‘Learning and development best way to grow organisation’

Learning and development has been described as the best way to grow business and safe organization from frustrations. Therefore, it is time for learning and development leaders to stop reacting to training requests and start meeting real performance needs.

However, learning and development professionals desiring to add value to their organizations need to learn to focus on training that would add value and start training at the right time for the right staff members.

Speaking at a Workforce Group learning and development leadership conference, held at the Zone Centre Gbagada Industrial Scheme, Gbagada Expressway, Lagos, one of the speakers, Seni Sulyman, from Andela Organization, said a learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge and modifying its culture to reflect new knowledge and insight while having the agility to adapt to changing environments.

Sulyman explained that in lorganization, learning is valued, encouraged and recognized, while access to training and personal development is open and flexible, within available resources. He noted that there is the use of a variety of development methods, which include coaching, mentorship, job rotation, as well as formal trainings to enable employees acquire and build necessary skills, knowledge and behaviour while making progress in their careers.

Sulyman said: “It is advisable for orgnaisations to empower individuals to identify their competency gaps and ways to close them. There is a clear link between learning and development, career progression, performance management and reward for all categories of staff member. The question is how do you build a learning organization.”

Bukola Oyeleye MD, Zone Centre, she stated the zone is a subsidiary of workforce group and it is company that creates and manages marketing events, adding that their events are targeted towards customers’ engagement and acquisitions.

Oyeleye noted that the gesture was to encourage learning and development community to learn best practices and learn how to maximize the opportunities for their businesses to grow up as Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and Directors of their organisations.

“This is an opportunity for people to come and learn how to build the most important assets in an organization, which are the staff members. And the assets must be maintained to enable organization to use the assets in several occasions so, organization must train and retain their staff members. Learning and developments are the one who help us shaping the knowledge base our people and build the competency that is required in doing business.”

“The World is changing by the day what is relevant today might not be relevant tomorrow so, you need to keep upgrading your knowledge. Knowledge is capital, which would help you to deliver the results of your business. The only way to achieve that is to keep training your people as much as the need arises.”

“We also have world class facility where we rent for seminars, meetings conferences, trainings among others and these facilities are where we created for people to come and use them.”

Oyeleye said that any management of organization that is not delivering the required results should be replaced with effectives for the growth of the organization. “If management is not delivering results the shareholders should change the management, for instance, if people in my organization are not performing I have to replace them with effective ones to enable me to get my money back with profits.”

“It is better for stakeholders find out why management or staff members in their organisations are not delivering the results. There are many reasons so, if the shareholders have given resources and technologies to the management and there is no improvement the next thing is to change the management.”

Martin Abraham, group head of talents from IHS Academy, said it is very important for people to come together and understand the important ways of doing business.“If you want to increase your credibility as a profession, we need more learning and development professionals operating learning and development strategy to the business need.”