Most organizational Learning and Development teams face two key challenges: identifying their organization's training needs, and verifying that their training interventions are effective.
Some try to develop their curricula by "reverse engineering" - looking at the most popular learning activities from their catalogue and expanding their offering in that area, rationalizing that employees know what training they need and communicate that through their training selections. Learning activities are added and dropped based on their popularity. Another common way to define curricula is by working with leaders to develop a training offering that aligns with their strategic organizational goals.
The most effective way to define a training offering is to identify employee competency or skills gaps and then assess the effectiveness of training by measuring performance both before and after training. However, most Learning and Development teams do not have access to this data in a comprehensive way, especially if their employee performance and talent management process is paper-based.
Develop Training Programs Based on Actual Learning Needs
One of the best ways to identify learning needs is to look at employee performance and identify gaps between organizational needs or expectations, and actual performance. Halogen eAppraisal™ give managers, HR and Learning and Development teams easy access to this critical information.
During an employee performance appraisal, managers can assign development plan activities to employees, and associate them with competencies that need development or with stretch objectives that require an employee to acquire new skills. This not only gives managers and employees a way to tie training to performance, it gives everyone an easy way to measure the performance improvements associated with training.
Halogen eAppraisal also provides key real-time reports that help identify learning needs: the Competency Score Dashboard and the more detailed the Competency Rating and Group Score Reports.
The Competency Score Dashboard lets you see at a glance the competencies with the lowest (or highest) overall scores so you can easily identify skill gaps that need to be addressed in the organization.
The Competency Rating Report gives you the ability to see the percentage of employees who have received a specific rating on a Competency, again making it easy to identify organizational learning needs.
The Group Scores report allows you to compare each subject's score against the overall average for the group.
The Target and Gap Group Scores report allows you to compare each subject's score against a target score. It also displays the gap between the target score and the actual score.
The Competency Rating report gives you the ability to see the percentage of employees who have received a specific rating on a competency.
These reports allow Learning and Development teams to clearly identify performance gaps and assess learning needs for the entire organization. And because Halogen allows you to compare report data year over year, they also enable them to track improvements in performance year over year.
In a similar way, Halogen eSuccession™ allows Learning and Development teams to assess learning needs associated with succession planning. It allows an organization to identify the competencies it requires for ongoing success and group these in talent pools. Employees are assessed for potential, and then assigned to talent pools for further development. Learning and Development teams can easily view the competency requirements and ratings, develop training programs and learning paths to address them, and track employee performance ratings and improvements in ratings over time to help ensure the company's future success.
Access Development Plans for the Entire Organization
Halogen eAppraisal's Development Plan report gives Training and Development teams access to the individual developments plans of the entire organization. With various sorting and filtering options, you can easily see what courses and other learning activities employees have planned, and can track their progress in completing them.
Similarly, Halogen eSuccession's Development Plan report gives Learning and Development teams access to the individual developments plans related to succession planning, and offers the same sorting and filtering capabilities.
Your teams can now see development plans at a glance and ensure sufficient training resources are available to address these.
Provide Training That Supports High-Level Organizational Goals
Halogen eAppraisal also helps Learning and Development teams build programs that support high-level organizational goals. Once these high-level goals and their associated sub-goals are established for the organization, everyone, including the Learning and Development team can view them. While managers and employees use this information to align their personal goals, Learning and Development teams can use it to create customized curricula and learning paths that support the achievement of these goals. Progress and performance on these goals can easily be tracked, so you can adjust your companion training offering in support.
Validate the Effectiveness of Training by Measuring Improvements in Performance
The same reports that help Learning and Development teams identify skill gaps can help them validate the effectiveness of learning interventions by measuring performance improvements on targeted competencies over time. Halogen eAppraisal gives you the unique capability to compare results year over year. Finally, a way to truly measure the value of training in terms of sustained performance improvements.
Read How Others Have Increased the Effectiveness of their Employee Development Initiatives
O'Sullivan Creel is realizing the benefits of being able to build training programs that meet the goals of their team members.
At Jelly Belly, they can more easily monitor employee skill development and ensure employees get the training they need to sustain top performance.
See for Yourself!
Take an online product tour to see the power of Halogen eAppraisal and Halogen eSuccession.
Try our software for free and see your forms and process working in our system.
