Learning and development initiatives are critical to maintaining your business’ competitive edge. As the business landscape evolves, so do the skills required to drive the business forward. If you have a team that consistently gets opportunities to update their knowledge and apply new skills, then they can deliver more value to customers and the business.
Yet, in a survey by McKinsey, only 30% of respondents reported their capability-building programs often or always achieved organisational impact. So, how can you maximise the results of learning and development initiatives?
HR departments play an essential role in driving these programs, and with an automated solution, your HR department can transform training to be more efficient, personalised and scalable. In this blog, I’ll cover the myriad ways that HR automation supports learning and development within an organisation, setting the stage for a more robust and engaged workforce.
Deliver training as people need new skills
The skills required by organisations today continue to change. For example, as artificial intelligence (AI) has evolved, many businesses need a new set of skills from their team, from understanding AI concepts to applying this technology in various business functions.
Automation uses data and reporting to show an individual's existing skill set so HR can identify areas for improvement and curate tailored training modules. This adaptive approach ensures that training remains relevant and facilitates the development of emerging skills.
Keeping your team's skills up-to-date is critical for individual career growth and organisational success. For employees, it enhances their competency, opens new career opportunities and boosts job satisfaction. From an organisational perspective, it ensures your workforce has the necessary skills to drive innovation, maintain a competitive edge and effectively respond to industry changes.
Make learning and development content readily available
HR automation reduces the time-consuming process of assembling resources for training. Automation curates and distributes relevant learning materials where someone from HR might have once manually compiled resources or links to training programs.
Automatically delivering content ensures that your team receives the resources needed without delay, making it much easier to engage with training. By taking the manual work out of assembling training resources, HR teams can spend more time on strategic tasks while employees continue receiving highly relevant training material.
HR automation also supports onboarding by automatically assigning necessary training materials to new hires. This includes everything from compliance training to job-specific instructions, ensuring people have immediate access to critical information. The result: a consistent onboarding experience that gives new hires the information to understand their role and deliver value to the organisation sooner. If you want to know more about how automation supports onboarding, I spoke about it in this webinar.
Gain insights on skill gaps and problems with training programs
HR automation delivers insights into the strengths and weaknesses of an organisation's workforce through data analysis and reporting. These tools can track and evaluate employee performance, revealing areas of proficiency and skill gaps. This detailed understanding of the workforce's skills landscape supports HR in determining training needs and prioritising learning and development initiatives.
By understanding where skill deficiencies lie, HR professionals can tailor learning and development initiatives to address these specific areas, whether they apply to individuals or whole teams. As a result, training initiatives become more relevant, impactful, and beneficial, enhancing individual growth and collective competency.
HR automation also offers an opportunity to evaluate the impact of existing training programs. It can identify where these programs may fall short through metrics like course completion rates, assessment scores, and employee feedback. Whether it’s content that needs updating or methods that could be more engaging, such insights pave the way for continuous improvement.
Understand how people progress in learning and development initiatives
You can use HR automation to monitor individuals' progress in learning and development initiatives. Automation can create reports with completed tasks and skills gained.
The data from these reports provide insights into where each person stands in their training journey. By analysing this data, HR teams can understand which team members consistently meet their training requirements and who may fall behind. Such understanding enables them to customise future training or provide additional resources to ensure everyone is on track, fostering a more inclusive and efficient learning environment.
Provide smaller pieces of training content to people
Microlearning focuses on delivering training in small, digestible pieces, typically aimed at teaching a specific skill or concept. HR automation can help your business implement this approach by delivering tips or bite-sized training materials to your team.
This strategy is especially effective when comprehensive training programs are unnecessary, but regular tips or reminders can enhance skill acquisition and application. For example, you might want to give your team regular tips on using a program, like Microsoft Teams, to ensure they get more out of it.
Breaking down information into more manageable parts enhances comprehension and retention. With the ability to automatically schedule and deliver training modules, HR automation ensures that your team receives the right content at the right time.
Microlearning allows your team to adopt and apply these tips one at a time rather than bombarding people with too much information they might not retain. This results in a more engaged and skilled team capable of maximising the tools and resources at their disposal.
Conclusion
HR automation can greatly support your learning and development initiatives by supporting a learning culture, addressing skill gaps, and enhancing organisational effectiveness.
With automation, HR teams can monitor individual progress, personalise training based on specific needs, and make learning content accessible. Reporting capabilities enable your team to identify skill gaps and modify programs to meet these demands. Furthermore, automation supports microlearning initiatives by distributing bite-size learning content across the organisation.
Total Calibration can deploy HR automation for your organisation
If your HR team manages copious amounts of routine paperwork and a growing volume of documentation, consider adopting an HR automation solution.
Our HR automation solutions offer a practical response to these challenges by automating tasks like onboarding, performance assessments and document management. So, your team can maintain consistency and quality when working on learning and development and employee engagement initiatives.
Please visit our HR automation page for more on what's possible with our solutions.
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