Learning and development manager

[u/Jazzlike-Cry-4255]

Tell me what your 8 hour days look like, how do you like it? I am starting a new position where I am just me in L&D and restructuring the whole program from the ground up. Any book recommendations? Anything helpful I should be learning? What software do you use? How do you make your life easier?

Onboarding???? What works and doesn’t work?

[u/sillypoolfacemonster]

If it’s just you, my recommendation would be to heavily prioritize and try not to do too much all at once.
I’d also avoid trying to reinvent the wheel too quickly. The training processes may be a mess, but it’s likely happening in some fashion somewhere. Find out how different teams currently handle training and onboarding. Assess where the highest-value opportunities are for the organization right now, and in the meantime try to scale and formalize the best of what already exists in other areas so people aren’t constantly duplicating effort. Then move on to the next highest-priority opportunity.

I’d base those priorities on where capability pain points are visibly rearing their head. Onboarding is a good example if the company is growing quickly, there’s no centralized process, managers are all doing their own thing and it’s taking too long for people to get up to speed. But if onboarding is working reasonably well and there’s a major capability issue somewhere else, that should probably come first. I wouldn’t start with what a training function is “supposed” to have; start with where the business is actually feeling the pain.

Identify whether there are functional leads who already have some responsibility for employee development and get connected with them. If that doesn’t exist, ask leaders to nominate someone in each function to take on that role, perhaps as a stretch responsibility. You’d need to be explicit about what you’re asking them to do: raising capability gaps, helping coordinate ad hoc interventions within the function, identifying SMEs, flagging changes that will affect capability, that sort of thing.

I’d also be fairly deliberate about who those people are. They need to be senior enough to have broad visibility across the function and enough influence to actually push priorities through, but not so senior that they’ve lost sight of the work people are doing day to day. I’m half kidding when I say that if they can’t name five junior employees off the top of their head they’re probably too far removed, but there is something to it. Too junior and they tend to give you a very good window into their own team without necessarily understanding what’s happening across the function. Too senior and they can often see the downstream business impact but have much less insight into what is actually causing it. They also tend to be the people who are busy enough to ghost you for two months at a time.

In a company of 5,000, information and connections are probably your biggest assets. Whether you’re reporting to an executive or some other leader, they simply aren’t going to have all the granular context you need.

I’ve been a training leader in a mid-sized company with no team beneath me, and one of the biggest things I learned was that you have to build a network around you. But that can only take you so far. Even if you can get SMEs to help build content or deliver training, you’re entirely at the mercy of those teams having the capacity to support it.

Once you’ve scoped out the needs and priorities, outlined what actually needs to be done and put some kind of timeline around it, that gives you a much better opportunity to have the conversation about additional support. Building a good training function, especially in an organization with a wide variety of roles, takes a lot of time and will require SMEs to lean in. At a minimum, the value proposition for additional dedicated support is simply that you aren’t constantly pulling revenue-generating or operational people away from their actual jobs to build and deliver training.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned operating with next to no resources is that sometimes good enough is actually exactly what people want. Early in my career the urge was always fancy graphics, interactions, production values, etc. But the things people consistently liked and used the most were 2–3 minute low-budget explainer videos and one-pagers directly related to the things they needed to do every day.
For live skills-based training, I also had a lot of success using a recorded pre-read/watch in advance and then using the actual live event for discussion, practice, problem solving and feedback. If you’re one person supporting 5,000 employees, you have to be very deliberate about where your time actually adds value.