How To Get Buy-In For Your Learning and Development Strategy

Without buy-in, no learning and development strategy is complete. Today, learning and development initiatives are crucial in our globally competitive world of business. 

Everything around us is innovating at the speed of exponential tech, so now, continual L&D needs to be an essential part of business for an organization to keep up.

But getting leadership buy-in of a new L&D strategy can feel like a tall order. After all, an employee carving out time to learn throughout the day takes away from work-related responsibilities. And when the competition is moving fast, time is money.

Your business leaders need to see that their investment will show a tangible return for your strategy to get the green light. It needs to be easy to implement, generate greater efficiency, and operate at high speed. 

Follow these three steps for your next L&D strategy:‍

Step 1: Connect training with company goals‍

Business leaders will rarely (if ever) compromise business operations to fit L&D needs. There are always a thousand things to do, there's never enough time, and customers always come first. So your strategy must match their goals.

First, find out the top three to five business objectives for the upcoming fiscal year, and then map your strategy to show how L&D will accelerate the timeline. 

For example, one objective is to increase per-person output in sales by a certain percentage month over month. You can create training programs throughout the year that helps them improve their output speed like qualifying tactics, closing scripts, the latest market research, and industry product knowledge.

Next, to ensure your strategy will do what it says it will, you'll need to show proof of concept, leading to step number two.‍

Step 2: Focus on data-driven solutions‍

For an L&D strategy to be effective, it needs to be measurable. It must be specific and time-based, and you'll need to show what a win looks like. 

Using the business metrics as your guide, one data set to consider tracking is employee retention from the year before vs. this year (after your strategy is implemented). High employee retention can save an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more in costs a year. 

Plus, a better-trained workforce is much more efficient. Greater employee efficiency leads to higher engagement. And higher engagement leads to even more productivity and product innovation.‍

Step 3: Make training frictionless and customizable‍

The biggest hurdle in any L&D strategy is overcoming the time it takes to conduct training, and the one-size-fits-all approach rarely moves the ROI needle. 

Historically, training sessions can take an hour or more out of someone's day. That's over ten percent of an employee's workday taken away, and that time away can add up quickly.

Today, it's important to meet your workers where they are and create a frictionless learning process. At Arist, we built the first text messaging learning platform. 

You can build and customize courses quickly, launch instantly, and track remote-friendly training in minutes. Or we can build courses with you.

Let us help implement your next L&D strategy and streamline your organization past the competition. Chat with our team.