Learning Strategies

In a capitalistic society, the primary decisions are driven by corporate objectives to maximize wealth for their owners.  For the ones who make these decisions this means "increase profits or we'll find someone else who will."

The ubiquitous presence of global competition - including current competitors, future ones, and even the imagined ones that keep us awake at night - drives decision making to maximize revenues and decrease costs to extremes.  “What customers can we reach today?  What expenses can we get rid of today?  However, the best organizations keep their eye on being competitive, not just for today, but for years to come.

During a recession the market has less money to split up between competing companies and the weaker ones will struggle to stay in business.  Quite often we see these weaker companies abandoning their training and development strategies, seeing them as a luxury and not critical to their survival.  When their boats start leaking (contracts lost, stock price dropping, top talent jumping ship) they don't see much point in teaching their employees.

However, hindsight has proven that the companies who not only survived the recession, but also raced ahead soonest when the economy rebounded, were the companies that taught employees better ways to reach customers, save money, and keep their top talent.  By developing better employees they became stronger competitors.  These companies are the ones everyone else is now chasing, and they did it through strategic learning processes.

It's not enough to simply hold a few training classes.  Strategic learning is based on continuously improving the improvement process.  These strategies usually center on finding faster and more effective ways to:

• develop the training
• deliver the training 
• reduce employee learning time
• assess training results 
• maximize knowledge usage

The strongest competitors know that better decisions come from better informed employees.  And, in hyper-lean market conditions it becomes imperative to keep your best talent from leaving, or worse, going to work for your competition.  The strongest companies know this, having learned that employees who learn more are happier, more effective, and loyal.  So, is employee development really a luxury?

Explorers Needed
Improved learning strategies also enable quicker, more agile responses to market changes.  When teenage girls in Thailand catch a retro fad and want bobby socks and saddle shoes, who will be the first company to respond well?  Who has a learning system in place that can help a product manager to change direction, a marketing manager to cross language and cultural barriers, and a supply chain manager adapt to new distribution channels?  Many decisions will need to be made at the loading-dock and in-store level of operations.  To have people who are ready to make decisions that are good for the customers, good for the strategic partners, and good for the company is crucial.

Learning strategies build contextual awareness, contingency preparedness, interpersonal dynamics, and improved communications.  Learning strategies drive revenues up through smarter marketing, better product design, and improved distribution.  Learning strategies drive costs down through better operational efficiencies, fewer mistakes and accidents, and improved supply chain leveraging.

The question isn't whether a company is better off with improved learning.  The question is whether they will realize it, admit it, and take action to improve their learning function.