How to create an effective Learning and Development (L&D) strategy 

The purpose of an L&D strategy

L&D strategy outlines the aims of an employee development initiative, ensuring they align with broader business goals.

Defining a corporate L&D strategy establishes a synergy between leadership and HR to help design training courses and personal development programs for employees throughout the organization.

L&D strategy is a critical part of an organization’s wider business strategy. It outlines the competencies the company requires from its workforce so that L&D staff can focus their efforts on a specific strategy.

Successful L&D strategies produce effective employees with the knowledge, skills, and capabilities required to improve the organization’s performance.

While L&D strategies are critical for businesses operating in evolving markets, they also produce significant employee benefits:

• Investing in L&D shows staff they are valued and provides professional growth and career progression opportunities.
• Aligning L&D strategy with business strategy helps to produce a strong and capable workforce, boosting performance and creating competitive advantages.

Even though there are significant benefits, research shows only 40% of companies say their learning strategy is aligned with business goals. Given that more than half of businesses fail to connect their learning initiatives to their objectives, companies that take the time to develop an explicit L&D strategy can see significant benefits.

When an organization aligns its L&D strategy with corporate goals, it can:

• Identify existing skills gaps hindering their operations and develop adequate upskilling or reskilling programs
• Secure a talent pipeline, including leadership development plans to help appropriately manage succession planning
• Enhance the workplace culture and promote continuous learning
• Workforce planning to adapt to new technologies and deliver successful digital transformation projects

Benefits of a successful L&D strategy

While there is overlap, the benefits produced by implementing a successful corporate L&D strategy can be separated into those for the employee and the employer.

Employee benefits

• Engagement – Developing employees and investing in their capabilities promotes workplace satisfaction and engagement. Most staff members like learning new skills and feeling valued by their employers.
• Collaboration – Group learning and knowledge-sharing can produce greater cohesion and togetherness within a team. This helps promote communication between employees and find new opportunities for collaboration.
• Job security – Employees who develop their skills and get better at their job become more valuable to employers, increasing their job security.
• Employability – This can also help increase their employability to other organizations should they move on.
• Internal mobility – Similarly, training can help employees transition to new, often more financially lucrative, roles within the organization. L&D strategy can identify previously untapped skills contributing to greater career development and potentially leading to promotions.

Employer benefits

• Productivity – When successful, employees’ improved performance and productivity post-L&D outweigh any time set aside for training courses and self-study. L&D strategy allows staff to get more work done in less time while also increasing the quality of their work and reducing the time required to fix any errors.
• Retention – Improved engagement and the potential for new challenges through internal mobility mean employees are more likely to remain at an organization with a strong L&D strategy and practices. Investing in employee careers helps incentivize employee retention.
• Recruitment – On a similar note, organizations can market themselves to potential hires by utilizing strong L&D strategies. With clear pathways to progress at the company, you can attract the best talent available.
• Competitive advantage – Knowledgeable employees can more effectively track new trends and developments within the industry, learning techniques to improve operations.
• Resilience – The L&D strategy helps develop the hard and soft skills employees need to adapt quickly to changes and pivot when unexpected situations occur. This could include knowledge of other business methods and products or the stress management and communication skills to reorganize work processes abruptly. With L&D practices in place, organizations become resilient in the face of volatile markets.

4. Planning learning experiences

Once you understand your existing workforce and where their weaknesses are, you can begin to develop training programs and specific learning experiences to enhance operations and achieve your goals.

Successful L&D programs tailor content to be as impactful as possible for each employee while also allowing them to learn in the manner that suits them best.

Essential factors to consider when planning learning experiences include:

• The methods of delivering educational content – Many approaches are available to educate your staff, including formal scheduled training sessions and self-motivated study where employees are responsible for their own learning.
• The resources you will provide employees – Whether they are generated in-house, outsourced, or purchased, new L&D strategies will require new resources.
• Review and assessment methodology – How you, as an organization, will assess the performance of employees post-training. This could include testing to understand the learner’s new knowledge, training evaluation feedback to assess the course itself, or learning metrics to track behavioral changes and see how training is applied in the workplace.

Learn more about 5 Ways to Improve Employee Engagement with L&D

5. Delivering learning experiences

This is where the L&D strategy goes from theory to practice and the training is delivered.

A lot has to go right, including developing the right content for your employees and having instructors capable of engaging and informative sessions.

When building a new learning culture, it is crucial to establish how training and continuous education will become part of the workplace routine.

Learn How to Build a Learning Culture to enhance the overall learning experiences.

6. Track, monitor, and evaluate employee performance

The first two steps establish what stakeholders hope to achieve with a new L&D strategy. The final stage of the process is to track employee performance against these outcomes and assess the effectiveness of the training program.

By tracking, monitoring, and evaluating employee performance, organizations can measure the impact of an L&D strategy and prove its value. Part of this is understanding employee performance before implementing a new L&D strategy.

Without a baseline in place, organizations struggle to establish meaningful learning metrics that reflect the real impact of a training program.

Tracking performance and evaluating training effectiveness is a difficult task. You can ask for feedback and incorporate employee assessments to determine what was learned.

But it is more challenging to measure behavioral changes and determine whether the new capabilities were efficiently applied in the workplace.

Discover 10 Valuable Training Metrics to Know

5 Examples of effective L&D strategies that can inspire you

There are many examples of effective L&D strategies for different types of organizations and various industries. Examples include:

• Yelp – the online review site promotes learning and development through two core practices: stretch roles, allowing employees to find their passion, and promoting from within. A staggering 98% of Yelp’s sales management roles were internal candidates.
• Money Supermarket – the UK price comparison website transformed its L&D strategy during the pandemic launching a new online platform that tailors specific experiences to each role. This includes a list of skills for staff to rate their abilities and a news feed with content based on the information provided.
• Google – the Silicon Valley giant offers employees a flexible learning environment through an L&D strategy centered around Google-to-Google (g2g), an internal network for employee training through peer-to-peer learning.
• NSPCC – National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, a UK charity, has significantly focused on “=mc,” its innovation program to help increase donations. The program has provided a rolling innovation scheme and coaching to support staff, including creating 50 innovation champions across the organization.
• Cruise Automation – The US company designing the self-driving cars of the future pivoted its L&D strategy in 2019, starting a pilot mentorship program that matched young and experienced employees while also providing helpful resources to increase the success of these relationships.

The importance of online platforms to employee Learning and Development

All these steps can be improved by implementing effective online platforms for learning and development.

Online platforms act as a critical tool helping to ensure consistent delivery of content to employees based on the chosen strategy. They allow employees to learn on their own terms, accessing training material where and when they want to learn.

The application of L&D online platforms includes:

• Creating a single repository for an organization’s entire learning resources (LMS)
• The ability to create, manage and monitor individualized learning tracks (LXP)
• Help instructional designers create new learning resources (Authoring tool)

With online platforms simplifying L&D processes, organizations can:

• scale the delivery of training material to their entire workforce
• promote collaborative learning to motivate employees
• react to any changes
• measure progress or specific outcomes

With the rise of work-from-home and hybrid models, online platforms for learning and development have gone from a bonus to a necessity. Training a dispersed workforce is only possible based on in-person interactions.

Now with the integration of online platforms, L&D staff can maintain operations and ensure teams are still developing new skills even when they are not in the office.

Valamis online learning solutions

Online learning has become essential for the learning and development strategy. If you are interested in topics like employee experience, scalable onboarding programs, and learning analytics, book a Valamis demo, we are here to help.