Answer to Question #237392 in Management for nat

Question

Discuss some of the crucial challenges that organisations can be faced with during planning and

implementation phase of any training and development program.

Answer 1

 Short-Term Focus

Temporary solutions and short-term vision are barriers to Organizational learning. Leaders usually tend to gravitate towards the most obvious problem without considering all the future consequences.

Meeting Needs of a Multigenerational Workforce

Engaging learners becomes more difficult as the generational differences in your workforce become more apparent. More digitally savvy millennial employees are more likely to engage with digital channels, while workers nearing retirement age may prefer more traditional methods. L&D professionals have to prepare content in ways the entire workforce can consume it. 

Measuring Effectiveness

Even if you find the right mix to engage workers, you still need a way to determine if they’re retaining and applying what they’ve learned. Tracking what happens after training is just as important as planning for the training itself. Developing the right assessments and tracking metrics is essential for a successful learning and development program. 

The Forgetting Curve

According to recent studies, students forget 70 percent of what they learn in a training session within 24 hours. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus dubbed this poor retention phenomenon, the Forgetting Curve. L&D professionals must plan for how to reinforce training content for better retention. 

Showing ROI on Learning and Development

As companies continue to look for ways to reduce expenses, learning, and development programs frequently end up on the chopping block. Demonstrating the value of these programs to company executives is often tricky if you lack the tracking and metrics to show an ROI on your training budget. 

Different learning habits

Whether you’re training 20 or 2000 learners, it’s vital that you consider learner preferences and habits in order to prevent further training issues.

The current workforce includes at least three generations, all of which have a radically different relationship with technology. So, your training is bound to be less effective if all employees are assumed to be equally tech-savvy or to have the same knowledge levels and learning habits.

 Lack of engagement

Engagement is important on three levels: cognitive, emotional, and behavioral. Without all three in place, poor <span style="font-weight: bolder;">knowledge retention</span>, passive learning, and a lack of commitment contribute to challenges in training and development.

What’s more, behavioral change is impossible without learning engagement. And, when training feels irrelevant or unnecessary, most learners mentally and emotionally “check out” and resist engaging.

Training that isn’t relevant

Many training programs are too generic, and not personalized enough for specific roles or skills. Unfortunately, generic training can strain learners’ time and patience by forcing them to engage with content that simply isn’t relevant to them. You can bet this leads to further training challenges.

Hectic employee schedules

When work, family life, and a slew of other demands are draining employees’ energy, there’s a risk that training just adds to their stress. Worse still, intruding on employees’ personal time with training sessions is a surefire way to make them resist (and even resent) training.

Tracking Skills Application

Discovering the “stickiness,” or sustainability of a training program is challenging at best. L&D professionals must find and implement an effective way to ensure skills are learned and applied in the real work environment.

 A dispersed workforce

A steady rise in remote work and a decentralized workforce has led to new challenges in training and development.

With a geographically dispersed workforce, training can be quite hard: misunderstandings are common, and cultural differences may even lead to inconsistent training. For example, some cultures are less comfortable with being vocal on online forums than others.

Costs

Facilitation, equipment, venue hire, and the cost of employees’ time (those hours add up!) all make training an expensive undertaking.

<span style="font-weight: bolder;">Training budgets</span> tend to be small, while training demands are always steep. What further contributes to challenges in training and development is when a strained budget also needs to incorporate travel and software costs.

 Resistance to Change

Employee resistance to change is a significant barrier to Organizational learning. Individuals who are accustomed to a particular way of functioning over a long period, tend to avoid doing something new. They don’t want to learn or change to new processes.

It is common for some employees to feel like they might lose familiarity that they have with existing systems & processes.

For an organization to evolve, it is necessary to change. Change initiatives help you to adapt to the current market trends, internal processes, the latest technological advancements, and more.

 Work-Learning Dichotomy

In many organizations, work and learning are considered as two different aspects of employment, and work, invariably, always has the highest priority. A work learning culture means that the company’s values support learning in a meaningful & effective way. Another big barrier to organizational learning in the workplace is your employee frustration in trying to improve their skills and knowledge without any support from the organization.