A learning strategy is an action plan outlining how learning will be used to support an organisation to successfully implement its strategic objectives. Also a learning strategy is key because it enables the learning and development(L&D) function to work as a key business partner by aligning investment in learning to the organisation's strategic objectives. This all sounds good, but the whole learning strategy thing can become a waste of time and resources if it turns out to be a cumbersome, drawn out process. Let me explain with an example. A manager I once worked with a couple of years ago was tasked with developing a learning strategy for the organisation by the leadership team who had just finished writing the organisation's business strategy. They were interested in seeing how the HR team would support the business strategy from a workforce development perspective. L&D being a part of HR had to come up with its own strategy, offcourse linked to the wider HR strategy.
The manager went away for 3 months, working mostly in isolation writing the learning strategy. Along the way he consulted the business strategy and spoke to a few managers. At the end of three months he presented a nicely formatted strategy document to the leadership team. After going through the strategy, the leadership team decided it needed some changes. The manager went away and laboured for another two months after which the leadership team finally approved it. So the L&D team had spent 5 months of the business year creating a plan to support the business. Looking back now, that was ridiculous. In today's business environment where things change so fast, no organisation can afford to spend 5 months in a business year creating a strategy, so why should L&D do it? This is not the way a business-focused L&D team should do things. Suffice to say that the learning strategy was never really useful. After about three months everybody forgot about it. That's not suprising since it was over 10 pages long, accompanied by a learning and development policy (another couple of pages) and goals set out in a spreadsheet. Too much information if you ask me.
I remember doing a Google search for samples of a learning strategy. The documents I saw were scary. They had lots of pages and were written in such dry language that I would prefer to watch paint dry than read some of the strategies. While a learning strategy should not be written in colourful or overly informal language, it should at least be readable and a bit inspiring. The question therefore remains - how does a learning strategy become lean? - That is the focus of the next part of this article.
