggers that prevent the client from fully engaging with the speaker’s message.
Practical Strategies and Techniques: Based on the assessment, coaches develop customized strategies and techniques to help clients overcome their listening barriers and enhance their active listening skills. These strategies may include exercises to improve concentration, mindfulness practices to stay present in the moment, or communication techniques to demonstrate empathy and understanding.
Role-Playing and Simulation: Active listening coaches often use role-playing and simulation exercises to help clients practice their newfound skills in a safe and supportive environment. These exercises allow clients to experiment with different listening approaches, receive immediate feedback from the coach, and gain confidence in their ability to engage effectively with others.
Feedback and Reflection: Throughout the coaching process, coaches provide ongoing feedback and support to help clients refine their active listening skills. They encourage clients to reflect on their experiences, identify areas of progress, and set achievable goals for further improvement.
Accountability and Follow-Up: Active listening coaches hold clients accountable for implementing the strategies and techniques discussed during coaching sessions. They may establish action plans, set milestones, and schedule follow-up sessions to track progress and provide additional support.
Active listening skills training offers several key benefits:
Improved Relationships:Effective communication is foundational to relationships. Active listening skills enable individuals to understand others better, fostering trust and deeper personal and professional connections.
Enhanced Problem-Solving: Active listening helps gather information and identify underlying issues, facilitating collaborative problem-solving. Teams equipped with active listening skills generate innovative solutions and overcome challenges more efficiently.
Increased Productivity: Clear communication reduces misunderstandings and errors, boosting team productivity. With active listening, teams work cohesively, make decisions confidently, and accomplish tasks efficiently.
Better Leadership: Active listening is vital for effective leadership. Leaders who listen attentively understand their team’s needs, fostering a culture of trust and respect. This leads to a more engaged workforce and greater organizational success.
Improved Customer Relationships: Active listening builds rapport and satisfaction in customer-facing roles. Employees trained in active listening skills can better understand customer needs, leading to higher satisfaction levels and increased loyalty.
Active listening online training courses
In today’s digital age, online training offers a convenient and accessible way to develop active listening skills. Various platforms and organizations offer specialized courses and resources tailored to enhance listening abilities. These online training programs typically provide structured lessons, interactive exercises, and practical tools to help participants cultivate effective listening habits. Whether you’re a professional seeking to improve communication in the workplace or an individual looking to enhance personal relationships, online training can offer valuable insights and strategies to become a better listener.
Active Listening Skills – The Ultimate Guide: This comprehensive course on Udemy covers a wide range of topics related to active listening. It includes practical techniques, exercises, and real-world examples to help participants understand the importance of active listening and apply effective listening strategies in various contexts. The course may cover topics such as improving concentration, reducing distractions, and using empathy to enhance communication.
Effective Listening Skills: The Art of Understanding: Offered by the University of California, Irvine, this course on Coursera provides a structured approach to developing effective listening skills. Participants learn about the principles of active listening, the role of empathy in communication, and strategies for overcoming barriers to active listening. The course may include video lectures, readings, quizzes, and peer-reviewed assignments to reinforce learning.
Active Listening: A Practical Guide: This course on LinkedIn Learning offers practical guidance on becoming a better listener. It may cover topics such as active listening techniques, body language cues, and active listening exercises. Participants learn to apply these skills professionally and personally to improve communication and build stronger relationships.
Listening Skills Training: Developed by Corporate Coach Group, this training program focuses on honing listening skills for effective communication in the workplace. Participants learn the importance of listening in leadership, teamwork, and customer service roles. The program may include interactive workshops, role-playing exercises, and practical tips for active listening.
The Power of Listening: Skillsoft offers this course to enhance listening skills for better understanding and collaboration. Participants learn about the benefits of active listening, strategies for active listening in meetings and negotiations, and techniques for responding effectively to others. The course may include video modules, interactive scenarios, and self-assessment quizzes.
Advanced Listening Skills Workshop: This workshop by the Management Training Institute delves into advanced listening techniques and strategies for professionals seeking to improve their communication effectiveness. Participants learn about active listening in leadership, coaching, and conflict resolution contexts. The workshop may include group discussions, case studies, and hands-on activities to reinforce learning.
Active Listening Masterclass: Developed by DevelopHer, this masterclass offers in-depth training on active listening skills. Participants learn about the principles of active listening, empathetic listening techniques, and strategies for overcoming common listening barriers. The masterclass may include lectures, interactive exercises, and personalized feedback to support participants’ development as active listeners.
Listening Skills for Healthcare Professionals: Tailored specifically for healthcare professionals, this course by the Center for Communication in Medicine provides training on active listening techniques to enhance patient care and communication. Participants learn to listen empathetically, ask probing questions, and respond effectively to patient concerns. The course may include case studies, role-playing exercises, and simulations to simulate real-world patient interactions. Here are some active listening questions which help you become a better listener.
Listening for Understanding: Training Connection offers this course to develop active listening skills for improved comprehension, collaboration, and conflict resolution in professional environments. Participants learn the importance of active listening in building trust and rapport with colleagues and clients. The course includes active listening exercises such as interactive workshops, group activities, and self-assessment tools to support participants’ learning journey.
Effective Communication: Listening and Responding: Vital Learning provides this course focused on improving listening and responding skills to facilitate clearer communication and stronger relationships. Participants learn about the components of active listening, including verbal and nonverbal cues, and practice active listening techniques through role-playing and group discussions. The course may also cover strategies for responding empathetically and constructively to others’ messages.
To wrap up
Active listening isn’t passive; it’s an intentional choice to connect with others on a profound level. Through coaching and training, managers can unlock the full potential of their listening skills, reaping benefits in both personal and professional spheres. By embracing active listening, you can foster deeper connections, resolve conflicts more effectively, and drive organizational success. As you continue on the journey of growth and development, let us remember that listening is not just with our ears but our hearts and minds.
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
Review your Active Listening Skills Today!
Take the free active listening assessment to get started on your journey of growth and development.
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Top 12 Leadership Coaching Books with Powerful Insights to Help You Succeed
Mentorship and coaching are transformative practices that have the remarkable ability to shape individuals and guide them toward realizing their full potential. Whether you’re a seasoned mentor looking to refine your approach or someone contemplating stepping into the role for the first time, the journey of mentorship is one of continuous learning and growth.
In this curated collection, we’ve assembled a treasure trove of leadership coaching books that delve deep into the art and science of mentorship and coaching. From timeless classics to contemporary gems, each book offers unique insights, practical strategies, and invaluable wisdom to help you become a more effective mentor or coach.
Whether you’re seeking to foster professional development in the workplace, guide personal growth, or empower others to overcome obstacles, these leadership coaching books serve as guiding lights on your path to becoming a catalyst for positive change in the lives of those you mentor.
Stedman Graham’s “Identity Leadership” isn’t just about leading others; it’s about leading yourself first. Graham argues that effective leadership starts with a deep understanding of one’s identity—knowing who you are, what you stand for, and what you want to achieve. This coaching book for leaders will help you Master your identity gives you the clarity, confidence, and authenticity needed to inspire and influence others which eventually helps you guide your clients. Through practical exercises and personal anecdotes, Graham guides readers on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment, helping them unlock their full potential as leaders.
Connect First
In “Connect First,” Melanie A. Katzman emphasizes the transformative power of genuine human connection. Drawing on her background in psychology and organizational development, Katzman explores how building strong relationships can drive success in both professional and personal spheres. From the boardroom to the living room, she offers practical strategies for cultivating empathy, fostering trust, and nurturing meaningful connections. Through real-world examples and actionable advice, “Connect First” equips readers with the tools to build bridges, break down barriers, and create lasting bonds with others.
Bill Eckstrom’s “The Coaching Effect” is a groundbreaking exploration of the profound impact that coaching can have on individual and organizational performance. Based on years of research and real-world experience, Eckstrom identifies the critical factors distinguishing effective coaching from mere management. He reveals how great coaches inspire, empower, and challenge their teams to reach new heights of excellence. Through compelling stories and practical insights, “The Coaching Effect” provides leaders with a roadmap for unlocking their team’s full potential and driving sustainable success.
Be Fearless
Jonathan Alpert’s “Be Fearless” is a bold manifesto for overcoming fear and seizing opportunities in life and business. Drawing on his psychotherapist and performance coach background, Alpert challenges readers to confront their fears head-on and embrace discomfort as a catalyst for growth. Through a combination of psychological principles and practical strategies, he guides readers on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment. From public speaking to career transitions, “Be Fearless” offers a roadmap for stepping outside your comfort zone and achieving your full potential.
The Art of Laser-Focused Coaching
Marion Franklin’s “The Art of Laser-Focused Coaching” is a comprehensive guide to mastering the art and science of coaching. Through a blend of theory, practice, and real-world examples, Franklin explores how coaches can achieve maximum impact by honing their focus and intentionality. From setting clear goals to asking powerful questions, she provides practical tools and techniques for facilitating meaningful change in individuals and organizations. “The Art of Laser-Focused Coaching” is essential reading for anyone seeking to elevate their coaching skills and make a lasting difference in the lives of others.
Coaching for Performance
“Coaching for Performance” is a classic in the coaching field, offering a comprehensive framework for unlocking human potential and driving performance improvement. Drawing on the pioneering work of Sir John Whitmore and his colleagues, the book explores the principles and practices of coaching as a catalyst for personal and professional growth. Through a combination of theory, case studies, and practical tools, the authors provide readers with a roadmap for fostering self-awareness, setting meaningful goals, and achieving sustainable results. Whether you’re a seasoned coach or just starting, “Coaching for Performance” is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to unleash their own potential and that of others.
The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead
Michael Bungay Stanier’s “The Coaching Habit” offers a fresh perspective on leadership and coaching, challenging traditional approaches and offering a simple yet powerful framework for driving change. Through seven essential coaching questions, Stanier demonstrates how leaders can shift from providing answers to asking questions, empowering their teams to find their own solutions, and taking ownership of their development. With a focus on curiosity, humility, and action, “The Coaching Habit” provides practical strategies for building coaching skills and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Whether you’re a CEO or a front-line manager, this book will transform how you lead and inspire others.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” is a compelling exploration of the common pitfalls that hinder team performance. Through a fictional narrative, Lencioni identifies five key dysfunctions—the absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results—that can undermine team cohesion and effectiveness. By unpacking these dysfunctions and providing practical strategies for addressing them, Lencioni offers a roadmap for building high-performing teams. With its engaging storytelling and actionable insights, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” is essential for leaders looking to cultivate collaboration, trust, and results.
The Leadership Coaching Sourcebook
“The Leadership Coaching Sourcebook” is a comprehensive resource for leaders and coaches seeking to deepen their understanding and practice of leadership coaching. Edited by Richard R. Kilburg and Associates, this anthology brings together leading experts in the field to share their insights, tools, and case studies. From foundational concepts to advanced techniques, the sourcebook covers various topics, including assessment, feedback, goal setting, and organizational change. With contributions from renowned practitioners and scholars, “The Leadership Coaching Sourcebook” is an indispensable guide for anyone committed to developing their coaching skills and driving positive change in individuals and organizations.
The Heart of Coaching
Thomas G. Crane’s “The Heart of Coaching” explores the essence of coaching as a transformative process of self-discovery and growth. Drawing on his extensive experience as a coach and educator, Crane shares profound insights and practical wisdom for aspiring and experienced coaches alike. Through illuminating stories and thought-provoking exercises, he reveals the power of empathy, presence, and authenticity in facilitating meaningful change. “The Heart of Coaching” offers a holistic approach to coaching that transcends technique, inviting readers to cultivate deeper connections with themselves and others. Whether you’re a coach, leader, or anyone committed to personal development, this book will inspire and empower you to tap into the heart of coaching.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High
“Crucial Conversations” offers practical tools and strategies for navigating difficult conversations with skill and confidence. Drawing on research in communication, psychology, and negotiation, the authors provide a framework for addressing sensitive issues, managing emotions, and achieving positive outcomes. Whether you’re dealing with conflicts at work, in relationships, or any other aspect of life, this book equips you with the skills to handle crucial conversations effectively. With clear, actionable advice and real-world examples, “Crucial Conversations” is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to communicate more effectively and build stronger relationships.
Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” challenges readers to rethink how they lead and communicate by starting with their underlying purpose and values. Through the concept of “The Golden Circle”—starting with why, then how, and finally what—Sinek illustrates how great leaders inspire action and foster loyalty by articulating their why. Drawing on examples from business, politics, and social movements, he demonstrates the power of purpose in driving engagement, innovation, and success. Whether you’re a CEO, entrepreneur, or team leader, “Start With Why” will transform how you think about leadership and inspire you to lead purposefully.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” is a seminal work that explores the factors that distinguish truly great companies from their merely good counterparts. Through extensive research and analysis, Collins identifies key principles and practices that drive sustained success, including disciplined people, thought, and action. With its rigorous methodology and compelling insights, “Good to Great” offers timeless lessons for leaders seeking to build enduring organizations. Whether you’re leading a startup or a Fortune 500 company, this book provides a roadmap for achieving greatness in any field.
As we wrap up our exploration of these leadership coaching books have illuminated the path to effective leadership and personal growth. From understanding our own identity to mastering the art of coaching conversations, each book offers valuable insights and practical strategies for aspiring mentors and coaches.
By embracing authenticity, connection, and purpose, we can unlock the transformative power of mentorship and coaching. Whether you’re a seasoned leader or just starting out, let these coaching books for leaders be your guide to inspiring, empowering, and elevating others to reach their full potential. Let’s continue to learn, grow, and lead with purpose.
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
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12 Best growth mindset podcasts to help you change your life
In today’s fast-paced and competitive world, having a growth mindset is essential for personal and professional success. A growth mindset is a state of mind that believes in the power of yet, values learning and improvement, and sees failures as opportunities for growth. It is about embracing challenges, persevering through setbacks, and continuously striving for self-improvement. One of the most effective ways to foster a growth mindset is through podcasts. Podcasts offer a convenient and accessible platform for personal development and can be a great way to cultivate a growth mindset.
This blog will explore the top 12 growth mindset podcasts for success, covering various topics and perspectives that can inspire and empower you on your growth journey. Let’s dive in and discover some amazing podcasts that will help you unleash your full potential and achieve your goals.
A growth mindset is a belief that intelligence and abilities can be developed through hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It is about recognizing that success is not solely determined by innate talent but by a willingness to learn, improve, and embrace challenges. Individuals with a growth mindset are likelier to see failures and setbacks as opportunities for growth and learning. Rather than giving up, they view obstacles as stepping stones to success.
Listening to podcasts on growth mindset can be an effective way to cultivate and reinforce this mindset. There are several great podcasts out there that are dedicated to helping individuals develop a growth mindset and achieve their full potential. These podcasts offer valuable insights, practical tips, and inspiring stories that can help individuals shift their mindset and adopt a more growth-oriented approach to life. Whether you are looking for motivation, strategies for personal growth, or advice on navigating challenges, there is a podcast for you.
The importance of a growth mindset in achieving success cannot be overstated. A growth mindset encourages individuals to embrace challenges, persist in the face of adversity, and view effort as a necessary part of growth and achievement. Through hard work, perseverance, and a willingness to learn from failures, individuals with a growth mindset can achieve success.
In a successful life, setbacks and failures are inevitable. However, individuals with a growth mindset see these challenges as opportunities for growth and learning rather than roadblocks. They understand that failure is not final but a stepping stone to success. By embracing the growth mindset, individuals are more likely to bounce back from setbacks, stay resilient in the face of adversity, and continue striving for their goals.
A growth mindset also cultivates a love for learning and improvement. Individuals with this mindset are driven by a desire to develop and grow personally and professionally constantly. They actively seek out new experiences, challenges, and growth opportunities. This mindset fuels success and leads to more fulfilling and meaningful lives.
Here are some engaging growth mindset activities that boost personal and professional growth.
How Podcasts Promote a Growth Mindset?
Podcasts can promote and nurture a growth mindset in several ways. Firstly, podcasts expose listeners to various stories, experiences, and perspectives that challenge their beliefs and attitudes. By hearing different viewpoints, listeners are encouraged to think critically, question assumptions, and consider new possibilities. This exposure to diverse ideas and perspectives fosters a more open and growth-oriented mindset.
Secondly, podcasts often feature intimate and candid conversations between hosts and guests, creating a sense of authenticity and vulnerability. Listeners are able to connect on a deeper level with the podcast hosts and guests, which can inspire a sense of empathy and understanding. This connection helps individuals realize that they are not alone in their struggles and challenges and that growth and change are possible for everyone.
Furthermore, podcasts offer practical strategies and advice for personal growth and development. From mindset shifts and goal setting to developing resilience and building healthy habits, podcasts provide listeners with actionable steps to foster a growth mindset and create big changes in their lives.
Lastly, podcasts can serve as a source of motivation and inspiration. Hearing success stories and journeys of growth and transformation can create a sense of possibility and optimism. Listeners are inspired to believe in their potential for growth and change and to act towards their goals and aspirations.
Top 12 Growth Mindset Podcasts for Success
Now that we understand the importance of a growth mindset and the role of podcasts in fostering it let’s dive into the top 20 growth mindset podcasts for success. These podcasts cover various topics, featuring interviews, stories, and discussions that provide valuable insights and strategies for personal and professional growth. Whether you are an entrepreneur, student, or someone looking to cultivate a growth mindset, these podcasts offer inspiration, motivation, and practical tips for unleashing your full potential and achieving success. Let’s explore these amazing podcasts and prepare for a transformative journey of growth and self-improvement.
Unleashing Ambition with ‘Pure Ambition Podcast’
The ‘Pure Ambition Podcast‘ is about unleashing ambition and achieving success with a growth mindset. This podcast features interviews with successful individuals from various fields who share their stories, challenges, and strategies for embracing ambition and achieving greatness. Listeners will gain practical tips and insights on how to turn their ambitions into action, overcome obstacles, and cultivate a growth mindset for success. If you’re looking for inspiration, motivation, and actionable steps to achieve your goals, this podcast is the best way to unleash your ambition and strive for greatness.
Living Better with ‘Living The Sweet Life’
‘Living The Sweet Life‘ is a podcast dedicated to helping individuals live better and happier lives with a growth mindset. Hosted by personal growth and happiness experts, this podcast offers insights, tips, and stories on cultivating a growth mindset, finding fulfillment, and creating a life of purpose and joy. Listeners will gain practical strategies for improving relationships, building resilience, and embracing a growth mindset for a more fulfilling life. This podcast is an excellent resource for anyone looking to live their best life and create positive changes for themselves and those around them.
Cultivating Positivity with ‘Mindset Growth hosted by Gary Bontrager’
‘Mindset Growth hosted by Gary Bontrager‘ is a podcast focused on cultivating positivity and embracing a growth mindset for success. The host, Gary Bontrager, explores self-improvement, motivation, and overcoming challenges and shares practical tips and strategies for developing a growth mindset. Listeners will gain valuable insights and inspiration for shifting their mindset and adopting a more optimistic outlook. This podcast is a great resource for anyone looking to cultivate positivity, resilience, and a growth mindset for personal and professional success.
Building Business with ‘Business Growth Mindset Podcast’
The ‘Business Growth Mindset Podcast‘ is dedicated to helping individuals build successful businesses with a growth mindset. Hosted by industry leaders and entrepreneurs, this podcast offers insights, strategies, and stories for overcoming challenges, embracing growth, and achieving business success. Listeners will gain practical tips for developing a growth mindset, building resilience, and achieving their best self in entrepreneurship. This podcast is a great resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners who want to tap into the power of mindset and achieve their business goals.
Expanding Horizons with ‘The Growth Mindset’
‘The Growth Mindset‘ podcast is all about expanding horizons and embracing a growth mindset for personal and professional growth. Hosted by experts in personal development and growth mindset, this podcast offers engaging discussions, stories, and strategies for developing a growth mindset and achieving big changes. Listeners will gain insights into overcoming limiting beliefs, embracing challenges, and developing an insatiable appetite for growth and learning. If you’re looking to expand your horizons and unlock your full potential, ‘The Growth Mindset’ podcast is a great resource to feed your growth mindset.
Harnessing Power with ‘The Power Of A Growth Mindset’
‘The Power Of A Growth Mindset‘ podcast is dedicated to harnessing the power of a growth mindset for personal and professional success. This podcast features discussions, stories, and practical strategies for developing resilience, overcoming obstacles, and achieving greatness. Listeners will gain insights into how to harness the power of a growth mindset, persevere through challenges, and achieve phenomenal results in life. If you’re looking for inspiration, motivation, and practical tips for unlocking your potential, ‘The Power Of A Growth Mindset’ podcast is a must-listen.
Growing Yourself with ‘Growth Mindset Podcast’
‘Growth Mindset Podcast‘ is about growing yourself and cultivating a growth mindset for personal and professional development. This podcast features interviews, stories, and discussions on deliberate practice, resilience, and continuous growth. Listeners will gain valuable insights and strategies for cultivating a growth mindset, developing healthy habits, and achieving goals. If you’re looking for a podcast to help you unlock your potential and grow as an individual, ‘Growth Mindset Podcast’ is a great resource to fuel your growth mindset journey.
Meeting the ‘Mindset Mentor’
The ‘Mindset mentor‘ podcast is about entering the mindset zone and cultivating a growth mindset for success. This podcast offers insights and strategies for developing a growth mindset, reframing negative behaviors, and adopting healthy mindset practices like meditation. Listeners will gain practical tips for shifting their mindset, enhancing their self-awareness, and embracing a growth-oriented state of mind. If you’re looking for a podcast to help you explore the mindset zone and unlock your full potential, ‘Mindset Zone’ is a must-listen.
Learning with ‘Growth Mindset Podcast with Kat Mae’
‘Growth Mindset Podcast with Kat Mae‘ is about learning and cultivating a growth mindset for personal and professional growth. This podcast offers insights, stories, and strategies on topics ranging from overcoming limiting beliefs to building resilience. Listeners will gain valuable insights and tools for embracing a growth mindset, learning compassionately, and achieving success. If you’re looking for a podcast that will inspire and empower you on your growth journey, ‘Growth Mindset Podcast with Kat Mae’ is a great resource to fuel your growth mindset and achieve your goals.
Get ready to rise high with ‘RiseUp Radio’
‘RiseUp Radio‘ is a podcast for every manager and leader who is ready to unleash their true potential. This podcast gives you great insights about all things required for people management. It allows you to listen in to industry experts with immense experience in skills that make a great leader. From communication to delegation to interviewing and culture & hiring, they have it all. Tune into RiseUp Radio to learn, reflect and grow in small steps everyday!
Conclusion
In conclusion, these top 20 growth mindset podcasts are a valuable resource for anyone seeking to cultivate a growth mindset and achieve success. You can gain insights, inspiration, and practical tips from experts in various fields by listening to these podcasts. The power of podcasts lies in their ability to provide on-the-go learning and personal development. With consistent listening and implementing the lessons learned, you can foster a growth mindset to propel you toward your goals.
Remember, to make the most of these podcasts, it’s important to listen and engage with the content actively. Take notes, reflect on how you can apply the concepts to your own life, and take action. Incorporate the learned lessons into your daily routine and mindset, and you’ll be on your way to unlocking your full potential and achieving your desired success. Happy listening!
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
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Learning and development are crucial for our lives for obvious reasons. We begin learning from the day we are born. And later on, some of us only make a career in this field. Being a professional or manager in learning and developing an exciting role comes with responsibilities and requirements. As businesses evolve, L&D managers are crucial in designing training programs, evaluating their effectiveness, and identifying talent development opportunities.
Through this blog, I will help you get a closer look at who an L&D manager is and what their crucial roles and responsibilities are. I will also help you understand the demand and necessity of L&D managers in today’s corporate world and the skills that you need to become a successful L&D manager.
Learning and development are pivotal in driving organizational growth, enhancing employee skills, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. It ensures that employees are equipped to meet evolving job demands, contributing to the overall success and sustainability of the organization. Nurturing a workforce through learning and development is vital for staying ahead in the modern business landscape.
In charge of employee training and development, L&D managers prioritize skill enhancement and professional growth. Central to an organization’s learning culture, they support learning initiatives and workforce development. Their role is indispensable in shaping the workforce’s professional skills. Additionally, staying up-to-date with industry trends, they incorporate best practices into training programs.
Read more about the top L&D trends in 2024!
Why are Learning and development Managers indispensable?
They play a crucial role in upskilling and reskilling the workforce, leading to improved employee engagement and retention.
L&D Managers are vital in bridging the skills gap between current and future workforce needs.
They drive a culture of continuous learning, ensuring the organization remains competitive and agile.
L&D Managers contribute to the organization’s ability to respond to market dynamics by nurturing a talent pool of adaptable professionals.
As a Learning and Development (L&D) manager, one plays a pivotal role in fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth. This multifaceted role encompasses various responsibilities to enhance employee skills, knowledge, and performance. Here are several key aspects of an L&D manager’s roles and responsibilities:
Training Needs Analysis: An effective manager conducts various assessments to pinpoint areas where training can impact most. For instance, in a customer service-oriented organization experiencing a rise in customer complaints, the manager might identify communication skills as a key area for improvement. Through surveys, performance reviews, and observation, they gather data to understand specific skill gaps and design training programs to enhance communication techniques for customer-facing employees.
Curriculum Development: Building on the example above, then manager develops a curriculum that addresses the identified needs. This could involve creating modules on active listening, empathy building, and conflict resolution. They might incorporate real-life scenarios and case studies drawn from the organization’s experiences to ensure relevance and engagement. Additionally, leveraging multimedia resources such as videos, simulations, and interactive quizzes enhances the learning experience and caters to diverse learning styles.
Implementation and Delivery: Once the curriculum is ready, the manager oversees its rollout and delivery. They may organize workshops facilitated by internal experts or external trainers, providing hands-on practice and opportunities for feedback. In the case of remote or dispersed teams, they utilize virtual platforms for synchronous or asynchronous learning. For example, they might host webinars on virtual communication skills or create self-paced online modules accessible to employees across different locations and time zones.
Evaluation and Feedback: To measure the effectiveness of training initiatives, the manager implements evaluation methods such as pre and post-training assessments, performance metrics analysis, and participant feedback surveys. For instance, after conducting a series of workshops on conflict resolution, they analyze post-training performance data to assess whether there’s a reduction in customer complaints related to communication issues. They also gather feedback from participants regarding the content’s relevance, the delivery quality, and suggestions for improvement, enabling continuous refinement of future training programs.
Learning Culture Promotion: To foster a culture of continuous learning, the manager champions initiatives that encourage knowledge sharing and collaboration. This could involve establishing mentorship programs where seasoned employees pass on their expertise to newer hires, organizing lunch-and-learn sessions on emerging industry trends, or creating online forums for employees to share best practices and seek advice from peers. By recognizing and celebrating learning achievements, such as certifications or completion of developmental milestones, they reinforce the value of continuous growth and inspire others to invest in their development journey.
Also, lifelong learning seems to be a key competency for L&D professionals as well. As Denise Fekete, Talent Development, AI tools and Change Management Consultant, rightly says, “We’re teaching other people how to learn, so we should also be open to learning ourselves in this exponentially shifting area of L&D.”
Top Skills for a Successful L&D Manager
An L&D manager’s success hinges on a diverse skill set essential for effective performance and leadership. Mastery of a spectrum of competencies, proficiency in varied skills, and the ability to excel in the role’s demands are imperative. The multifaceted skill set aligned with the role’s requirements is vital for excelling as an L&D manager. Following are the top 5 skills that are required for L&D manager as stated by Denise.
Open Mindset for Learning: An open mindset means receptive to new ideas, feedback, and experiences. In the context of L&D, it involves being open to exploring different teaching methods, learning theories, and technologies. L&D professionals with an open mindset are willing to challenge their existing beliefs and practices, continuously seeking opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills.
Leadership Capabilities: Leadership in L&D extends beyond traditional hierarchical roles. It involves influencing and inspiring others to engage in learning and development activities. Influential L&D leaders possess strong communication skills to convey the importance of learning initiatives and to motivate learners. They also demonstrate empathy and understanding, recognizing learners’ individual needs and challenges and providing support and guidance as needed.
Technological Savvy: Being technologically savvy in L&D means understanding how to leverage technology to enhance the learning experience. This includes familiarity with learning management systems (LMS), authoring tools, virtual reality, gamification, and other digital platforms and resources. Technological proficiency allows L&D professionals to design engaging, interactive, and accessible learning solutions that cater to diverse learner preferences and needs.
Curiosity and Creativity: Curiosity fuels a desire to explore, experiment, and innovate in the L&D. Curious L&D professionals constantly seek new ideas, trends, and best practices to incorporate into their work. Creativity is the ability to think outside the box and design innovative learning experiences that captivate and inspire learners. Whether it’s designing gamified simulations, interactive e-learning modules, or experiential learning activities, creativity enhances learner engagement and retention.
Diversity of Thought: Embracing diversity of thought means valuing different perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds in the learning process. L&D professionals recognize that learners come from diverse cultures, backgrounds, and learning styles. By incorporating diverse viewpoints into their instructional design, they ensure that learning materials are inclusive and accessible to all learners. This may involve using varied instructional methods, incorporating multimedia content, or providing multiple pathways for learning.
In conclusion, the role of an L&D Manager is crucial in today’s organizations. They are vital in designing and implementing training programs, evaluating training effectiveness, and fostering talent development and succession planning. As the corporate learning landscape continues to evolve, managers must stay updated with the latest trends and technologies to ensure the success and growth of their organization. To become a successful L&D Manager, one must possess strategic planning and organizational skills, effective communication and leadership abilities, analytical and problem-solving capabilities, and adaptability to embrace new technologies.
Looking ahead, the role of Learning and development Managers will continue to evolve as organizations realize the importance of continuous learning and development. Managers must adapt to emerging trends and technologies to provide employees with innovative and effective learning solutions. If you aspire to become an L&D Manager or enhance your skills in this field, staying updated with the latest industry trends and advancements is essential. Also, work on building a learning mindset because to help others learn new things, you must adapt to changes and keep growing. Happy learning!
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
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Understanding the Forgetting Curve: Top 4 Insights for L&D Professionals
The human mind has several fascinating cognitive abilities, such as thinking, learning, analyzing, remembering, etc. These abilities allow us to perform our day-to-day simple to complex functions. Memory and remembering are integral parts of it all. It is because of the vast number of things that we remember that allow us to become better and not repeat past mistakes. However, along with remembering comes forgetting.
Have you ever thought about why you remember certain things and forget the others? And how do you remember something you learned years ago but still forget the thing you learned a few days back? Although the mind stores huge amounts of information, it still forgets some things. I’ll help you figure out the answers to these questions.
In the late 19th century, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus made an epic discovery in memory retention. He conducted spaced learning sessions on himself and uncovered the decline of memory retention over time. He concluded that the human mind tends to discard newly acquired information over time, a phenomenon known as the “forgetting curve.”
What is the forgetting curve?
The forgetting curve depicts the relationship between memory retention and time, impacting the long-term learning curve. It shows an exponential decrease in memory within the initial days after learning. This decline occurs regardless of the epic meaning of the information if it is not rehearsed again.
Ebbinghaus conducted experiments on himself to study how quickly he forgot nonsense syllables (meaningless combinations of letters) over time. He found that forgetting follows a logarithmic pattern: initially rapid, then gradually tapering off.
This curve depicted below shows that we forget most newly learned information within the first few hours or days after learning it, with the rate of forgetting decreasing over time. For example, if you learn a new concept today, you might retain a large portion of it initially. Still, without reinforcement or review, your memory of it will decline rapidly, eventually reaching a plateau where you retain only a fraction of what you initially learned. Or think about when you train other people for specific skills. You prepared and delivered a great session with all the necessary information, but what after that? The trainees actually start losing all that knowledge instantly, and within a few days, it’s forgotten.
Factors affecting the forgetting curve
Several factors can influence the rate at which information is forgotten:
Complexity of the Material: More complex or abstract information may be more difficult to retain than simple, concrete concepts.
Learner’s Prior Knowledge: Learners who have prior knowledge or experience related to the new information may retain it better than those who do not.
Learning Environment: Distractions, interruptions, and other environmental factors can impact how well information is encoded and subsequently retained.
Effectiveness of Initial Learning Experience: The quality of the initial learning experience, including the teaching methods used and the level of engagement of the learner, can influence how well information is retained.
Reinforcement and Review: The frequency and timing of reinforcement and review activities can significantly affect memory retention. Spaced repetition, which involves reviewing information at increasing intervals over time, is particularly effective in combating forgetting.
The influence of the forgetting curve on Learning and Development (L&D) is significant. Well, why do L&D professionals need to learn about this? We must focus on creating the best material, bringing in the best experts, and make them train the employees. However, it is equally essential to focus on retaining the knowledge gained. Learning new things might not be a problem for many but retaining that for a long time and implementing it is a problem that is very common in workplaces. That’s why we trying to understand why we forget many things. Not only that, the forgetting curve imapcts the field of L&D in several ways.
Read below to find out exactly why you should consider it while designing training programs.
Retention Challenges: The forgetting curve highlights the natural tendency of individuals to forget information over time, especially if it is not reinforced. L&D professionals need to be aware of this challenge to design learning experiences that address the potential decay of knowledge.
Optimizing Training Programs: L&D professionals must design training programs that go beyond initial knowledge transfer. Understanding the forgetting curve emphasizes the need for ongoing reinforcement and review to optimize learning outcomes.
Resource Efficiency: Recognizing the impact of the forgetting curve helps L&D teams allocate resources more efficiently. Instead of investing solely in one-time training events, they can design programs that include spaced repetition and reinforcement strategies, ensuring a more lasting impact without unnecessary repetition.
Improved Learning Outcomes: Focusing on the forgetting curve encourages L&D professionals to adopt effective teaching methods. Incorporating spaced repetition, interactive learning, and continuous reinforcement can improve learning outcomes and better knowledge retention.
Adaptation of Training Strategies: L&D professionals can adapt their training strategies to align with the principles of the forgetting curve. This may involve incorporating technologies that support spaced repetition, implementing microlearning approaches, and utilizing performance support tools to reinforce learning over time.
Enhanced Employee Performance: By acknowledging the forgetting curve, L&D professionals can contribute to enhanced employee performance. Training programs that account for the natural decay of knowledge and provide mechanisms to counteract it contribute to a more knowledgeable and competent workforce.
Strategic Learning Design: Understanding the forgetting curve informs the strategic design of learning experiences. L&D professionals can structure content to facilitate easier recall and integrate reinforcement mechanisms, resulting in a more effective and sustainable learning journey.
Promoting Continuous Learning Culture: The forgetting curve emphasizes the importance of continuous learning. L&D professionals can use this concept to advocate for a culture of lifelong learning within organizations, encouraging employees to regularly revisit and reinforce their knowledge. A positive and strong workplace culture can leave a huge impact on the team’s work.
Measuring and Evaluating Training Impact: L&D professionals can use the forgetting curve as a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of training programs. By assessing knowledge retention over time, they can identify areas of improvement and adjust their strategies to better align with the learning needs of employees.
Strategies to Overcome the Forgetting Curve
The first task of understanding the “what” and “why” is done; let’s move to the “how” part now! You know how easily trainees might forget the knowledge you or other experts impart, so you’ll automatically think about how to prevent it as much as possible. And this becomes even more important when you are responsible for training a whole bunch of people. Well, here are some strategies that would be helpful for you:
Spaced Repetition
Implement a spaced repetition system where learners review and revise material at increasing intervals. This approach involves revisiting information just as it’s about to be forgotten, reinforcing the memory, and extending the retention period. Technology-based tools like flashcard apps or learning management systems can automate spaced repetition schedules.
Microlearning
This is also one of the aspects of L&D trends for 2024. It essentially means to break down content into bite-sized, easily digestible modules or lessons. You should deliver information in short bursts, focusing on specific concepts or skills. Microlearning allows for better engagement and information retention, aligning with providing information in a way that minimizes the impact of the forgetting curve.
Interactive Learning Activities
Incorporate interactive elements such as quizzes, discussions, simulations, and real-world scenarios into training theories. Active participation enhances engagement and reinforces learning, making it more memorable. Interactive activities can help counteract the passive nature of traditional learning methods.
Continuous Reinforcement
Pay attention to establishing a system of continuous reinforcement beyond the initial training sessions. Provide regular opportunities for learners to apply their knowledge in practical scenarios, participate in discussions, or receive feedback. Reinforcement can be achieved through ongoing learning opportunities, mentorship programs, or periodic assessments.
Performance Support Tools
You can offer readily accessible performance support tools that employees can use as quick references for daily tasks. Job aids, checklists, and online resources provide just-in-time information, supporting learners when needed. These tools act as reinforcements, bridging the gap between formal training and on-the-job application.
Conclusion
As an L&D professional, you must understand the key concepts behind memory and learning. And this forgetting curve gives you a lot of insights that can help you make your training process much more effective and efficient. Think about the components like time, strength, relevance, and presentation, which can affect the outcomes of the learning programs that you create and deliver.
After understanding this, build tricks and techniques to help your trainees overcome the forgetting curve. L&D professionals can employ various strategies like reinforcing content regularly, ensuring clarity and relevance in learning materials, and incorporating interactivity can all enhance memory retention. Spaced learning, which involves distributing learning over time, effectively retains the new learning.
L&D professionals can create more effective and impactful learning experiences by leveraging these insights from the forgetting curve. Incorporating these strategies into training programs will support long-term memory retention and maximize the benefits of learning and development initiatives.
Aastha, a passionate industrial psychologist, writer, and counselor, brings her unique expertise to Risely. With specialized knowledge in industrial psychology, Aastha offers a fresh perspective on personal and professional development. Her broad experience as an industrial psychologist enables her to accurately understand and solve problems for managers and leaders with an empathetic approach.
Ace your people management role with strong delegation skills.
Master the art of effective delegation by reviewing your skills with a free assessment now.
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