Critical challenges for L&D by Ed Griffin, Training Journal, November 2009

In recent months there seem to have been rather too many articles asking how the L&D function can and should respond to the recession and I have reviewed several in this year’s blogs. And as I read the first few pages of this article, I thought it was the same old stuff - the need to be more focussed, to justify costs, to show value, to connect with the business and achieve senior level sponsorship. This is all true - and not just in recessionary times - but good L&D professionals should not need reminding of it.

It was only when the author began to reveal some quantitative data from CIPD research that I began to get interested. The most interesting result was the high percentage of L&D people surveyed whose companies were, as a result of the recession, placing greater emphasis on retaining people and developing talent in-house. This could lead to the counter-intuitive conclusion that the recession could provide an opportunity for more, rather than less, in-company training and the survey gave some evidence that this is indeed the case.

Unfortunately the examples in the article to justify this conclusion were unconvincing. Scotrail was mentioned by name as a company that was continuing to invest in its people during the recession but the other examples were anonymous and barely relevant. When a name is not quoted it is bound to make one wonder why a company would not want to be mentioned publicly as an investor in its people? Maybe because it is not well known enough to be credible to the reader?

The latter part of the article does move onto practical guidance with the suggestion that simple frameworks like ‘Must, Should and Can’ and ‘Relevance, Alignment and Measurement (RAM)’ can be used to help decide upon priorities when times are hard and budgets are low. Again this is not something that should be new to most L&D professionals.

To me the most powerful part of the article was the reminder at the end that L&D professionals should not allow the recession and other pressures to hold back their own personal development. The author asks a series of questions to test whether we are developing ourselves sufficiently, for example:

• How is the field of L&D developing?
• What impact do generational differences have upon learning strategy?
• What are the implications of social networking Internet sites for learning strategy?

These questions are important because, just like the cobbler and his own shoes, we can be guilty of forgetting that our own effectiveness depends on continued personal development.

To read this article go to

http://www.trainingjournal.com/tj/2548.html