Boris Joaquin| Executivechronicles.com
Throughout my career, especially where it involves sales and marketing, I have always advocated for the alignment of business priorities, people strategy and constant training even if we did not have the budget for it. Here’s the simple reason why: customer acquisition and retention are primarily influenced by sales executives and customer service staff. As such, these frontliners need to be highly motivated and equipped to be effective!
Because of this, I have always sought for the HR agenda to be on the executive table. People strategy belongs to every manager. And so, I would always push for learning opportunities, at the very least, for my team.
This is what I love about the work that we do in training and development. At Breakthrough Leadership Management Consultancy and its learning events arm, Salt & Light Ventures, we get to recommend and provide business improvement tools designed to advance an organization’s performance through the management and development of their people.
In more than a decade since being involved in the business of Learning and Development (L&D), I have observed a broadening landscape and trends in L&D practice. I have seen the industry evolve twice: from people management to talent management, and from the technology age to the people age. Each year, the practice evolves, attempting to address key development needs better.
Here in the Philippines, we asked our clients what approaches they consider to be most effective in facilitating learning and development among their employees. The broadening landscape in L&D, as our top clients identified, now involve the following:
- In-house training
- On-the-job training
- Coaching or learning from peers
- Online learning and assessment (including webinars, mobile, or platform-based testing) and
- External conferences, workshops, and events
As we consider our clients’ increasing development needs, BLMC and SLV are also evolving to develop ways to serve these needs better.
Assessment and Analysis
When a company starts deploying so many learning channels, whether web-based or classroom trainings, it is important to be grounded on the “why”. Otherwise, employees would see these tools as additional task or burden for their productivity. This why we have ventured into online assessments which can help our clients understand their people’s needs and development areas.
More Relevant Internal Training
Majority of our clients exhaustively utilize in-house training for their employees’ growth and development. This year, we have lined up relevant and insightful training programs from high-caliber trainers and subject matter experts.
To continue to grow in meeting the needs of our clients, we are moving towards customizing training content — developed either solely by our team or in collaboration with client’s internal L&D practitioners. Our newest division, Link Organizational Development (Link-OD), is commissioned to do exactly that, either by adapting or curating existing internal or external materials, or by developing user-generated content (learners creating and sharing their own learning materials or content).
Coaching and Hands-On Training
On-the-job training involves face-to-face interactions, with the addition of coaching, job rotation, secondment, and shadowing. While this program is purely developed within the organization, we have an excellent line-up of subject matter and industry experts clients can outsource from us as consultants and coaches to help build your people’s competencies in leadership, project management, marketing, and customer service.
Furthermore, our GM/VP in Salt & Light Ventures is facilitating partnership with corporations to help us facilitate same-industry-exposure learning.
Catalytic Events
We need to continue to work collaboratively with every organization that we serve to ensure that current and future business needs are met and that learning and development is agile, effective, and timely. Technological developments and emerging insights from other disciplines have great potential to aid this process – but only if the capability to exploit these tools and techniques are developed concurrently. We therefore need to keep an eye on the future, to understand the evolving learning landscape, while continuing to build the professional competencies we need today to drive and sustain organizational success.
Our branded learning events allow our clients to keep abreast on what is new and current. These big events this 2016 promise to be enriching and catalytic.
Moving Forward
Today’s companies must evolve their learning and development strategies to be able to adapt to the current workforce. The impact of traditional models of learning on improving engagement and performance will eventually plateau. By aligning learning and people strategies with business objectives and strategies as well as leveraging innovative technology, organizations will be able to create high-performing teams that deliver results.
We are seeing an ongoing recognition of the importance of greater alignment within businesses, and our findings point to the benefits this has in a number of areas – for example, increased clarity of purpose, how effectively people management practices support leadership development, and the ability to quantify the impact of trainings and learning events on productivity.
We at Breakthrough Leadership Management Consultancy, Inc. face a stimulating and challenging future in meeting organizational and learner requirements in fast-paced and busy environments.
We are excited to work closely and collaboratively with you toward your organizational growth.
