Last year, there was the widespread adoption of remote working. Organizations were scrambling to explore the best way to adapt to workplace changes. In-person training and professional development may have been neglected.
Come 2021, stay-at-home regulations and restrictions are slowly lifting. Offices have opened, and people are slowly returning to work. This poses another challenge to organizations as they figure out the best way for workplace learning to happen while juggling between their employees working at home and in the office.
According to Kevin Delaney, LinkedIn’s Vice President of Learning and Development, “People have recognized that learning is no longer a nice to have; it’s a must-have because learning is essential for success.”
The importance of learning
With today’s changing working world, continuous growth must keep up. For many challenges that we are facing with this change, learning is the answer. It marks the difference between an employee’s relevance or redundancy in an organization.
The digital learning experience of people must go beyond the mere consumption of knowledge. While learning is crucial, the way in which learning content is delivered matters as well. Learning content must include a variety of learning exercises, including quizzes, reflections, application, and knowledge sharing.
This then ensures that the information acquired would be retained and applied in the organization. As the world is experiencing a rapid change towards digital learning, the tolerance for subpar online learning will decrease. Hence, it is important to keep yourself updated constantly.
Many organizations today are rolling out learning and development strategies to train their employees. However, these strategies cost money. To receive investment or a budget for learning and development in your organization, a strong business proposal with performance outcomes is necessary.
Budgets and resources are limited, and with competing business goals and needs, key decision-makers must see the benefits of a learning transformation.
How exactly should you go about proposing a case for learning and development in your organization?
Laying out business needs and KPIs
By mapping out business needs and KPIs, organizations can look towards existing and forecasted data to support their case. For instance, what are the roles that the organization is lacking? What skills are needed to boost the efficiency of the organization? Are these skill gaps affecting the revenue and profit margins?
Conducting competitor analysis
Keeping up with your competition is certainly a strong case to invest in workplace learning. What are the learning and development strategies implemented by leading organizations in the same field? It would be beneficial to back these examples up with data and numbers as well.
Cost-savings
Look for tangible ways your strategies can generate revenue. Transitioning from classroom learning to online learning, or streamlining procedures in your organization can result in cost savings.
Your business case should essentially address the benefits and risks should the investment decision be made to support the strategies. A bonus would be to outline possible alternatives, alongside a compelling argument for moving ahead with your proposal.
Learning Strategist Amanda Nolen of NilesNolan has put together a free LinkedIn Learning course on “The Future of Workplace Learning.” In this 23-minute course, you would be able to make use of learning and development as a key driver for your business, and how to get executive buy-in and investment to bring growth and transformation to your organization.
Intrigued? Head over to her course to find out more.
