Today, E-Learning has become a need for almost every organization. Companies allocate the right proportion of budgets for training and development of employees majorly through online learning courses.
But, many professionals do not consider workplace learning as a business-relevant activity. Before initiating learning through an e-course within the organization, it is essential to ensure that this initiative should be regarded as a business activity and aligned with the business objectives.
Any learning initiative would be funded by business leaders only if it is business relevant and supports an organization to achieve its goals. And, once the budget is allocated to any learning activity, then it becomes a business activity. For example, if an automobile company’s learning department wants to develop an e-course to train their internal sales force and their dealer sales personnel, then the top management would fund this initiative because it will fulfill an immediate business need of the company. This means that the activity is business relevant; hence it’s a business activity.
Once a learning activity is accepted as a business activity, the second aspect is to align it with business. Here comes the real challenge for learning professionals, and they fail to discourse both relevances and alignment. The learning process needs to be beneficial for both learners and organizations. Right learning professionals who create learning strategies keep in mind the need for business and business objectives and generate better ROI from teaching activities. They align learning techniques with changing business priorities.
It has been seen that professionals develop a relevant e-course and then expect employees to align learning solutions with business objectives. By doing this, learning professionals do not get any credibility from the business leaders. And ultimately, business leaders turn down to fund for online learning courses. Top business leaders set business targets for learning programs and measure the outcomes at the end of the program. Business leaders need a commitment to ensure skills development and effective utilization of these skills to achieve their goals.
For example, an IT networking company wants to retain its position in customer satisfaction. Their learning department will train its customer care team on product features and services and align the learning process with the customer satisfaction business objective. So, it is ensured that the learning process would meet customer expectations. This happens by including real-time skills assessments so that employees are on explicit performance expectations.
Before recommending any learning activity, learning professionals must ascertain that activities are relevant to the business and are aligned with business objectives. Business goals determine the learning strategy of any organization. A learning professional’s role is to develop a learning strategy to drive the organization towards achieving its goals. Before suggesting online learning courses to the organization, the Learning & Development team must first analyze business problems and then formulate learning strategies that can add value back into the business and generate optimum ROI.
