How to Build a Powerful Learning Strategy in 2022

Continual learning in the workplace is the secret to business innovation. Today, developing a powerful learning strategy is one of the most effective ways to ensure your organization stays in front of the curve and ahead of the competition.

The best learning strategies give you a complete picture of your organization's skill sets, enabling you to know what skills to train, how to course-correct with greater ease, and what success looks like.

Here are four ways to build your next learning strategy:

Assess your team

The first step to any new strategy is to understand the skills and competencies of your current employees.

To do that, we suggest asking yourself the following five questions and noting your answers:

• What skills are needed to succeed in each role?

• What skills do your employees in each role currently have?

• Where are there skill gaps between individuals and departments?

• What new skills will be needed for future positions?

• How quickly do employees need to learn the new skills?

These questions will give you a birds-eye view of the landscape of your current organization. 

Align Learning with Business

The fastest route to ROI from your learning strategy is to align it with long-term business goals.

For example, if your organization wants to develop a new brand-driven marketing strategy, you could develop a complimentary course on corporate branding best practices. 

A course before a new initiative is a great way to get everyone working on the project aligned and rowing in the same direction. 

Additionally, aligning your learning strategy with business goals will also create executive buy-in. When stakeholders know learning and development can help accelerate their bottom line, they will be more invested in developing and implementing the strategy.

Create a budget

Once you have your business-aligned learning strategy, you'll want to decide how you're going to pay for it. 

Our suggestion is to get hyper-detailed on costs. The goal is to be as cost-effective as possible, but you don't want to skimp on quality in service or price, so it's important to know the cost of each course and how much time they will take. 

We suggest creating a roadmap for each course and listing individual costs.

For example, let's say you want your brand marketing strategy to have three courses covering branding fundamentals, brand strategy, and branding for sales enablement. In this case, list the cost and the length of each course so you can validate the budget if it comes into question.

Personalize, implement, and track

Today's top learning strategies are personalized to fit the specific needs of individual employees. Hour-long training where employees have to log onto a portal to click through a set of true or false questions ends up being a roadblock in their day. 

Today, your learning strategy needs to meet your employees where they are and create a frictionless learning experience.

At Arist, we built the first text messaging learning platform. You can build courses quickly, launch instantly, and track remote-friendly training in minutes. Or we can build courses for you. 

We also created an analytics dashboard for our courses that allows you to track individual progress, view responses, and gather analytics without leaving the dashboard. And all data can be seamlessly integrated with Salesforce and 100+ other tools.

Book a demo now.