What does being committed to skills-based L&D mean?

- I'd like to share what a commitment to a skills-based L&D department looks like. First of all, a commitment to skills-based L&D requires the belief system that in today's economy, an organization's collective skills are its greatest asset. Leadership either gets the opportunity in a skills-based approach or it does not. If your executives don't have that awareness yet, you have an opportunity to become the boss whisperer. Send the articles from LinkedIn and other trusted sources, preaching the opportunity in this transformation, and don't give up, even if it takes a while to sink in. Once leadership has decided on its commitment to a skills-based organization, it has an obligation to make that commitment known to everyone involved, a directive that comes from the top. That message has to be repeated, placed on posters, made part of weekly meetings, and rewarded. Without expressing a clear commitment from the top, a skills-based L&D department won't happen. Secondly, commitment requires a robust budget. L&D budgets are often a percentage of overall employee expenses, roughly from one to 5%. According to the Association for Talent Development, the average budget is $1,280 per employee across all industries. The average employee spends roughly 30 hours per year training. Now, you can best believe that top skills-based organizations will allocate far more than that amount and time and money to train their employees. The fact is, yesterday's training budget won't meet the needs of today's rapidly evolving skills-based organization. Commitment also requires an investment into managing a robust learning management system or LMS for short. Today's top LMS programs offer excellent content, data, integration with third party content providers, the ability to upload your own training, user management, an inviting user interface, and even gamification. Most importantly, it also requires a commitment to the time and expense of implementing those programs. Finally, it requires management's commitment to L&D time. The L&D department has a sales job to do with managers reluctant to have employees spending time on L&D rather than getting work done right now. They have to help managers embrace the benefit of developing skills as opposed to simply applying the skills the employees have today. For example, you can tell 'em that Google is known for embracing a time commitment that allows very busy engineers a day each week to develop their skills or pursue their curiosities. How do you catch up to an organization that does that? If the commitment to learning and development is viewed as an event as opposed to a complete redesign of an organization's long-term talent approach, then the L&D budget will be one of the first things to be cut when an organization is under financial pressure. I'll finish with a quote by Zig Ziglar. He said that "Commitment is doing those things you said you were going to do, long after the mood you said them in has worn off." That is true for the commitment to learning and development in the skills-based organization.