Ensure Your Learning Team Can Get the Job Done
A team, of any kind, must aim for the same goal to be successful; your learning staff is no different. Learning staff must have the instructional, visual, and development skills and resources available to deliver learning experiences that make an impact in your organization.
Custom staff resourcing or supplementation for an existing learning organization offers an opportunity to quickly and effectively reach beyond your team’s current capacity. This will save you both time and money. By using learning staff supplementation, your training can work smarter, not harder.
Read on to learn the benefits of learning staff expansion.
Without the right skills and tools, a learning team will flounder. They may fully connect with business partners and understand their training needs but will not be able to deliver training experiences that drive business results. To do this, you must consider the scale of the learning programs you want to implement.
Consider the Scale
Think about a business that needs to implement a new HR system across a global team. Beyond the technology considerations, every employee needs to be trained on how to access and use the HR system. This becomes your defined learning goal. But, how do you reach it? A one-on-one demonstration for each employee isn’t feasible. An emailed slide deck with system screenshots and instructions will be lost, misinterpreted, or deleted. So, what do you need?
You need a learning solution that will engage and resonate with employees. A training solution that employees can connect with easily when and where they need it. A training solution that provides the “why” behind the “what” and “how.” This type of program will save time and money in system implementation. Before moving forward, though, analyze the resources you need.
Analyze Your Resources
A company’s training resources must sit at a dynamic apex. One where business partner consulting, project management, adult instructional design, visual design, and learning technology collide. These resources must be able to flex and adapt to evolving business needs and help the organization stay ahead of change as well as respond to urgent needs. Now, let’s review each in detail.
Business partner consulting
Your learning staff must be able to talk with business partners to understand the issues they need to solve. They must be able to identify if there is a knowledge gap or an application gap and then speak to potential learning solutions to solve it.
Project management
An effective learning project stays in scope, on budget, and on time. Learning project managers understand the ins and outs of learning development, areas to pay particular attention to, and how to work with business partners to generate productive review and approval cycles. This requires defined scope documentation, timelines, people management, templates, and tools.
Instructional design
Contemporary instructional designers understand and are able to apply user experience concepts and their intersection with content curation. They work directly with subject matter experts to gather, analyze, and synthesize content that meets defined learning goals. Instructional designers use adult learning best practices that respect employees’ short attention span and limited time for training activities. By writing with a targeted voice, instructional designers can break down complex concepts into easily digestible chunks of information. They can create interactions, infographics, video, and gaming concepts that enable information to come to life.
Visual design
Employees now require visual stimulation to engage and absorb content of any kind. Content must look and feel made for them, relevant to their role, and be easy to use. Expert visual designers use an Adobe suite of tools, design layouts, design tools that push training well beyond standard corporate photography. Visual designers can take text-based content and transform it into an engaging and useful presentation, eLearning course, website, interactive PDF, and more.
Learning technology and development
Training development tools have quickly evolved in recent years. To create digital training that functions well on modern browsers, learning management systems, and mobile devices, expert learning developers must stay on top of the latest technology. Outsourced learning development resources can often develop custom video, augmented and virtual reality, microlearning, gaming, and knowledge retention platforms quickly and efficiently. They know the ins and outs of LMSs, SCORM requirements, xAPI, learning analytics, devices, browsers, and application of non-English translations to ensure your employee encounters little to no hurdles in completing their training.
Expand Your Reach with Custom Talent Support
People and the programs and tools they use can often be leveraged to do more than their current capacity. However, with impending timelines and constrained headcounts, companies need to look for new alternatives.
With a team of one or a team of ten, custom staff resourcing or supplementation for an existing learning organization offers an opportunity to quickly and effectively reach beyond current capacity. This will save you both time and money.
Rent Versus Build
In fact, HR Executive recently stated that a top HR trend in 2021 is to “rent” versus “build” talent. They noted that “as the speed of in-demand skills accelerate,” companies will shift investment away from building talent internally to renting talent when and where it is needed.
Modern Staff Augmentation
Custom talent support no longer conjures up images of outsourced and mismanaged technology; paid for, then forgotten. Instead, modern staff augmentation includes highly managed contracted resources who are experts in their target field. Outsourced learning team support works with existing business partners and processes to bring out the best in your organization. This type of talent supplementation delivers training results beyond your team’s current capacity and addresses specific learning experience concerns or deliverables. Plus, there are several other benefits, too.
Benefits of External Learning Staff Expansion
Using external learning staff support allows a company to define their talent gaps and then address them specifically, with custom expertise. In addition, it allows you to:
- Define a budget and stick to it. Budget dollars allotted to learning and development are limited.
- Implement training that will create business results. Business processes and systems are unique to your organization and are often complex. To be beneficial to your employees’ time, training must capture and sustain attention and address a targeted, not generic, business need.
- Stick to a timeline. Learning projects often unintentionally grow beyond their initial scope. Outsourcing components of a learning project ensure delivery when you need it and with sufficient testing, functionality support, and analysis of overall learner experience.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
By using learning staff supplementation, your training can work smarter, not harder. The goal becomes clearly defined, and with the right instructional, visual, and development skills and people in place, reaching it becomes attainable.
LHT Learning has supported global teams in learning staffing support with a variety of training expertise. Reach out if interested in seeing how.
