Learning and development are concerned with training your employees to enhance their skills. Employees are an integral part of any organization. It is important that your employees have the required skill sets and they are up-to-date. Learning and development focus on instilling just that. Learning helps the employees acquire knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Similarly, development helps them to broaden their goals.
The four words: learning, development, training, and education are used interchangeably. However, there is a considerable difference between them.
- Learning: Learning is all about acquiring new skills, knowledge, or experience, development, training as well as education involve learning.
- Training: Training is all about teaching skills, knowledge, or attitude that can be applied immediately in real-life scenarios.
- Development: Development looks at the long-term goal. It is all about broadening the understanding of the employees and providing them an in-depth knowledge.
- Education: Education is a formal way to gain in-depth knowledge in some subject.
Phases of an effective learning and development process:
- Analyse the need for training
At first, you need to analyse why you need training. Only when you are clear with “why” will you be able to mould the training. You should not train your employees only for the sake of training. You should train them to acquire new knowledge or skill sets that can be used in the future. Learning has a goal. To analyse the need for training, you should know where you want to see your organization in the future.
- Specify your learning objective
When you are clear with why you need training, the next thing you should do is specify what your end goals for this training are; what you want to achieve after this training. Every training objective has three components:
- The ability to realize your needs: For instance, as an HR manager, I should know about the areas where my employees are lacking.
- Conditions for effective behaviour: For instance, when you go to a meeting, you should be able to summarize the meeting within a minute or two and be able to present it before your clients.
- A specific and quantifiable training goal: For instance, you should be able to gauge the improvement of your employees after the training; you should have a matrix for that.
- Design the training
Now is the right time to design the training. The training can be imparted in so many ways. You need to decide on the training material, learning activities, teaching method, and so on. The training should be designed together with the external trainer and the trainee. You should involve various forms of training like presentations, seminars, keynotes, lectures, etc.
- Monitoring and evaluation
This is the last phase of training. In this phase, the effectiveness of the training is evaluated. Student feedbacks are also collected in this stage that can be used to plan future endeavours. Effective training should be able to bring a change in employee behaviour. This is how you bring a change to an organization.
