skills development

How do your 2020 L&D initiatives stack up against those identified by global leadership, learning and talent development professionals?

According to the Nordic Business Forum, 2020 and the next decade will be about ‘upleveling’ the human in the workplace. As automation and AI take care of the more mundane tasks, employees need to increasingly specialise in tasks that leverage unique “human” strengths like creativity, emotional intelligence, and storytelling, says Mia Heiskanen. In order to nurture these skills in their employees, organisations will need to build a solid organizational learning culture and a strong leadership talent pipeline.

According to Scott Blanchard’s 2020 HR Learning and Talent Development Trends Survey, managing change, employee engagement and attracting top talent, were identified as key issues/challenges facing HR and L&D professionals in 2020. To manage these issues, Blanchard names the following key initiatives most HR & L&D professionals will be focusing on in 2020:

  1. Getting leaders at all levels to be more coach-like
  2. Preparing for leadership gaps / creating leadership bench strength
  3. Developing team leaders, frontline managers and mid-level managers

Every year, South African companies spend millions on leadership development for top executives, yet they neglect to consider that far more value can be achieved if they invested lower down the ladder. This could also include development for purposes of grooming talent to step into the roles of employees who will be retiring within the next 3 to 5 years. According to Jenny Boxall, who convenes The New Manager Programme at the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB), “Most new managers need a helping hand. They tend to be overwhelmed with their new responsibilities. They have been promoted to their new role because they were good at a technical skill, but that does not equip them to manage others.”

The importance of management training for frontline managers and mid-line manages is poorly misunderstood and it is costing many companies and government departments dearly. As the country gears up to capitalise on Ramaphosa’s promised new dawn, it is a good time to turn attention to its managers.

5 PRINCIPLES TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN IMPLEMENTING A NEW MANAGEMENT TRAINING INITIATIVE: 

1. Strategic Integration
Include training initiatives that are aligned with your business strategy. Not only does this ensure that the right skills will be acquired, but that your business also has what it needs for future growth.

2. Top Management Buy-In
Identify a high level and a broad spectrum of executive sponsors who buy into your business case for integration and can encourage training attendance, reinforce new skills, role model behaviours and share success stories.

3. Systemic Delivery
Provide a comprehensive learning approach that is operationally achievable. This includes opportunities for practice, on-the-job application, executive and learner coaching, as well as online reinforcement.

4. Demonstrate Tangible Value
Define success and identify the measurement methods that will work for you! These can include learner evaluations (written or numerical), regular meetings to track progress and identify barriers, pre and post programme assessments, or even the sharing of success stories.

5. Follow Up and Reinforcement
Allow your learners to engage in opportunities to practice, reinforce, and apply new mindsets, skills, and tools in their daily work. Get mentors/coaches and even senior leadership involved, and share success stories, challenges, and best practice, and recognise and reward top performers.

BROWSE OUR RANGE OF MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES:

NC: Management NQF Level 3
FETC: Generic Management NQF Level 4
NC: Generic Management NQF Level 5

THE ADDED BENEFITS OF IMPLEMENTING A LEARNERSHIP PROGRAMME:

  • Receive discretionary grant funding from your SETA – the Learnership essentially becomes a self-funding mechanism.
  • Reduce your tax percentage by applying the Learnership tax incentive to your payroll.
  • Claim your full spend across multiple elements in your BBBEE scorecard, including Enterprise, Supplier and Socio Economic Development. Click here to find out how.

“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives” – Clay P. Bedford

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