How to Double Your L&D Budget by Aligning with Business Needs
Align learning with performance in stakeholders’ minds and explain the risks of non-conformance to secure the budget you need in L&D
Guy W Wallace, a former Performance Analyst & Instructional Architect, joins Blake Proberts on the Strategic L&D Podcast.
They talk about how to discuss aligning L&D and business strategy by putting a governance board in place, creating advisory councils with specific people leaders to ensure alignment, and how to get attention, acceptance, and demand from executives. Listen to the full episode above or watch below.
Key takeaways
“[Training] really comes down to trying to replicate the real world performance.”
1. Change behaviours.
Learning effectiveness comes from addressing knowledge and skill gaps of learners, and that comes from understanding their backgrounds and needs.
“Content needs to be bookended. This is what’s in it for you; this is what’s in it for the organisation and your process performance. Now let’s practice what you learned in an authentic way.”
2. Match training to the job’s complexity.
Use real-world practice and consistently level-up challenges for high-stakes tasks. Provide guidance for low-stakes, infrequent tasks to enhance performance.
“[People] shouldn’t have… to memorise everything, because memories are faulty. We need to augment people’s performance.”
3. You’re not training people to memorise things.
You’re changing behaviours. Sometimes that means they’ll need reminders, so utilise technology to augment the day to day environment.
“We’re too focused on things like engagement. Who cares if people are engaged or not? Can they perform when they get back out on the job is the number one thing we should be concerned with.”
4. You’re probably not measuring the right things.
Which means there’s no way you’re getting good returns, let alone the right ones. If you’re working to address business problems, then you should be measuring business outcomes.
“There’s so many variables to performance [where] learning is not going to solve that, content’s not going to solve that.”
5. Stay in your lane.
Learning can’t solve everything. More content won’t fix business issues. The bottom line is identifying and solving the root causes of performance issues.
See more from our host: Blake Proberts
Learn about our guest: Guy W Wallace
Hear more of the Strategic L&D Podcast on Spotify and Apple. You’ll also find us in video form on YouTube.