Supporting coaching

Line managers should make sure they spend their time as efficiency as possible, especially when it comes to something new. If they take a coaching role, they should understand what problems and opportunities for a specific employee are and what actions are required from them.

Managers should have everything at hand: employees list, competency standards, target competency profiles, assessment forms, analytics etc

After reviewing the assessment and self-assessment result and considering what can cause the difference the manager has a starting point in communication, something he/she can begin a meeting with.

There is no better way to force the manager to draw attention to the development of their direct reports and think about why and how their employee are trained and developed. It is important that it’s not happening once or twice a year, but periodically, according to the individual learning path.

Microlearning has a kaleidoscopic feel

Theoretically. lack of knowledge and skills of an employee is revealed, when the employee failed to complete the working task. In this case the approach is reactive - managers see their reports struggle and offer them relevant learning experience.

The reactive nature of learning should be changed to the proactive learning, based on the individual learnability. It also allows to align coaching and learning.

Microlearning has many advantages. For example in our system we can guarantee that learners master more than 80% of learning material. There is one disadvantage, though: the microlearning can have kaleidoscopic feeling, something like trying to put together scattered beads.

We need something similar to a mental "thread" to collect those beads into a beautiful necklace.

In SNAPSIM we use the competency matrix, based on 74 National Occupational Standards for Management and Leadership (UK)

Comparability

Let's face it, in most companies, Learning & Development is not among the top priorities of senior managers (compliance training is exception). So results are not very important. If the employee completes an eLearning course and passes the test - good, if not - not a big deal.

The situations changes, when it comes to assessment and evaluation. Its result can impact career perspectives and compensation, especially when there are ratings. For ratings to be fair, we need to establish comparability of every aspect.

If we have ratings of employees based on their learning agility, we must provide a comparability of of learning programmes, its contents and structure.

Content of the learning programme answers the question: "Should Account Managers in B2B know the fundamentals of finance?" In other words - what competencies are required for each category of employees? Programme structure outlines what type of knowledge they should posses.

Competency based learning

The curriculum is based on the management and leadership competence framework taken from the National Occupational Standards (UK) for management and leadership. These were developed to cover all management and leadership-related job functions, across any industry, and a number of levels of responsibility and complexity. This framework is approved by employers and industry stakeholders.

Each of the National Occupational Standards has the same structure: 1) links to other standards, 2) skills to be developed, 3) outcomes of effective performance, 4) behaviours which underpin effective performance, 5) knowledge and understanding

Requirements for knowledge and understanding are practical. They foster certain behaviours that should in turn support employees' performance.

If we plan to develop the competency profile from scratch, we need to align strategic business goals.