How businesses focus on learning, skills and their workers has evolved. Technologies that enable improvements have changed and multiplied. To get your learning and talent technology strategy and investment right, it’s critical to understand your options and goals. A key starting point is understanding your desired business outcomes. Then you can thoughtfully and effectively allocate your critical (and limited) workforce development budget.
Let’s look at the key criteria and success factors that can help you make the best investment decisions for your company and workforce.
Step 1: Identify your problem
First and foremost, shift your perspective. This process is not necessarily about finding the newest technology. It’s about figuring out which problems you really need to solve.
Many of the questions and themes can be traced back to one overarching problem: most HR systems, resources and strategies are isolated. They rarely work together or share information, which means data on learning and upskilling is incomplete. And without these insights, HR and business leaders don’t have the data they need to effectively support learning, hiring or business initiatives.
Step 2: Gather your requirements
Once you’ve identified your problems, it’s time to build a list of requirements based on your new goals. By asking the right questions, you can develop a vision of success and invest in the right technology, one that will work toward your end goal by meeting your company’s unique needs.
Talk to people outside your L&D or HR teams. By getting to know your workers, their managers and your business leaders, you can find out what kinds of development experiences they find most useful. Identify their goals, challenges and habits, and figure out what’s missing from your existing learning solutions.
Once you have an understanding of what a more ideal solution looks like, compile the requirements in order of importance for your organization as a whole. This is an opportunity to rethink your RFP, which was most likely built for outdated and less diverse technology. Build this list upon your company’s genuine needs, not just a standardized checklist.
If yours is like most midsize or large organizations, there will not be a single vendor or piece of technology that addresses all of your organization’s talent development needs. You’ll likely benefit from a learning ecosystem — a combination of integrated technologies — which we’ll discuss in the following section.
Step 3: Explore potential solutions
As talent development has evolved, so have tools and functions designed to support learning and skilling. While more traditional tools are geared toward managing learning, modern solutions empower individual workers and managers to drive development on their own, and to connect it with their career aspirations as well as their teams’ needs.
Solutions need to address two challenges simultaneously. Workers need simple access to learning and development wherever it occurs and in real-time as part of their jobs. Organizations need insight into skills their company and employees have, what skills are needed and how to bridge that gap.
Step 4: Select the right suppliers
Now that you know what you’re looking for, figure out what’s possible. Read some research. Then get out of your office. Ask your peer network or consultants and analysts. Go to a conference or trade show. Talk to vendors. See some demos. Build a shortlist.
Step 5: Communicate the value
You’ve identified the best solution for your company, but that solution will never be implemented if you’re unable to gain buy-in from the executive team and main stakeholders. Here’s how to build a business case to demonstrate the value of your desired investment.
There are really only four things anyone can do to create business value: grow revenues, expand profit margins, optimize the efficiency of assets or enhance investors’ expectations for the future. That’s it. Learning and talent development may or may not directly contribute to those things. But technology’s impact is more indirect.
To build a business case for learning and HR technology, you’ll need to connect the expected benefits, costs, efficiencies, risks or opportunities to those four value drivers — to show how the investment will make an impact.
There is no one-size-fits-all formula for choosing a learning or HR technology vendor or building a business case. Every organization has different goals, unique challenges and preferred methods for assessing investments. But by asking the right questions and understanding your options, you’ll be able to effectively communicate the value of your chosen supplier and create a clearer understanding of your company’s expectations, requirements and ultimate success.
