What would you do if you were asked to develop a total company training plan?

How would you come up with a company wide learning and development plan?

If you were asked, as an internal or external consultant to help the company review, develop or improve such a process, what would you do? Where would you start?

There are many well-documented processes out there, which you may be aware of. I hope to outline in this article the main elements of such a process or a plan. The focus is on the practical aspects and the key principles* so that one can easily remember it or easy to refer to refresh our memory. I will refer to this entire thing as the learning system.

Where do we start? Where we start could well depend on where the problem is, or where we are requested to look at. I will start with the job competence framework (JCF). JCF defines all the different jobs and competency levels (e.g. from awareness, skill to mastery) that are available in the company. These job definitions are also often called job competence profile (JCP).

The second element in the learning system is the Learning catalogue, training materials (existing and/or new), and the learning infrastructure (e.g. websites, classrooms, logistics). The catalogue is a list of all the available courses and also holds new courses that will be added in the future.

The third element is the Learning Needs Analysis (LNA) process. The Training/Learning department manages this process and they do this by engaging the line managers or team leaders in the company. LNA consolidates all the approved training requests from line managers/team leaders, calculates the number of people who needs to be trained and uses this to develop the training timetable/schedule for the year (our fourth piece).

The fifth piece is the individual development plan discussion that takes place between each team leader and their direct reports. Staff can refer to the training catalogue to check what courses they would like to attend and discuss with their immediate manager what areas they would like to develop.

The sixth element is the running of the various training courses that have been scheduled. This involves hiring external trainers or using internal trainers to conduct the courses.

The seventh element is the assessment of the competence of the trainee. This part usually involves accredited type of training (e.g. industrial competency standards, internal accredited technical training, project management certification, etc.).

So, how does all these 7 elements fit together? A picture is worth a thousand words, so an easy way to integrate all these is to remember this picture:

Even with this picture, sometimes it is not easy to remember the entire process. So, to simplify it even further, one way that I normally do is think of the LNA as the central piece, and think of the inputs and outputs to this process.

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