Retain and develop employees with learning pathways

It is arguable that the recent popularity of Learning Management Systems (LMS) has been driven more by the need to demonstrate compliance than the desire for organisations to develop and nurture their employees. Now that these compliance needs are being met, however, organisations are starting to investigate ways of leveraging the capability of their systems to automate tasks, deploy better online learning and to create ongoing learning programs for their employees.

One capability that is rapidly gaining interest is the use of the LMS to create visible, easily accessible learning pathways for employees. These are formal or informal learning events that address requirements such as job specific skills, soft skills and leadership development programs.

Experience shows that lack of development opportunities or visible training programs that enhance job skills are major factors in employee churn. The fact that sometimes such opportunities do exist within the organisation but aren't easily accessible or visible to employees confirms that many organisations are still struggling to internally market and distribute learning. Learning pathways are designed to address these problems.

Using a LMS, it is a relatively simple task to roll job specific learning into a curriculum that is assigned to employees upon commencement. The LMS should allow employees to easily view their required and optional pathway(s), bringing visibility not only to essential courses but also to training that may develop soft skills or advance the employee in other areas of the organisation. This provides the employee with a positive reminder of the time and energy being invested in their training, and it confirms that there are plans to continue to advance the employee's skill set.

Designing pathways that work

The foundation of a successful learning pathway is well-designed training program. The next step is to create a matrix by job role. This lists all required or essential learning programs in the order in which they should be taken. The training should then be broken down into categories such as compliance, system training, product training, soft skills training and so on. Note which programs will need refreshers over time so that these can be monitored and prompts issued as required. Next, identify any pre-requisites which add another layer of logic that helps to qualify eligibility for training.

You now have a matrix from which it should be possible to create sets of core curricula that apply to large populations of your organisation. These curricula form the learning pathways catering to the largest job families. Your LMS should be able to make the learning pathways visible only to relevant audience types, which will cut down overloading employees with too many options. 

Communicate

Tell your staff about the pathways, train them and encourage their use. The training doesn't have to be elaborate; it just needs to enable everyone to get started. After all, there's no point building pathways if it is unclear to the employee population in how to utilise them.

Don't forget to market the pathways to managers and ensure that they can talk to their employees about them in an informed fashion, not just at performance time, but throughout the year.

Too much complexity will confuse

Avoid unnecessary complexity. Creating hundreds of curricula that cater for every single type of employee may seem organised but it will clog your LMS and the complexity will quickly become burdensome, particularly when you want to add a program across certain sets of employees.  Also when staff members who have designed the curricula leave, they often take much of the knowledge with them, leaving a convoluted set of pathways within the LMS and confused employees.

Administration of the pathways is another issue. If a training program is removed or adjusted, edits will be required to every learning pathway that contains the course.

Short-term training needs are usually unsuitable for incorporation into learning pathways. If you have a program that needs to be quickly rolled out to the entire employee population, rather than creating pathways that will later need to be discontinued, it is probably best to consider different methods of automatically enrolling all employees into the program. Exactly how you achieve this will depend on the technology you use.

Learning Pathways allow employees, managers and learning and development groups to package learning into logical knowledge "areas".  They provide visible guidance as to where employees are headed. Very importantly pathways provide a sense of security for employees knowing that they are going to be developed over time in a variety of skills.

A good LMS will make the process much easier and will facilitate reporting on progress through the pathways, training uptake and so on. However, just like any undertaking that affects your employee population, training in the use of pathways is vital if you want to realise the full benefits of the initiative.

Abou the author

Andrew Roberts is human capital solutions manager at ComOps. For further information, please visit http://www.comops.com.au

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