Crafting an effective L&D strategy is always difficult.

However, it’s even more difficult in the new, uncertain world of work and development. 

What are 3 of the most common mistakes L&D professionals make?

Neglecting Their Own Development

As an L&D professional or training manager, neglecting your own development is detrimental to yourself, your business and your employees.

Learning professionals often neglect their own development needs as they are so focused on developing their teams.

This can create a shortage of the skills needed to drive learning and development, and gain buy-in from employees.

Here are 3 examples of training programmes for L&D professionals and training managers:

• Train the Training Manager
  
  
• CTM – Certified Training Manager
  
  
• Certified Training and Development Manager

Sticking to What They Know

More often than not, people like to stick to what they know and don’t like going outside of their comfort zone.

However, this can be detrimental when choosing training programmes.

As Albert Einstein said, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.

Although it can be daunting to try a new training method or a new type of development programme, it can greatly benefit and motivate employees as it demonstrates your dedication to their development.

If you are considering trying a new training approach and are unsure of what different types of training there are, click here to see the top 10 types of employee training.

Not Measuring Success

Contrary to popular belief, the responsibility of a training manager doesn’t stop at choosing the programme and enrolling employees.

What training managers do during and after the training programme is equally, if not more, important.

The most important aspect of learning is then implementing that learning, and while this is primarily the responsibility of the training provider, there are several things that training managers and leaders can do to help, including:

• Feedback from Employees
  One easy way to measure the effectiveness of a training programme is to ask your employees about how much they’ve learnt and whether they believe that the training programme is worth the time and money invested.
  
  
• Feedback from the Provider
  You can also get feedback from the training provider to measure the progress your employees are making.
  
  
• Setting and Monitoring Challenges
  Many training providers set challenges for employees but if your training provider doesn’t, you can set them internally. Challenges are where an employee says that will complete a certain task or action by a certain date and then someone, usually a skills coach, checks that they have done it. This holds the employee accountable for their actions and helps ensure learning is translated into action.

The Importance of Learning and Development

A strong, well thought-out and effective Learning and Development strategy is the backbone of any strong team.

It can instill confidence in employees and provide your workforce with the skills and knowledge for their day-to-day work and for the future.

“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow” Anthony J. D’Angelo