Top 3 Challenges Facing Chief Learning Officers for 2017

Training, by definition, requires a forward-looking approach. You don’t train for what you did; you train for what you’re going to do next. So with the new year approaching, we thought it would be helpful to share our top three challenges facing Chief Learning Officers (CLO) in 2017.

How To Train Employees As Quickly As Possible

American companies spent $70.6 billion on employee training in 2015, according to Training Magazine’s annual report (the most recent report available). With that much money being spent, CLOs understand just how important it is to demonstrate a return on investment. 

One way to think about the ROI of your training is by focusing on this question: how long does it take you to train employees to proficiency?

The faster you can get an employee to proficiency, the more bang for your training buck. But paradoxically, one of the best ways to reduce training time is to acknowledge that everyone learns at a different pace. Rather than trying to speed everyone up, CLOs should take a page from Amazon, which reduced its holiday season training time from six weeks to two days. How did they do that? One key way to reducing training time is focusing on personalized learning technology that allows learners to move toward proficiency at their own pace. Yes, some learners may need extra time, however, since lessons are no longer geared toward the hypothetical “average” learner, personalized adaptive learning technology can find efficiencies that don’t exist within a static learning environment.

How To Increase Training Effectiveness

There’s no doubt that ineffective training is a waste. But an even larger problem is Scrap Learning, which is training that employees never apply to their jobs. By some estimates, as much as 80 percent of corporate training can be classified as scrap learning, meaning that 80 percent of an enterprise’s training investment goes to waste either because there was no application of the training back to the job or employees went back to their old methodologies.

One way to dramatically reduce this problem is to shift toward adaptive online learning tools. First and foremost, the material in these courses can better calibrate to an organization’s current needs. But just as important, an adaptive approach to learning allows data analytics to  integrate with business metrics and job task analysis ensuring the training lessons employees are focusing on are relevant and applicable back to the workforce.

How to Ensure Competency

For too long, corporate training has been seen by some as checking the box. The problem with that approach is it favors completion at the expense of competency, and as a result, the ROI of that kind of training is worth about as much as the paper used to print a certificate of completion.

What we all want is training that achieves the demonstrable (and measurable) goal of competency. Adaptive, personalized learning tools are critical for helping learners achieve competency, but first CLOs must set competency, not completion, as their organization’s primary learning objective for 2017 and beyond.

 

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