In a previous post I listed the six questions that need to be answered to begin to create a lean learning strategy. To recap the questions are:
What are the key strategic objectives that your organisation needs to achieve?
What key actions must your organisation take to achieve the strategic objectives?
What organisational capabilities are necessary for the organisation to take these actions successfully?
What skills and knowledge do people need for the organisation to have the right capabilities?
How will the L&D function help people to acquire the right knowledge and skills?
How will the L&D team know that people have acquired the right skills and knowledge and the organisation has the developed the right capabilities?
In subsequent posts including this one I will explain each question in more details. This post will focus on the first question which is, What are the key strategic objectives your organisation needs to achieve?
To answer this question and the subsequent ones I will use a short company story.
Complete Compliance is a medium sized company with over 250 employees. The company’s headquarters is in London, but it has branches in New York, Dubai and Sydney. The company provides a bundle of financial compliance services to financial services companies such as retail and investment banks and insurance companies. The Services it provides include compliance training, daily compliance news, conferences and events, a recruitment board and compliance related databases.
Complete Compliance’s vision is to be the largest provider of financial compliance services globally. The company wants their website to be the first place that top financial companies go when they need financial compliance solutions. Ultimately they want to provide all their services on a single platform. They have called this connected compliance and the aim is that organisations can get their solutions from just one website.
The company’s learning and development team need to create a learning and development strategy for the company. The learning and development manager knows that Complete Compliance has the main goal to provide connected compliance services through a single platform to all the top financial services organisations in the world, but he also wants to know what the key strategic objectives necessary to achieve that are. After speaking to the leadership team he finds out that in the short to medium term the most important priorities for the company are:
To establish a presence in Africa within the next 12 months. They are looking at setting up branches in Nigeria and South Africa because of the size of their financial markets.
Within the next six months they want to rebuild their online platforms into a single platform that provides access to all their compliance services.
The also want to expand and increase their sales pipeline in the next six months. By this they mean, to increase the amount of sales each account manager generates and also expand the size of the sales team.
The learning and development manager now knows the most important strategic objectives Complete Compliance will focus on for the next 12 months. This is also the answer to the first question. Next the manager (whom we will call Tim), wants to know what actions the company is taking to achieve the objectives.
