Don’t Just Enable Self-Directed Training, Track It To Drive Readiness
Learner MobileSeptember 15, 20262 min read
If your sales team is expanding into new markets, adding product lines, or shifting buyer conversations.
Over the years, SVI has had the wonderful opportunity to work with Walmart and many of its impressive leaders. There is always something to learn from their vision, size, and global impact. One of the most important talent trends where we’ve seen Walmart lead the way is talent readiness. As the world’s leading employer, they are always thinking about how to train associates faster and better. It seemed like we were always in the talent development and training laboratory–tinkering with new ideas, methodologies, and technology to create talent advantages and drive innovation. Scaling readiness within a massive organization and doing it faster than others would establish a significant and sustainable competitive advantage.To do it faster meant that we couldn’t take on a time-consuming and costly traditional approach where everyone was processed through the standard readiness machine in the same way. We needed to approach readiness training according to each Associates’ unique learning style and accommodate their pace of learning. How is that faster?Good question. It’s faster because readiness training became self-directed. And while some people processed to readiness faster and others processed more slowly, the organization-wide speed to readiness significantly increased as a whole. Readiness shifted from a traditional training approach that must accommodate the slowest learner to ensure all 50 processed successfully, to self-directed where no one was limited. In the traditional scenario, all 50 were ready in 90 days. In a self-directed approach for example, 1/3 might achieve readiness in 40 days, 1/3 might achieve readiness in 65 days, and 1/3 might achieve readiness in 90 days. In this scenario, the average time to readiness in the self-directed approach was 65 days instead of 90 days.Today’s top performing companies are embracing self-directed training, and the modern workforce is loving it. They can learn in the flow of their work and their lives. They aren’t tethered to back offices and breakrooms for four hours of agonizing computer-based training. They consume training in their desired time and in bite-sized elements. They have freedom to maneuver, and the results are in – they are ready, faster.We’ve helped many companies transition to digitized, self-directed learning that can be consumed in minutes at a time according to their learning style and lifestyle. Additionally, our clients have on- demand access to the data and insights that help them drive continuous improvement, higher employee engagement, and stronger performance through a self-directed and microlearning approach.
If you’d like more information on how to apply a self-directed training approach to readiness, email us at letstalk@learnermobile.com.
