Learning And Development Strategy Examples

Happier employees who stay longer in your company and work more productively in their role is kinda ✨the dream✨ for business owners, right?

It’s easier to accomplish than you may think! Companies that invest in learning and development programs see an increase in productivity (+24%, according to HR Digest) and in employee retention (+58%, again HR Digest). The importance of learning and development to a company’s success is so undeniable, a whopping 90% of surveyed companies said they’ve implemented employee training.

Supporting employees in learning new skills creates a positive company culture—one in which employees feel confident and appreciated. Who wouldn’t want to stick around and work hard in that environment?

A solid training program should be an integral part of your overall business strategy. But delivering engaging content that promotes continuous learning for the entire organisation can be a daunting task.

So, in this blog, we’ll share examples of learning and development strategies that are engaging for employees and beneficial for business performance. We’ll also show you how a learning management system (LMS) makes it easier to create and deliver online courses.

You can use these examples to guide your learning and development approach and find an L&D groove that really rocks.

How an LMS enhances your L&D strategy

A learning management system is designed to make every part of your learning and development strategy easier – from planning your training programs to tracking key performance indicators.

With an LMS, you can execute every essential task associated with a successful L&D strategy, like:

Create digital learning content
Plan journeys for your learners based on their job role, department, or the online courses they’ve taken in the past
Encourage social learning with forums, webinars, group chats, and direct messaging
Remind learners about upcoming assignment deadlines or new courses on offer
Automatically suggest courses that might address learning and development needs

An LMS encourages employees to take charge of their own learning. When they log in to the LMS, they can see their learning results and find on-the-job training courses that will help them do their job better or give them a leg-up when it’s time for promotions. That kind of autonomy is empowering for employees.

Corporate training is most successful with the weight of employee buy-in behind it, and you’ll enjoy better employee engagement with a self-driven training program that inspires skills development and knowledge retention.

Learning and development strategy examples

Take a look at these 5 learning and development strategies for a variety of employee education needs:

L&D Strategy 1: Onboarding and Orientation

A structured onboarding process helps employees feel confident in their roles from day one. Plus, it makes life easier for your HR department by ensuring required forms and signatures are gathered in one place for every employee, retrievable whenever they’re needed.

For organisations that need to onboard new employees, we recommend employee training that follows this plan:

Structured onboarding curriculum on topics like company culture, policies, and team integration. HR forms can also be part of this training, ensuring all new-hire documentation is signed and filed on time.
Mentorship system, initially in face-to-face meetings and moving to chats, webinars, and messaging within the LMS one month after start date. Mentorship encourages new employees to fit in, and gives them a go-to person for questions and support.
Technology and tools education to train employees on the tech they’ll need to know for their roles. This includes software, equipment, and specialised systems. Training modules should include check-ins from the training mentor and interactive elements like quizzes and tests to ensure the employee has grasped key concepts.
Feedback and assessment should be part of the onboarding process. Mix in-person and online sessions, and use LMS features like quizzes to track learner progress.
Immerse and integrate your new employees into the company culture with social interactions and team-building events. Many of these should be conducted in person, but they can also happen digitally within the LMS via events like webinars and video chats.

L&D Strategy 2: Continuous Skills Enhancement

In any company, it’s critical to encourage ongoing learning. Even seasoned employees need to brush up on their skills from time to time. Encouraging employees to keep learning, no matter their skill level, shows them that your company values education.

Here’s how we recommend planning a training program for ongoing skills development:

Assess opportunities to upskill or improve by conducting regular skills gap analyses. This helps ensure your training efforts are targeted and aligned with business priorities.
Facilitate personalised learning plans tailored for each role and department. Employees care more about learning that feels relevant to them, so you’ll see higher levels of employee engagement with workshops and coaching that are specific to their needs.
Support microlearning and mobile learning. An LMS allows employees to learn anytime, anywhere. Training materials are available day or night, regardless of employee location. They can ask questions and look up answers whenever they have a spare moment or squeeze in a training session between other tasks.
Encourage social learning to build bonds and see better knowledge retention numbers. Learning is easy and more effective when it’s done with the support of the community. Mentorship programs and knowledge-sharing forums allow employees to learn from one another’s expertise.
Monitor progress as they learn with LMS tracking and reporting features. Your LMS should allow you to see how learners progress through their training and check their comprehension with quizzes and tests. Report on metrics like completion rates, time to completion, and knowledge retention, and ask for learners’ feedback to tweak and improve your courses.

L&D Strategy 3: Leadership and Career Development

A clear path to career advancement is critical to keeping your brightest and most ambitious employees. Providing opportunities for professional development allows workers to envision a future in your company, so your employee training initiatives should include career advancement courses.

Identify potential leaders within your organisation and allow them to self-identify, too. Performance evaluations and 360 feedback loops let your managers spot potential in your employees and encourage them to take corporate training courses. But if you make those courses available to everyone on your learning platform, ambitious employees can self-identify as potential leaders by seeking the courses themselves.
Prepare learners for leadership and business success by offering courses on communication skills, decision-making, conflict resolution, critical thinking, and team management – all through your LMS.
Mentorship and coaching can drive successful learning in your company and should be part of any leadership development program. Pair emerging leaders with experienced employees who can offer support and advice on meeting business objectives and managing others with skill and tact.
Encourage cross-functional experience by letting them take temporary roles in complementary departments or work on cross-functional projects. A good leader understands their mission from every angle. You can encourage employees to broaden their knowledge with learning courses from other departments, too.
Provide clear career paths with your leadership development strategy. Set goals that offer a mix of formal learning interventions, mentorship, and experience opportunities. Define must-have skills and transparent ways to assess skills proficiency. Then, deliver on advancement promises when those goals are met.

L&D Strategy 4: Compliance and Regulatory Training

Without thoughtful learning and development strategies, compliance and regulatory training can be a huge headache. But informed planning goes a long way towards making this type of training seamless.

Audit your learning needs, whether they’re general requirements or industry-specific training. Look at all parts of the business that currently offer compliance or regulatory training, and work closely with HR to understand the legal and industry standards that must be met.
Develop your compliance training based on the comprehensive goals you’ve established in step 1. Deliver training to your employees via the LMS as much as possible so you can track who’s completed it, test their understanding of the subject, and download training records whenever needed.
Implement a regular training schedule. An LMS does this automatically by scheduling upcoming employee training depending on roles and departments, sending reminders about course deadlines, and prompting learners to test or refresh their knowledge periodically.
Assess and award certificates when courses are completed. In an LMS, these processes are automated. Course completion triggers learning assessment, which is recorded and accessible anytime you need it. Certificates are auto-generated and can be reprinted as needed, too.
Embed compliance training into daily workflows. Safety training is more likely to stick if implemented daily, so work those compliance regulations into your everyday tasks and retest or refresh knowledge regularly within the LMS.

L&D Strategy 5: Gamification for Employee Engagement

The most effective learning and development strategies are both functional and fun! Business excellence doesn’t have to be boring. You can add a bit of pzazz to your training initiatives by making learning light-hearted and social.

Create interactive learning modules that embed quizzes, games, and simulations in the training material. Learning is a lot more fun when it’s active.
Introduce leaderboards to add a dash of healthy competition. Your LMS will have leaderboard features to keep track of who’s completed training, who scored the highest, and which department is performing the best as a whole.
Offer rewards for winning individuals or departments. These can be intangible awards (like badges or points awarded in the LMS) or tangible (like time off work or gift cards to a favourite coffee shop).
Set goals and give feedback. Clear goals are key to any fair competition, and feedback on how to better achieve those goals will help everyone feel they can give their best. An LMS is an ideal way to provide both goals and feedback.
Encourage collaboration. Transform departments into teams and allow inter-department partnerships with social challenges. You’ll foster a culture of teamwork in your company, and you’ll also encourage employee bonding by building shared learning experiences.

Measuring learning success & ROI

Corporate learning is most successful when it’s closely tied to business goals. You can ensure your learning strategy folds into the overall business strategy by keeping a close eye on the key metrics that affect the training’s return on investment (ROI).

Most businesses find it practical to track and measure these metrics as they gauge their training success.

Training completion rates

If your employees regularly complete the required training, you’re on a good track. On the other hand, red flags would be raised by large numbers of employees who fail to complete a particular course, or by an individual who routinely fails to finish classes.

Employee engagement and satisfaction

Build feedback opportunities into every training course you offer. That way, you can gather data from the learners themselves about whether your courses are engaging and whether they feel they’ve learned anything from it.

Skills improvement

It’s a good idea to test learners’ skills proficiency before and after a training course so you can accurately gauge whether their skills have improved.

Time to competency

Training that takes too long eats into your ROI metrics. Some skills will require more time than others to achieve proficiency, but every skill and course should have a recommended deadline. That way, you can identify where learners are lagging and intervene to improve their outcomes.

Learning retention and application

All skills should be periodically refreshed. We all forget details or pick up bad habits now and then, but a routine refresher course schedule keeps employees at peak performance. Using your LMS, prompt quizzes and tests at regular intervals to see whether knowledge has been retained. If your learners can’t pass the test, you can enrol them in a refresher course.

Compliance certification rates

The number of employees completing their mandatory compliance and regulatory training is a helpful metric in determining whether your training programs meet business goals.

Feedback and promotions

If your learners’ feedback reports are improving and their careers are advancing, it’s a good sign your training programs are working as intended. The ultimate goal of your training initiatives is to arm employees with the skills they need to advance within your company and contribute to the overall business strategy. Positive outcomes in manager feedback and promotions reflect a healthy approach to training.

You can track each of these metrics within your learning management system. An exceptional LMS will let you customise and download reports so you can share the outcomes with key stakeholders.

Get started on your own learning and development strategy framework

High-performance organisations focus on getting the foundations right before launching into learning and development initiatives. Before you design any training materials, start with these steps:

Define your business goals for learning and development
Conduct a skills gap analysis to understand which new skills your employees need
List the learning outcomes you’d like your learners to achieve
Use the learning and development strategy examples above to inform your learning and development approach

Give your company a distinct competitive advantage with a fully-featured, user-friendly LMS. LearnRight makes it simple to deliver digital learning courses and measure learners’ results. With best-in-class reporting features and flawless integrations, LearnRight is the missing lynchpin in your learning and development strategy. Take it for a spin today!