Learning is invaluable. Depending upon one’s approach and impact measurement strategy, it can be an expensive investment for organizations. However, it does not have to be. How can your organization stretch its Learning & Development budget? Here are ten recommendations to learn on a dime.
Career Path Stories: People seek professional development to either upskill for the role they have or to which they aspire. Help them see how others have charted paths like they hope to by sharing their stories. Invite people from different parts of the company to share their career journey, what propelled them, where they took detours, where they struggled and what they learned along the way.
“In a Box” Programs: When you design an in-house program or purchase an economical one, collect all of the supplies and how to guides and package them for company-wide use. By making programs easily adopted and deployable, less training will sit on a shelf waiting for a “train the trainer” or guest external facilitator. When a “bright spot” from one sector of the business can be boxed and shipped off across the company, not only does it become more economical overall, but it also creates a shared vocabulary and experience across the talent population.
Pre- & Post-Mortems: Much can be learned through brainstorming and analyzing failures. Pre-mortems consider a proposed solution and pre-emptively ask, “What could go wrong? Why might it fail?” This exercise can strengthen ideas and develop creative problem-solving skills. Post-mortems analyze large mistakes in an effort to prevent future occurrences and engrain lessons learned.
In House TED Talks or Disrupts: Invite employees to prepare a short TEDx or Disrupt-style talk and deliver it in an open mic night setting. By asking people to talk about their passions, share offbeat ideas, challenge norms and lift others up, culture is built alongside learning.
Book Club: Whether full length books or simple summaries, a classic book club never goes out of style. Consider Blinkist or getAbstract. Alternatively, use a podcast or short video to jump start a discussion.
Reach More-Style Discussions: Instill a spirit of curiosity and empower anyone to lead a discussion by implementing a simple question generation approach and building facilitation skills among employees. Draw on similar source materials as a book club, but take the discussions to the next level.
Team Building Activity: Much can be learned about style, group dynamics and life experience through team building activities. These people-centric and social learnings can translate into stronger team performance.
Case Studies: Consider an internal or external case and learn from the experience of others. What went well? What did not? What about their approach was novel? How does their experience apply to yours?
About the Business Session: Invite someone from another department to present an overview of what they do, how they do it and why it is important to the business. Learning about others fosters insights and forges greater connection and collaboration.
Curated YouTube: Instead of purchasing eLearning collections or catalogs, curate high quality, publicly available content. More and more LMS are built to host such videos because they recognize the value of them.
Extra Two Cents
Mentoring: Establishing a mentoring framework and program is free. Many mentoring software platforms have a free tier and certain professional organizations offer free mentoring. Shout out to Together and The Mentoring Club. By teaching people the durable skills, mentoring can take hold without formal administration.
Networking: People learn in social settings. Structure is not always necessary. Simply create the opportunity for diverse people to connect with the goal of walking away with three new insights.
Top 10's
If these ideas have spurred your curiosity for other talent “top 10 lists,” check out:
To the Point
Learning does not have to be expensive to be impactful. Get creative, be scrappy, set goals and follow through.
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