Learning and Development- Top 4 Focus Areas for CLOs worldwide in 2017

Last updated on February 7, 2017

As the war for talent gets fiercer, organizations are increasingly looking at their talent pool to ensure that their learning and development initiatives are at par with, if not above, the market standards. The most important among these are the consistent learning materials and the technology integration that has become mainstream for large and small businesses alike. With these tools at their disposal, the chief learning officer responsibilities are also growing manifold. The learning officer of yesteryear is today tasked with the chief learning officer responsibilities that is summarily managing and developing the quality of knowledge of the entire talent pool in an organization. And this task isn’t easy. Here’s a quick look at the top 4 focus areas for Chief Learning Officers in 2017:

Connect Learning and Development To Business Strategy

The objective of any successful learning and development program centers around the actual productivity enhancement to an organization in terms of employee performance. Maintaining this alignment and developing a complete business vision-centric learning and development program schedule accordingly is the hallmark of a successful chief learning officer. With the war for talent intensifying, it has become all the more important for a business goal oriented learning and development program to beat the competition and stay ahead and this is the first area of focus that learning officers need to maintain in 2017.

Set Up Training Tracks and Milestones Along The Way For Best Performers

This is an oft overlooked aspect of the learning and development department. Chief Learning officers will need to benchmark and segregate employees in almost every department according to their performance levels, into high potential, high performance, or training requirement centric tracks. Each of these tracks can then be used to analyze the specific requirements for each member- which, in turn, would play a crucial role in preparing succession plans and ensure only the right employee fitment is considered and then developed for future leadership roles.

Create Short, Middle and Long Term Strategies and Implement Them

Every Chief Learning Officer magazine has had repeated articles and pieces about the importance of segregating the learning goals of the talent pool into short, medium and long term goals. There is a necessity of this being carefully planned and implemented, for example, strategic and skill improvement training can be a medium term training whereas job related critical skill development is  a short term training theme. Such segregation also helps in maximizing the total return on investment from the learning and development budgets of the organization.

Customized Core Set of On-Demand Programs

Learning On-Demand is the key of the new enterprise. This is more than likely to be the major trend in the coming days as well. Integration into the cloud has provided an unprecedented advantage even for distributed workforces, as more and more of them are looking to technology to provide a personalized learning experience. This is why the new age Chief Learning Officer will be required to leverage this technology and extend it to employees as and when they required, from anywhere.

Chief Learning officers across the world are using technology to redefine the next level of employee efficiency. If you are one, you need to keep these factors in mind or be left behind in the war for talent.