In today’s “Age of Talent”, Enterprise Learning and Talent Management have become key factors in an organizations’ strategic competitiveness. The tight labor market, coupled with an increased focus on driving performance through a more engaged and skilled workforce, will be a catalyst for further alignment between training, performance management and overall Talent Management.
Until very recently, organizations have responded to tighter labor markets through a greater emphasis on recruiting. Undoubtedly, the so called “War for Talent”, to date, has been fought with limited tactics, technology and strategies, but that is changing rapidly. Today, more organizations are starting to focus on engagement, retention and driving better performance from their existing workforce while still maintaining a vigil for talent from the outside.
Organizations that invest in their employees’ training and development are often rewarded exponentially more than those that focus the majority of their efforts on recruitment. It has been estimated that after the cost of hire plus the cost of dismissing and replacing bad hires and the typical time to performance lag in most knowledge-economy occupations, training is up to fifty times less expensive than hiring. Moreover, the payoff of investing in existing talent - in productivity, performance, engagement and retention - is clearly significant (even if difficult to measure). In survey after survey, employees tell us that training and development, well-articulated career paths and having an employer “that cares about their development” are among the most important drivers for attraction, retention and engagement.
Integrated Learning & Performance Management promises to help organizations make better decisions about learning and development investments by basing spending decisions on the evidence of what works and what is needed. In the last 2-3 years, the focus towards Talent Management has placed attention on a much more holistic approach to HR than the silos that are typical today. As organizations move into the era of talent management, integrating functional areas is critical – the integration of Performance and Learning Management is among the first in which organizations have been successful and seen positive results.
The Solution
The ability to innately link learning and performance management leads to new outcomes that cut several ways. First and foremost, the ability to target training and development programs in alignment with both specific employee needs and organizational business imperatives , means better-performing talent and companies. This is the last frontier, after all – using coordinated talent management programs to make organizations “better” (whether that means higher revenues, more units shipped, more members served, or whatever tangible bottom-line metric is mission critical).
Performance measurement without strategically and tactically linking learning interventions only goes part of the way to this outcome. Similarly, learning management and training administration programs devised without inherent links to employee performance and goal management leaves an organization wanting.
On the flip side, the integration of learning management with performance measurement and management, promises to help organizations understand which training and development initiatives boost performance and productivity and which do not.
Karen S. Brethower, in Maintenance Systems: The Neglected Half of Behavior Change, argues that:
“Failure looms for programmed instruction projects in which there is an inadequate consideration of maintenance systems. What happens to the trainee after training via programmed instruction is at least as important to job performance as the training itself.”
This, indeed, speaks to the age-old gap in effective long-term measurement of training effectiveness. Integration of learning and performance assessment provides the means to close this gap. Simply put, integrated learning and performance management, done well, leads to higher-performing employees, higher performing companies, better goal alignment, and better training decisions – in all cases through decisions based on evidence and driven by clear need.
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