The vast majority of businesses today are operating in increasingly competitive environments. Any investment made, therefore – whether of time or money – should have the bottom line of the organisation firmly in mind. The delivery of learning solutions should be no exception to that rule. If you are going to invest in learning & development (L&D), it should be because you want to yield lasting impact from its implementation – one of the primary results of which will be long-term performance improvement. Money, and time, well spent, in other words.

But how can L&D create that impact? The answer is simple: by developing talent. People are the most powerful asset a company has. Whatever your industry, and whoever your target market is, exceptional talent is the most effective way to achieve results and help guarantee business success. L&D, at its core, should be focused not just on nurturing and developing the existing talent within your organisation, but also on creating talent where the business needs it most, i.e. where certain skills or behaviours – ones that would help the organisation move forward and achieve its goals – are lacking, or where existing talent could be honed for greater effect.

Know what you want to achieve

The first step towards ensuring high-impact results from L&D is to ensure it is:

Targeted in the right place

At the right people

At the right time

In order to achieve that, you need to undertake full training needs analysis so that specific areas of development can be pinpointed. Once you understand the need, it is important to gauge exactly what the desired outcome of the programme will be in relation to the identified requirement. This may seem obvious, but you would be amazed at how many organisations run L&D programmes without having a crystal-clear vision of what they want to get out of it.

It is not always easy to gather this type of information, but a reputable L&D provider should be able to consult with you on this part of the process. By embedding themselves within your business, they will be able to fully understand your company’s culture, the different ways of working, and the specific issues faced on a day-to-day basis. By doing that, they can apply their knowledge of L&D in a way that is completely individual to you and your business, which ultimately means any learning experiences delivered will be much more relevant, and therefore the results will be, too.

Align L&D with wider strategic goals

The 2014 CIPD Learning and Development Survey found that there has been a significant increase in the integration of L&D activity and business strategy, and the trend is predicted to continue.

37 per cent expect closer integration of L&D activity and business strategy over the next two years

Only 26 per cent expected this the previous year – 11 per cent increase

These figures show that people are realising L&D’s potential, when fully aligned with company goals, to have a genuine impact on the overall performance of an organisation.

Again, this may seem like an obvious concept today, but historically L&D has not always been considered a key strategic arm of an organisation. If you really want to achieve positive, meaningful results through L&D, however, the way you view and implement L&D needs to move away from that traditional perception and acknowledge its strategic potential. If not, the output will inevitably have less of an impact on your company’s ability to achieve its goals, which, of course, is the bottom-line result you should always be aiming for.

Focus on the right people

There are many different types of learning, and many different levels at which it can be targeted. You need to understand where your L&D investment is going to be best placed, particularly when working with a constrained L&D budget (our research this year suggested many businesses are).

Building talent isn’t just about putting people through training programmes and hoping they get better at their job, more productive, or more engaged, for example (depending on your predetermined measurement criteria). Of course the desired outcome of any learning intervention is to have an impact on the person involved, but the process starts much earlier than that. You need to make sure you’re having an impact on the people who are best-placed to harness the learning and apply it in a way that genuinely helps the business.

Developing leadership talent, for example, while initially more expensive, can be a great way to filter knowledge and skill down through the business. Leaders also make the big decisions that can affect the future of the company, so if you are going through significant change, for example, you might want to develop the talent of those responsible for guiding the organisation through that change. If you need to secure the future talent pipeline of the business, however, then your time and effort may be better spent identifying and developing high-potential employees at lower levels.

Assess the impact

If you want to achieve positive results through L&D, it is vital that you monitor the relevant output before, during, and after the learning intervention. If you are trying to affect certain behaviours, for example, it is important to assess those behaviours prior to the learning so that you have a benchmark against which to measure once the solution has been delivered.

The situation you want to avoid is this: having spent a great deal of time (and potentially money) working out the areas of the business in which L&D is required, and why, and the type of learning that would meet that need and help drive your organisation towards achieving its goals, you then go through the process of implementing the solution, only to find that you’re not sure how or why the learning has or hasn’t had the desired effect. It then becomes more difficult to replicate its success (or redevelop the programme in the right way), thus impending your chances of achieving long-term impact. This is where the earlier point about knowing exactly what you want to achieve before any learning begins becomes relevant.

If you haven’t outlined the precise results you want, how can you measure whether you have achieved them or not?

No shortcuts

As with anything in business, there is no quick-fire way to achieve significant results and build exceptional talent through L&D. A truly impactful L&D intervention requires the following:

A full understanding of the strategic goals of your organisation

An evidence-based assessment of the way in which L&D can help you realise those goals

Knowledge of which specific types of learning are required

Knowledge of when/on whom the learning should be implemented

Then, you need to measure the impact – before, during, and after the intervention. If you want specific results, it is not good enough to simply invest in a training solution and hope it works. While that approach may be cheaper in the short term, you could actually be wasting time and money in the long run, and not realising the full potential of your people.

Again, a reputable L&D provider should be able to guide you through the whole process – from aligning the learning with your business strategy, to delivering it to the right people and in the right way – and provide you with an end-to-end L&D solution that is intrinsically linked with the individual needs of your organisation. That approach will always give you the best possible chance of achieving the results you want.