A learning and development strategy is an action plan that clearly identifies what the learning and development team or function in an organisation will do to support the organisation to achieve its strategic objectives. In other words it outlines actions that the function will take to align learning and development with an organisation’s priorities. Having a learning and development strategy has a number of benefits. Among them are:
- It aligns learning and development actions and investment to what is really important to the organisation.
- It ensures learning and development resources are not wasted on unnecessary activities and projects.
- It creates a framework that facilitates the measurement of outcomes from learning and development investment.
Also a good learning and development strategy has certain qualities, some of which are:
- Learning and development outcomes must be based on business goals.
- Learning and development outcomes must be clear and measurable.
- It must not be complicated. Anybody should be able to understand it.
- It must be action-oriented and not descriptive.
Who is responsible for creating the strategy?
A learning and development strategy must be developed collaboratively by the organisation’s leadership team, other key stakeholders and the learning and development team. The learning and development team must not develop the strategy by themselves and present it to the organisation. Rather they must first understand the organisation’s priorities and development the strategy to align with those priorities.
In my next post I will start answering the question, how do you create a learning and development strategy?
