Your organization is just starting to crest over the 200th employee. The culture is starting to change from a “startup” culture to a “growth” culture. The organization is starting to get nervous that the culture is starting to become damaged, attrition is becoming higher day by day with the growth changes that are being made. New employees are starting to be onboarded and beginning to become frustrated with the lack of learning opportunities to learn their new role. Their “trainer” is the person providing the training is the employee their manager set the new employee with to “job shadow”. The procedures this person is teaching the new employee is not correct and not only is this hurting the new employee it is also hurting the company. New managers are being promoted because they know the system or product but lack heavily in managerial skills. New customers are being onboarded and implemented only to return with frustration on how to use a complex system, there is no learning or manuals on how to use the system. Your company just sold a $600,000 piece of software with no directions. The customer begins to get more frustrated as the person assigned to the account is the new person that had a terrible training experience. Within a year, the new employee has left, and the new customer is no longer going to renew their contract.
So, what can your organization do?
You may not admit it, but this sound familiar to a lot of companies between 200 and 5,000 employees or companies that are going through a merger & acquisition.
Start a learning culture!
Step 1: Plan the department
Before you hire the right person, you need to know why you are hiring this specific individual. The organizations leadership team needs to sit down and determine:
- What is important to the company?
- Where are the noticeable learning gaps?
- Where are frustrations internally and externally?
- How much money does the organization want to spend for this department?
- How many people are needed to create learning? (How big is the L&D Team)
- What software do you need to purchase?
- How long do you expect the learning will take to create?
There are several more questions to ask, but this is a good start.
Far too often organization want to create an L&D department but fail to start to answer these questions. The other mistake companies fail to understand is that just because someone has L&D listed on their resume, they may have no real experience with L&D.
- This is typically at a senior level of someone who oversees the team but does not have any idea what is going on.
- In addition to this individual, several people that start off in L&D might be a SME on a system. Just because this person knows a specific system, does not mean they can replicate that knowledge to a new system.
- Then you have the “talkers”, these are individuals that move through the ranks, they talk learning lingo but cannot build a program or have a vision for the department. These people are the most dangerous as they typically have an ego and are often always right. They will sound great in the interview but cannot perform the job.
- The last group is the people you should be looking at for your organization and don’t focus on their previous title. We will talk about titles in another blog post. These individuals are the “doers” the ones that understand learning science, can understand new task and processes easily, the ones that understand new and emerging technologies, the ones without an ego that understand teamwork will create better products.
Other options in starting a learning organization is to work with a 3rd party before you hire your key players. A 3rd party learning organization like Performance Interactions can help you determine the learning culture and priorities which courses need to be built first. We can also set up the backend processes for your new L&D department and determine the learning branding. This way while your HR team is going through the hiring process, the new hire will not feel overwhelmed by what the organization is expecting this individual to do and what the individual can actually do.