“Find out what interests you the most!” – L&D division is often considered as an individual unit of HR, but it’s not. There are multiple areas that one can explore within L&D starting from facilitation to content development to the role of a learning business partner and creating business solutions. It is just about finding your passion and working towards it.
I started my career in 2013 as a trainer. But I knew there was so much more to explore within the purview of Learning & Development. And fortunately I was able to explore the roles of a content developer, learning business partner and L&D head across ecommerce and manufacturing organizations. Today, I head the entire L&D division of the manufacturing giant– Escorts Limited, catering to the development needs of 3000+ employees.
“It all starts with Business Understanding”. Gone are those days when HR function was taken up as a support function. Today, HR has moved from transactional to transformational approach, resulting in bringing strategic solutions to business problems.
“Accepting and Adapting Change”: As L&D professional, we must keep updating our methodologies and approach based on the business and customer requirements. (For example: to address the need of a Time management workshop, we have moved a traditional activity based traditional workshop. In today’s dynamic world, “If you don’t change, you will get changed”.
“What YOU experience, remains with YOU.” Yes, experiential learning is impactful but we should strive to make a balance between all modes of facilitation. Organizations should prefer experiential workshop when the plan is to achieve improvement in either skill or attitude of the individual.
For example: if the requirement is to teach people how to ride a bicycle, and we end up doing a classroom workshop on riding skills or fundamentals of a bicycle. Yes, a definite recipe for failure. Similarly, any training requirement before being delivered should be assessed whether it is a requirement of Knowledge, Skill or Attitude enhancement. Anything that falls under either Skill or Attitude can be achieved more effectively using experiential learning techniques.
The simplest way is answer “What’s in it for me?” to the stakeholders including participants, their managers and the leadership team. If the L&D team is able to show the impact it would create for the participant and link it with business goals, the buy-in will always be there.
