As businesses strive to stay competitive and adaptive, making informed decisions that contribute to overall success is crucial. Achieving success involves keeping a content, engaged team at the forefront of these efforts, as employee satisfaction plays a significant role in overall business achievements.
The cornerstone of a company’s value lies in its employees. However, fostering professional growth and development is an ongoing process and requires strategic planning. This fact is especially true when addressing various challenges in training and development for your team.
Employee motivation and productivity largely rest on how well a company navigates common obstacles, such as:
For over 40 years, CMOE has had the opportunity to talk with thousands of learning and development (L&D) professionals. Through these discussions, we have gained a comprehensive perspective of the training challenges they encounter and have combined this insight with timely data to present the following Top 10 challenges of training and development professionals—with solutions for each.
Table of Contents:
Organizational change is common and more challenging than ever. Navigating through changes related to mergers, acquisitions, technology, budgets, and staffing is the top challenge cited by L&D professionals.
L&D professionals can work with leaders and others in the business to craft messaging and build development resources that support the “why” behind changes being implemented. This can help them:
Many work environments face leadership-development challenges. It is crucial for organizations to develop leaders at every level—from team leads on the front lines all the way up to the CEO—to support their success and ensure that the business will be successful in the short and long term.
Businesses that invest in leadership development are 2.4 times more likely to meet their performance goals. L&D professionals can proactively support this by:
L&D professionals must communicate the value of learning and development. Too often, other urgent tasks seem to take priority while learning and development falls by the wayside. It’s a challenge to get learners to attend, actively participate, and follow through on their development assignments, and without clear prioritization or accountability measures in place, this is likely to continue.
L&D team members should work with the HR and leadership teams to make learning and development an organizational priority. Ongoing learning should be a core organizational value and something that is both provided for current employees as well as built into the hiring and retention process. This can work through methods such as:
When a company is global or geographically dispersed, it increases the difficulty of providing consistent training. The most common challenges of training and development include geographic limitations, increased costs, language barriers, translation issues, and virtual training needs.
L&D leaders can deliver training and development more consistently by:
Demonstrating a training program’s “stickiness” or sustainability is challenging at best. L&D professionals must find an effective way to ensure skills are learned and applied in the real work environment—and that they are implemented over the long term.
Build a skills-application assignment where you and your trainee establish and agree to a work project. This project should provide the team member the opportunity to apply the skills they’ve learned through their L&D training. A timeline should be set with applicable milestones so the trainee is accountable for completing the project. Once the initial project is complete, consider creating another assignment that builds upon those skills so that they stay fresh and relevant as the individual’s skills progress.
Review CMOE's Employee Development and help your employees reach their full potential with driven performance objectives.
Successfully handling conflict can be difficult, even for seasoned professionals, but conflict management is a critical skill that simply cannot be overlooked. 85% of team members experience conflict in the workplace. If left unresolved, conflict can increase turnover, decrease employee morale, and impact the longevity and well-being of a business.
L&D leaders should understand and develop training that helps employees explore and apply the five stages of conflict resolution:
Keeping employee training and development a top priority in an organization is challenging. It is often left to a few stakeholders and key leaders to determine how much learning is to be conducted, who gets the learning, and how much funding is granted for development purposes. Because of this, it is the responsibility of the training-function leader and team to have a long-term direction that will lead the training function into the future. This strategy should outline why the training function exists, who it serves, the value proposition it offers, and how it will create value over the next 2–4 years.
Work with your customers/users (department heads, business-unit leaders, and others) to identify the emerging needs, challenges, issues, or pain points they are facing as it relates to the performance of human capital. Identify skill gaps in the talent pool and pinpoint what skills and competencies are needed in the workforce. Gather insights by using surveys, assessments, focus-group interviews, exit interviews, or other observational data. These insights will help you focus on critical practices that add value and improve organizational performance.
Many L&D professionals must demonstrate how training programs are making a quantifiable impact for the organization. By conducting quantitative assessments and linking metrics and measures to learning initiatives, L&D leaders can demonstrate a return on investment. For some organizations that have not established this practice, it can be quite challenging to begin measuring the return on investment in an effective way.
The first step is to see if the organization has existing measures or KPIs in place that can be linked or tied to training initiatives. If not, you will need to prepare a list of possible measurement ideas to get started. While “hard” quantifiable measures are preferred, don’t discount the value of softer measures that may be less directly quantifiable.
Examples of hard measures:
Examples of soft measures:
Ensuring that learning is effective, retained, and used can be one of the most difficult responsibilities of an L&D professional. There are often many topics that need to be covered in a limited amount of time. Likewise, there are numerous topics that may require extra creativity or unique delivery methods so that skill development can occur.
L&D professionals should:
As an L&D professional, you must anticipate that your training will be delivered to a diverse, multigenerational workforce. As such, it is essential that you take the needs, learning styles, experiences, worldviews, and preferences of your audience into consideration when designing training modules and development assignments.
When planning, developing, and delivering learning experiences, engage in at least some of the following activities:
From managing organizational transitions to empowering employees to invest in their growth, the right strategies can bolster your training and development efforts, cultivating a thriving workforce. These proactive measures help you implement steady, transformative training approaches. In turn, your entire team can take forward strides toward progress.
Your training and development goals are within reach. With a tailored approach, you can better pave the way for a motivated, skilled, and prosperous future for your team. Learn how CMOE can help you empower your employees to achieve new professional growth and enhanced satisfaction.
