Why the status quo is dangerous for your L&D

Avoid the pitfalls of stagnant L&D infrastructure in rapidly changing times.

No learning and development team is an island. And it’s dangerous to pretend otherwise right now.

Budgets are being cut, spending is being monitored and measured more closely than previously, and there is uncertainty in the air.

If you sit back, pretend it’s business and usual and hope the storm passes, there is every chance that somebody is going to start hacking at your L&D budget.

Don’t wait for that to happen. Challenge the status quo on your own terms to stop your good work from being decimated. How? Let’s take a look at what you can do.

Invest in an LMS

If you don’t currently have a learning management system or you don’t have an LMS that does exactly what your organisation needs, you can’t afford to carry on as you are. Before your budget disappears, make the investment in L&D infrastructure that:

• Increases learner engagement
• Cuts your admin spend
• Reduces time and resources spent on compliance
• Streamlines auditing processes
• Helps you to measure the return on your budget and evaluate the impact of your investment

Move to right-skilling

Focus your L&D operations on right-skilling: ensuring that everything you do is focused towards learning that delivers the skills your organisations and the individuals in it truly need.

Protect your budget from anyone wishing to paint L&D as a wishy-washy optional extra by creating a lean, mean, skills gap-closing, internal recruitment candidate-generating, staff-retaining machine.

Slash the parts of your operations you want to slash

Before anyone else gets a chance to set your priorities, start getting rid of the things you would rather not be spending large chunks of your L&D budget on. For most L&D teams laborious, time-consuming admin tasks will be the first to go.

Look at ways to automate and integrate to reduce your admin burden (and simultaneously cut your admin spend). Enrolment, learning pathways and reporting are all prime areas of admin overspending, so focus your efforts there initially.

Cut out duplication

If you’re duplicating L&D tasks across different departments, divisions or subsidiaries of your organisation, you can easily remove that for a substantial saving. If you’re currently running multiple installations of your LMS, the savings will be even greater.

The simplest way to achieve these savings is to adopt a multi-tenancy infrastructure. This will allow you to create and manage different learning environments for different parts of your organisation via a single installation. 

A multi-tenancy structure may also allow you to delegate some non-essential tasks that have landed on your plate to each department or division.

Maintain continuous communication 

We started by saying that no L&D team is an island and you need to take measures to make sure you’re not isolated. Be proactive in your approach to communications. Your LMS is packed with tools you can use for internal communications, including messaging, forums and newsletter functionality.

Maintaining continuous communication has several benefits. Firstly, it allows you to convey the value of your work to the wider organisation. Secondly, it allows you to promote courses and prompt action. At that point it becomes self-fulfilling: encourage people to take a key or new course, then communicate the successful uptake while also promoting the next goal.

Start challenging the status quo

There’s a Mikhail Gorbachev quote we regularly return to: “If you don’t move forward, sooner or later you begin to move backward.” If you’re ready to leave the status quo behind and move forward with a plan that helps you to avoid the pitfalls ahead, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.

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