As we assess the changes in the learning and development landscape, we must also consider how we manage the delivery of our learning. What is being learned, how people are learning, and where learning takes place have evolved dramatically, and how we manage training delivery has likewise changed.
Ensuring alignment in this area can make learning more engaging and effective and help to align with organizational goals and priorities. Read on to learn how to capitalize on and enhance your training delivery management to bring the greatest results to your organization.
5 Tips for Better Training Delivery Management
1. Align with Your Customers and Stakeholders
A foundational step in successful delivery management is gaining a deeper understanding of your customer and stakeholder needs. Whether you are working with program stakeholders, executive champions of the initiative, content designers or developers, or even a workforce management team, aligning everyone to the same vision and strategy is imperative.
A strategy our delivery management team utilizes when aligning with our partners is to ask various questions, such as:
- What is the goal of the initiative?
- What business problems are you trying to solve?
- Who is the target audience of this program?
- What will be the duration of this initiative and program?
- What locations and languages do you need delivery support in?
- What expertise and skill sets may be required?
- What is the modality of the learning experience?
These details can help you build a resource profile to aid in selecting the right team members for the delivery. Once you have drafted a resource profile, remember to share it and calibrate it with your customers and stakeholders.
2. Plan for Demand and Leverage Downtime
Demand planning is one of the most crucial skills and tasks when managing a training delivery function. Aligning with your organization and stakeholders on priorities and needs can help you properly plan for demand. These details will help guide you and allow you to decide how best to utilize your team and identify any resourcing gaps.
Demand planning involves consistently looking into the future and anticipating needs. As the leader of the learning delivery function, you must stay connected to the organization and business. Utilizing a standard system for training delivery intake and requests can help you stay informed and assess the organization’s demands. This information can help build a roadmap and ensure the proper resources are aligned and available. When creating the roadmap, it is essential to consider the periodic or seasonal trends that indicate peaks and valleys in training needs.
When adequately planning for demand, you can optimize efficiency by leveraging your downtime. Leveraging your downtime involves measuring your utilization—tracking how many days and hours facilitators and other delivery resources spent delivering learning.
It is unrealistic to expect delivery resources to be 100% utilized since needs will always fluctuate. For instance, an onboarding course that spans several months will involve much higher time utilization than running a few virtual instructor-led training (VILT) leadership sessions. It is important, however, that you also set a utilization target. The industry standard for utilization is around 65-70% of all available hours. As a delivery resource manager, you want to carefully consider where to dedicate the other 30-35% of the time, be it to plan for upcoming sessions, update materials, refresh skills, practice self-development, or familiarize yourself with operational procedures.
3. Have Processes and Procedures for Various Modalities
Today, there is a wider variety of modalities to deliver training to learners. Because of this, it is crucial as a training delivery function to have processes and procedures in place to offer support.
As some organizations return to the office environment, their learning organization assesses which modality will be most effective for which program. We are seeing organizations return to in-person learning (42%) while leveraging virtual learning for specific programs (58%). Each modality has its unique nuances that require varying processes and procedures. To optimize and ensure successful training delivery, it is essential to continuously examine your processes and procedures for various modalities.
For example, for in-person learning, the training delivery may have processes around room setup, AV equipment, and roster management that are specific to that modality. Whereas, for VILT sessions, the processes and procedures will involve gathering and distributing platform links and materials, aligning with the virtual producer, and addressing any post-session activities such as managing recordings.
Taking the time to examine the processes and procedures will help to make things run more smoothly. This will enable your project and program managers or coordinators to successfully execute critical steps and tasks for delivery at the time of need. Our experienced program and project managers periodically review the processes and procedures aligned with training and training delivery. Staying up to date and incorporating best practices can be invaluable.
4. Commit to Ongoing Upskilling and Resource Development Efforts
In addition to putting processes and procedures in place to support the various training methods and modalities, it is important to have the proper talent and skills to deliver. With the constant evolution of learning modalities and strategies, it’s essential to keep current with platforms and tools for delivery management. Because of this, you must develop a plan for ongoing upskilling and development of delivery resources. One way to do this is to take advantage of the various resources through ATD or a partner like GP Strategies, which offers many blogs, articles, and webinars on industry changes and hot topics.
Over the past several years, we have been hearing about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on the workforce. It is essential to evaluate how these tools can impact both learning and the management of training delivery. For instance, organizations are starting to leverage AI to analyze data and help develop a deployment plan for training programs. Additionally, many organizations are training their teams on the skills needed to effectively utilize AI in their work life. Since AI is evolving and changing frequently, it is imperative to have a plan to keep pace with and upskill on these technologies and skills.
With this information on new industry trends, strategies, and modalities, you can build a strategy around how your team will stay up-to-date and continue its growth. If you have tracked your utilization, this is an ideal way to leverage downtime between training delivery projects. A side bonus of committing time to resource development is that it can dramatically increase engagement and the retention of your top talent.
5. Invest Time in Community and Engagement
A final way to improve your training delivery is to allow your training facilitators to communicate and share ideas in this era of decreased connection. Providing a space for your teams to share ideas on hot topics, themes, customer project wins, new programs, learner reactions, and design quality will enhance your team’s morale and promote knowledge sharing and celebration.
Outside of online communities, you can also consider hosting regular Q&A events on hot topics or trends or creating ongoing touchpoints for quarterly reviews or industry update talks that invite discussion. Find ways to build a community for your team and provide easy and constant access to it.
Optimize Your Training and Delivery Techniques
There are countless ways to ensure your training delivery management is operating efficiently. Learn more about our training delivery management services.
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