LEARNING WITHIN organisations is becoming increasingly strategic in the eyes of business leaders and important to the bottom line, the preliminary findings of a study by IBM has found
LEARNING WITHIN organisations is becoming increasingly strategic in the eyes of business leaders and important to the bottom line, the preliminary findings of a study by IBM has found.
It is also expected to make a major contribution to meeting the supply-side challenges for talent posed by an ageing workforce and low participation rates.
IBM compared the views and priorities of the business leaders of 28 multi-national organisations with those of their chief learning advocates across 10 industry sectors, including automotive, financial services, government, media and retail.
The initial results suggest that learning was regarded by both groups as a critical component to the achievement of the goals of organisations.
“We wanted to get a deeper insight into how aligned the thinking was between CLOs – chief learning officers and senior learning execs – and CXOs – people like CEOs, COOs, CFOs – around the learning function and how it should respond to the overarching business needs,” said Nancy DeViney, general manager IBM Learning Solutions.
“How should the learning function be held accountable for adding value? So we really wanted to test this out on both sides and see if there was alignment in this thinking.”
What the study found was that learning was becoming increasingly valued in the eyes of the various CXOs. “They were beginning to really understand and see the power of this as a key component to their ability to achieve the overall goals and priorities of the firm,” DeViney said.
”Often the focus is very much on growth, innovation, transformation and change in many cases so there was increasing awareness on their part that learning could and should play a role in supporting that.
“There is an understanding that learning contributes at the enterprise level, in terms of overall organisational and enterprise strategy and how that gets employed. Good learning initiatives or good learning implementations are well aligned to that enterprise strategy.”
There was also the business unit level “because sometimes there are some business unit priorities that need to be addressed”. And then lastly a third, individual level including “how you deal with individual skill, capability and capacity,” she said.
