Learning and development is an ongoing investment in employee skills and competencies to optimize contributions in their current roles and prepare them for promotion. We work with teams who are just starting to create their learning and development programs and with teams who need help structuring and communicating how activities and resources contribute to a comprehensive program.
The Summit Consulting team works with you, your leaders and employees to define the goals for your program and develop strategies to deliver on those goals. We develop learning and development solutions to meet current and future needs and help employees understand career paths within your organization. Our consultants partner with teams to evaluate existing learning and development components and resources and identify gaps to recommend a comprehensive solution that meets defined objectives.
Our expertise in training, change management and communications supports the solutions we propose.
1. Form a working team
Input from leaders, managers, and individual contributors ensures the program will provide opportunities to support immediate and future skills and knowledge gaps. Participants should include representatives from across the organization to ensure all parts of the team have a voice in program development. This volunteer team will advise the consulting team as well as contribute to the program design.
2. Define program objectives and gain alignment
Learning and development programs may be focused on immediate up-skilling, promotion and career paths, or a combination of both. We work with the team to identify and define program objectives and deliver solutions to meet these objectives. We partner with the leadership and working teams to ensure we are aligned to manage to and deliver on expectations.
3. Evaluate existing resources
We gather information from the team and organization about the learning and development resources and activities available to employees. We engage managers and leaders in evaluating skills and competency gaps in the current employee pool. Using these inputs as well as information from engagement surveys, interviews, benchmarks and others as appropriate, we will assess what’s working and identify opportunities for improvement.
4. Develop a recommendation for learning and development
We partner with the working team to develop a customized program recommendation aligned to the defined objectives. This may include specific training or educational modules, industry or association memberships, implementation of a structured mentor program, development or expansion of competency models, and career path planning tools for your organization.
5. Develop learning modules
Using best practices from our project management discipline, we will design and develop the program components in partnership with your team. We incorporate expertise from our instructional design and training delivery methodology to create learning modules that enable team members to quickly gain the skills and knowledge to contribute to the organization.
6. Create a communication plan
We will also develop a communication plan to support the learning and development investments. Employees need to be informed of what’s available and how each program component may contribute to their development at various stages of their career. It’s critical for employees to have ownership over their development and career path planning.
7. Gather feedback and make adjustments
Once the program is in place, it will be critical to evaluate the components and the program against the defined objectives. We can create survey questions for new employees, managers, leaders and/or buddies to help you evaluate program effectiveness. Once information is gathered, it is essential that the working team and leaders review the evaluations and determine ways to improve the program or supplement with additional components. We can facilitate this evaluation phase and guide the team through recommendations for improvement or work with your team to plan and implement this phase on their own.
Summit Consulting leverages extensive instructional design and training delivery experience, transformative project management engagements, and a passion for results to provide our clients with customized learning and development programs.
