Improving the Value of Learning and Development, by Wendy Douglas

From Issue 7 of our newsletter.

"Increasing global competition has led to intense pressure on Human Resource Development to demonstrate that programmes contribute directly to the organisation’s bottom line" (Holton). Given this, it is critical that the strategic contribution of learning and development is understood.

This is currently not the case. In fact, the impact of learning and development can often be almost invisible – a recent study (1) showed that 80% of respondents were unable to quantify the effect of development. Yet several million pounds was spent on UK management development last year, and it has excellent scope for return on investment, provided that it can show it delivers practical benefits to the organisation. This is the perennial issue of transferring the value of development into achieving results.

When employees are being assessed for development, they are usually asked two questions:

1. What skills, knowledge and personal attributes are important in your job?

2. In which of these do you need development?

These are necessary questions to ask – it is essential to know what specific areas are relevant to the employee’s work, their interests and their skills, and to discover what areas they would prioritise for development and how prepared they are to undertake the learning. Traditionally, once the answers to these questions have been satisfactorily answered, development needs are understood to have been established and, if approved, development goes ahead. It looks like a sensible strategy – but it can lead to wrong decisions. Why?

A third question needs to be asked. Without it, new skills may go unnoticed and the company’s investment may be wasted. This question is:

3. Which of your skills, knowledge and personal attributes are likely to be encouraged, recognised and rewarded by the company?

The three questions fit together in the following diagram:

In other words, more attention needs to be paid to the way learning and development will fit in with the organisation’s strategy and culture. We need to know what is important to the employee, and the priorities of the organisation. Without addressing this third question, it is possible that the employee’s new skill will not be valuable to the business. Alternatively, it may be found that enough people already possess it. As a result, after the employee has been developed, they find that their new ability is not as much in demand as they had expected.

It is the job of good management development to ensure that this does not happen. By asking for managers’ views of the everyday reality of line management, and by analysing:

• how work is allocated,

• the business norms,

• bonuses and how they are awarded, and

• promotions,

a better determination of development needs can be made.

These are the characteristics of the real world that if properly accounted for, will stop development from being out of touch with the business.

The development that really pays off for the individual and for the organisation, is found where learning and development is important to the job, where the individual is ready for it and where putting it into practice will be recognised and rewarded.

In this context, we need to look at the chain of command. What kind of development is the employee’s manager receiving? What about their manager? How strongly do more senior people support the various levels of learning and development and how will they ensure that the learning is put into practice? To focus on this, a fourth question is required, as follows:

4. How will the learning and development be implemented?

Even if learning is important to the company, it could be wasted if no processes are in place to enable its use. The training strategy should establish such processes.

Our approach to learning and development is to identify the skills, knowledge and personal attributes that are most likely to be recognised by the organisation, either because they are currently valued by the organisation or because they are seen to be critical for the business’s future development. This approach is grounded in the organisation’s reality and hence prevents any subsequent development programmes being unfocused on business needs.

1 International Institute of Management Development, Lausanne – study into current practice in assessing the impact of management development in organisations.

Click here to see more about our approach to assessment and development.

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