Dear Apprentice,
We are delighted to have you in our team!
We hope working with us will help you to gain valuable experience and the skills required for a successful career in Learning and Development.
Here is a guide about the existing L&D roles in our team and their responsibilities.
Additionally, you can find some advice with regards to knowledge and skills required of L&D professionals and examples of their importance.
LEARNING & DEVELOPMENT GUIDE
1. L&D ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE
Figure 1.1
Figure 1.1 reflects our department in terms of the roles it is consisted of. A more analytical approach follows with every single role’s responsibilities:
L&D ADMINISTRATOR
Responsibilities:
• Provide a successful induction program for the new starters
• Advertising all the new training courses and act as first point of contact
• Effectively administrating training courses (booking rooms, catering, printing materials)
• Scheduling, booking and effectively delivering training courses according to agreed company strategy
• Keeping updated the training database
L&D ADVISOR
Responsibilities:
• Liaising and consulting the line managers in order to identify training and learning needs through annual appraisals.
• Design and deliver effective training plans
• Provide career development support
• Evaluating the training provided by collecting and analyzing trainees’ feedback
L&D MANAGER
Responsibilities:
• Designing and implementing learning and development strategy according to the organizational needs
• Making sure the L&D strategy is aligned with the company’s strategy
• Effectively manage, coach and support L&D team by ensuring that the workload has been distributed fairly and the project deadlines are met successfully
• Built strong relationships in order to understand stakeholders’ needs
2. TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE / SKILLS
In a working environment that rapidly changes, Learning & Development practitioners need to have certain technical knowledge and skills in order to deliver successful training (CIPD, 2018):
• Analytical skills
Learning & Development Practitioners have to be able to conduct and analyze a learning and training needs analysis on many levels across the company.
• Cost data analysis and evaluation skills
Return on investment analysis in order to demonstrate the outcomes of the learning and development programs.
• External market knowledge
Awareness of the methods the competitors use for their employees learning and development.
• Deep knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of different methods, approaches and channels used in learning and training and ability to choose the most suitable according to the company’s different departments’ needs.
• Adult learning theories/organizational learning knowledge in order to be able to design efficient and effective learning solutions for the organization.
3. COMMUNICATION SKILLS
Communication skills are fundamental for every Learning & Development practitioner. Being a good communicator will give the ability and confidence to build and maintain good relationship in the working environment (Kelcher, 1992). A good communicator is able to send the message they want to send effectively and ensure that it has been understood by the receivers. The message sender has to be trustworthy to make the receivers speak openly about their feelings and thoughts. For that purpose, the message has to be clear and the appropriate language and medium have to be used. Body language plays an important role in the procedure as it makes the message sender to look confident and approachable. Moreover, part of the communication skills is the ability to influence people in order to persuade them about his L&D plans and learning solutions and their effectiveness (Beevers and Rea, 2016).
A great example of using communication skills in L&D is during the meetings with the Line Managers. Sometimes it could be tricky for an L&D professional to make the Line Managers speak openly in order to understand their team members’ training and learning needs. Supporting the Line Managers on the appraisals is tricky as the L&D professional has to use appropriate language in order to explain what is required by them and the appropriate medium.
Additionally, a training session on a new HR Software that involves the Line Managers could be very challenging for L&D. The L&D professional has to plan and design a simple and appealing training session so the Line Managers can engage. The right medium and language have to be used and only the most important information has to be shared in order to avoid any confusion. A deep knowledge of the subject is necessary in order to make the sender of the message to look trustworthy and the receivers to feel secure about the information validity.
4. L&D PRACTITIONER BEHAVIORS
4.1 WORK MANAGEMENT
We appreciate the fact that you will be finding yourself being very busy almost every day.
For that reason, prioritizing skills are very important to manage your workload in an effective and efficient way. The ability to prioritize your tasks according to their importance is very useful especially when you try to satisfy all your customers, like we all in L&D try to do. For that reason, it is suggested to use Stephen Covey’s “Time Management Matrix” (Covey,1992) ( Figure 4.1), according to which:
• Important and urgent tasks should be your first priority.
• Important but not urgent tasks you should start planning your approach on them.
• Urgent but not important are those tasks you should do but they are not so important to spend a lot of time on them.
• Not important and not urgent tasks are those you should decide whether you do them or not. If you have to do them, you can forget until you’re coming closer to the deadline.
URGENT NOT URGENT
IMPORTANT Quadrant I:
Urgent & Important Quadrant II:
Not Urgent & Important
NOT IMPORTANT Quadrant III:
Urgent & Not Important Quadrant IV:
Not Urgent & Not Important
Figure 4.1
4.2 COLLABORATIVE WORK
One of the most exciting things in our profession is the fact that we have to deal with people. This is not always easy to handle as there are different approaches that apply on different people. Therefore, it is very important for a L&D professional to be collaborative.
A practical example of collaborative work behaviour is the ability to build strong relationships. This way they will create a more pleasant working environment for themselves and the others (Mindtools.com, n.d.). Helping your colleagues with their tasks, taking into consideration their opinion, respecting their cultural differences, handling any possible disagreement without emotional approach are only some aspects of how to build and maintain good working relationships.