Learning and development (L&D) professionals play a critical role in every company. They conduct learning needs analysis and draw up training plans to equip employees with the skills for peak performance. They advise management on how to narrow the gap between individual performance and the company’s targets. And they promote a culture of continuous learning throughout the company. Without L&D professionals, training will be uncoordinated and lacking in strategic direction.
In practice, however, L&D professionals are often unable to devote as much time as they would like to this strategic role. They are often stuck in fire-fighting mode — running training programs, registering (and withdrawing) employees for courses and churning out training reports, to name just a few daily tasks.
From our many discussions with L&D professionals over the years, we have observed a pattern of pain points they often experience:
1. Burdened with administrative work
As a company’s headcount grows, the number of training places increases exponentially. L&D professionals have the unenviable task of coordinating all these programs, deconflicting schedules and ensuring that colleagues do not miss their courses. Due to the sheer volume of data they need to process, coupled with the lack of productivity tools (see Pain Point #2), they often find themselves weighed down by dreary administrative work.
2. Inadequate productivity tools
L&D departments are often relegated to the back of the queue for the acquisition of enterprise software which can boost their productivity. They watch as Finance procures the ERP system they had been coveting, Sales is rewarded with the snazzy CRM system that promises to quadruple their pipeline, and even HR enjoys the bliss of working with an HR management system to manage leave, payroll and performance.
L&D, meanwhile, often has to make do with just Microsoft Excel. While Excel is an excellent tool for entering and storing data in tables, it does not lend itself easily to collaboration between different departments. To share training records like Individual Training Plans or Training Progress Reports, L&D will need to place the Excel file on the company file server. Data security then becomes an issue, because employees in different departments will see of their colleagues’ training data than they need to. The alternative is not to share the files, but this leads to Pain Point #3.
3. Becoming a choke point
When a lane on a road is closed for construction work, the remaining lane can become a choke point for cars and trucks, leading to massive traffic jams. In the same way, by restricting access to training data due to security concerns, L&D may inadvertently become a bottleneck for the processing of training data. Training deadlines may get missed and staff may forget to go for their courses — and who will get the blame?
4. Reminders, reminders, reminders
It is a task that most L&D professionals dread: Emailing and calling staff — and their managers — to remind them to go for courses as training plan deadlines loom. Once the course is over, L&D will again have to coax employees to complete their post-course evaluations. Some of these surveys must be done three months after a course is completed. L&D will then have to juggle a complex matrix of timings to decide when to send out each reminder.
To add to the frustration, employees often ignore these training notifications, as the busyness of their daily work takes priority. Attending training and completing paperwork is usually the last thing on their minds.
5. Dealing with the consequences of missed training
Failing to send employees for training not only impacts employees’ performance, but in many companies it could have more serious operational and financial consequences. For companies in regulated industries like financial services and manufacturing, failure to attend required training could result in failed ISO audits, forfeited government grants or even regulatory action. For example, workers may be prohibited from operating machinery for safety reasons if they don’t complete their refresher training on schedule.
If the above challenges sound familiar, you are not alone. L&D professionals the world over experience them too.
There is a solution…
Like many of the challenges in the world today, technology provides solutions to many of the headaches experienced by L&D professionals.
A training management system can help L&D departments construct training roadmaps and share individual training plans with all employees. It can send reminders to staff to register for courses and chase them to complete post-course surveys. Using the results of these surveys, the system can generate reports to help management evaluate training effectiveness and measure the company’s training ROI.
All this will relieve L&D professionals of the more mundane aspects of training administration. More significantly, a system that is deployed throughout the enterprise will encourage all employees to take personal responsibility over their own training by providing self-service interfaces and timely reminders. The L&D department no longer needs to bear the entire burden of managing training on their own.
With the right enterprise training management system in place, many of the challenges faced by L&D can be overcome. It will free up L&D professionals to focus on their most strategic contribution — transforming the learning culture and processes in the company.
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