Tricks for grabbing management attention for elearning

How can you get your voice heard and raise support for innovative learning approaches? With budgets tighter than ever, it’s a question facing everyone in L&D right now.

Laura Overton of Towards Maturity thinks she may have the answer.

At a recent CERTPOINT Virtual User Forum, Laura outlined her top tips for increasing the effectiveness of elearning. Her crucial point: you need to get managers on board.

Why is management support so important? Simple. In Laura’s extensive research over several years and across hundreds of organizations, one statistic stands out: 55% of learners say their line manager’s opinion influences their take up of elearning.

In other words, if you don’t have the managers on board, no matter how good everything else is, your learning program is likely to fail.

So just how do you get managers’ attention?

Laura mentioned three key factors or ‘Impact Indicators’

1-      Efficiency

While efficiency isn’t everything, the fact is that elearning is a faster way of transferring information than traditional means. Cost savings average 11% and time savings 36%. But, cautions Laura, put this in terms that make sense to managers. Don’t lead with the efficiencies. Instead, ask this: what would they do with that 36% time saving?

2-      Business agility

According to Laura’s survey, 69% of 153 participants reported faster time to competency through using elearning, and 59% reported improvements in their ability to implement changes in products and processes. What does that mean for managers? More productive staff, faster – that’s a sure way of getting management attention!

3-      Management Perception

Unfortunately, though, it seems that many L&D professionals are more concerned with training outputs than with management engagement. 74% of those surveyed were unsure if line managers would agree that productivity had increased, while 50% were unsure whether line managers in their organizations believed new staff were up to speed faster. These numbers show the lack in communications into and out of the L&D department.

Laura has shown, using empirical research, that L&D professionals should capture and communicate their successes with their managers. Success measures are not necessarily about strict ROI measures, they can be about other achievements such as staff satisfaction, speed of procedure, productivity or customer satisfaction depending on the nature of each specific business.

CERTPOINT Systems thanks Laura Overton for this thought-provoking presentation.

To Download the presentation click here.