Joanna Strahan, founder of C2C Training Group, is back with another valuable article on crafting a winning learning and development strategy for your staff. C2C Training Group offers high quality assessment/competency-based courses in Health and Safety, leadership, business skills and personal development. Consequently, Joanna’s 21 years of industry experience ensures engaging and impactful training sessions.
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Startup founders need highly motivated, well-trained staff to drive business growth, regardless of team size. Therefore, to achieve this it will be essential for you to put a learning and development strategy in place.
Learning and development strategy (L&D) forms a key part of developing your staff and carrying out performance management within your business. Subsequently, an L&D Plan is a strategic roadmap creating a picture of where the organisation wants to be in the future. Thus, Learning and Development will support the building of staff’s capability, capacity and commitment.
As a startup founder you want to empower your people to achieve their full potential. Engaging them in the plan can have a hugely positive impact on both your business and your staff. It can also help you attract, recruit, and develop the skilled workers you need by enabling you to:
- Establish clear career pathways and personal development reviews
- Demystify education programmes and promote upskilling initiatives
- Diversify recruitment routes by identifying key transferrable skills and offering apprenticeship programmes
Training involves teaching people the required skills and behaviors through various methods. Consequently, businesses and teams with the best players thrive and outperform the competition.
Here are six steps startup founders can take to develop a coherent, practical and effective Learning and Development plan:
Step 1: Create clear career pathways
To create clear career pathways, you will first need to identify the role profiles that exist within your business. Furthermore, you will need to determine the purpose of the role, the hierarchy of authority, reporting lines and career progression routes.
For example, the purpose of a sales team is to generate sales, grow the business and retain existing customer relationships and within the sales teams there will be different job roles:
- Sales Representative
- Trainee Sales Representative
- Assistant Sales Representative
- Sales Manager
- Sales Director
Career pathways should also show how to achieve progression and promotion. For example, how do you move from Sales Representative to Sales Manager? Outline the necessary skills and experience progression within the written career pathway.
Step 2: Define Roles and Responsibilities
Defining clear roles and responsibilities provides your own business with the vital advantages necessary for continual growth. If people are clear about what they need to do, it makes it easier for then to do it. This enables increased internal control, improved process management and enhances operational performance.
To develop an effective Learning and Development strategy, you should evaluate your existing roles and responsibilities defined in your job descriptions to ensure that they are reflective of what you need people to do. If not, the knowledge and behaviours criteria you set will not deliver the skills required to fulfil the role. The most efficient and effective way of achieving this is to set up a small working group with key operational people at different levels and across a variety of job roles.
Step 3: Define the Knowledge & Behaviours Required
It is important that the new job descriptions clearly define the knowledge requirement to successfully undertake the role. When defining knowledge requirements for roles, consider both experience and education as valuable sources. Not everyone needs to be an expert in every area, but a baseline awareness is beneficial.
Alongside knowledge, identify attitudes and behaviors that align with your startup’s culture, vision, and values.Because how you do something is more likely to deliver good customer service that just what you do.
Involve your staff in this process to ensure comprehensive input. Together with a training gap analysis you will be able to highlight specific skill gaps within your business. From there, you can prioritise your employees training needs. When discussing this with your team, you should consider a variety of core skills including:
Values & Behaviours
Values are just behaviours you want people to live by. giving them direction on how to achieve your mission. They should be specific and descriptive in the way you want people to act or treat people
Health, Safety & Environment
Businesses have a moral and legal obligation to manage this well, and people need to be aware of how you are protecting them and their environment and what they should do to help
Quality
Quality directly impacts customer service and brand loyalty; equip employees with the skills to maintain high standards
Performance & Time Management
Efficiency and punctuality are critical to a successful business and people should know how to prioritise and make the most of their time
Commercial Focus
Everyone in a business can affect your profitability, from general awareness of business costs and the use of company resources, to cost saving and revenue generation
Leadership & Management
Line managers or supervisors have a massive influence on the team dynamics and performance. Understand how to motivate and manage your staff effectively, as this is often overlooked during promotions based on tenure
Strategic Thinking
Target strategic thinking at the senior management level, focusing on performance reviews and strategic planning for success. This type of thinking will help you achieve your Vision.
Step 4: Choose the Right Training
Having identified the knowledge and behaviours required to fulfil each role, you can now look to select the appropriate training.
Training involves teaching people the required skills and behaviors through various methods:
- Technical Courses or Qualifications
- Apprenticeships, Vocational Programmes or Mentoring
- Internal Training
- Continued Professional Development (CPD) Modules
- Compliance Training
A good Learning and Development strategy gives people the opportunity to complete different types of training, not simply to assist in the competency of their role. Ideally, it should inspire them to achieve their career goals, to broaden their knowledge, and to widen their skills base.
To select the right training, you will needto use the job descriptions to identify the learning outcomes needed to fulfil the role. Subsequently, finding a course that meets these needs, in the delivery method that best suits your business, can often be difficult and can require thinking outside the box.
Remember a recognised training course or a theoretical qualification may not deliver the competence levels you are looking for and often blended learning delivers the best results. Therefore, where you have a training need for a member of staff and you cannot find the course, approach your training provider and ask them if they can work with your business to design, deliver and complete a bespoke training.
Step 5: Build on Skills & Experience
Just because people attend a training course does not mean that they are competent in those skills. In fact, defined skills are the ability to consistently perform tasks well, developed through practice and experience.
Encourage your teams to apply their knowledge practically, providing observation, support, and mentorship from line managers. Subsequently, within the job profiles, you should determine the skills and experience levels required for each role.
Step 6: Monitoring the Learning & Development Journey
While tracking statistical performance against the learning and development strategy is important, focusing solely on course completion rates overlooks crucial factors.
Every individual’s learning and development journey will be different, and it is important that you remain flexible and inclusive in your plans. Consequently, you need to have a system for understanding their journey and monitoring their development. So, a Personal Development Review (PDR) can provide a framework for employees to have open and regular conversations with their line manager about their performance, including reviewing their competency, personal development and career goal:
A PDR should include:
- Competency Review
We determine the employee’s level of competency based on set criteria aligned with their roles, responsibilities, and the company’s competency framework.
- Development Review
During your development review the employee and line manager will discuss the employee’s development needs for the year ahead and how the line manager is able to support the employee’s development. For example, what training courses will the employee require to better their knowledge and experience within their role.
- Career Goals
The employee and line manager will discuss the employee’s career goals and future aspirations. Then, the line manager will encourage the employee to outline their short term and long-term goals and establish actions required to achieve them.
For startup founders, creating a structured Learning and Development plan will mean that you are able to identify the training needed for your team to do their jobs well. You can then monitor the effectiveness of the plan and adjust where necessary. Additionally, a focus on L&D from the early stages of your startup will help you to drive growth and achieve your strategic plans.
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