In January 2024, the World Economic Forum declared the 2020s as the decade of upskilling. Thinking about long-term talent enablement is critical for ensuring your L&D strategy gets the attention of C-Suite, and an annual training plan is your stakeholder-friendly tool to get the job done.
With 9/10 executives planning to increase or identify more targeted ways to invest in employee upskilling and reskilling, there has never been a better time to propose a fresh approach to your training plan.
L&D teams across industries are working to address the following:
- 40% of the workforce will need to reskill to adapt to AI
- 76% of workers are more likely to stay at a company that offers continuous training
- 6 in 10 employees will require new training before 2027
Learn more: The future of work: An upskilling and reskilling revolution
You may wonder: what skills are needed to adapt to AI? What new skills will emerge over the next few years that I can prepare for in advance? A skills-first approach to your annual training plan can address these important questions.
Why is mapping skills important for your annual training plan?
An annual training plan is your blueprint for a training strategy that measures (and anticipates) each employee's career path. It is a collaborative process among the C-suite, L&D leaders, and even employees to acquire and enhance workforce skills aligned with your organization’s objectives. Coordinating business goals with your L&D initiatives can look like:
- Decreasing employee turnover by tackling the employee skills needed to improve customer service.
- Expanding cybersecurity training to protect your organization in a fully remote or hybrid work environment.
- Scaling training globally while ensuring the content remains relevant, compliant, and unified.
Even executives are growing more aware of the importance of a skills-first approach. Amanda Nolen, co-founder and Fortune 500 consultant at NilesNolen, proposes changing the title of Chief Learning Officers to Chief Skills Officers. Ignoring your corporate training strategy can stagnate business growth, disengage employees, and slow productivity.
Training for the future
As a learning expert, your role has evolved to encompass much more than quality training content. You’re tasked with creating content outside of your purview, catching the attention of distracted learners, and tying it all together to drive real business impact.
Our step-by-step plan for annual training helps you shift your focus beyond traditional metrics like employee satisfaction and completion rates. It encourages a skills-mapping mindset to support real growth.
You’ll learn how to:
- Identify skills gaps and find solutions: Collaborate with stakeholders to pinpoint critical skills gaps and explore solutions to help you close them.
- Develop an annual training plan strategy: Learn how to engage and support employees throughout their lifecycle while addressing key skills gaps across the organization.
- Integrate change management strategies: Discover how to support employees through new training and track metrics that will ‘wow’ your stakeholders.
- Build on your annual training plan: Discover strategies to amplify your culture of learning for improved employee retention and engagement.
By following these strategies, you’ll gain the confidence to try innovative solutions, reveal the potential in your team, and grow your own career as a learning leader.
Let's get started!
1. Identify skills gaps across your organization
Conduct a comprehensive training needs analysis
The first step in creating an effective annual learning plan is conducting a thorough training needs analysis. This process involves identifying gaps in employee skills and determining the most appropriate learning solutions to address these areas. There are many strategies for identifying skills gaps:
Resolve the online and on-the-job training gap
Engage with key stakeholders such as managers and HR to gather input on their learning needs, expectations, and current challenges. Create a checklist.
Analyze past performance reviews
Review employee performance evaluations to identify common areas of improvement and potential skill gaps to address through training.
Challenge your definition of success
Do your L&D team’s training objectives directly align with your organization's overarching goals? If the answer is somewhat or no, consider looking for other metrics that will inspire your team to buy into collaborating with other departments.
When your team is too focused on its own goals, this can lead to a limited perspective on how you can become an asset to IT, product, sales, and other parts of the company. An annual training plan is your opportunity to improve your leadership strategy, look beyond completion rates, and address the needs of different departments.
2. Research LMS administration and platform features
Review platform G2 provides an overview of different types of LMS software, but not all platforms offer skills-first solutions.
Reduce LMS administration
Creating a more efficient annual learning plan will protect your team’s time while you scale your effort to develop and promote targeted employee training.
- Automated enrollment and notifications: LMS administrators can create rules for automated user enrollments and send out tailored reminders or notifications based on specific triggers, ensuring employees stay on track with their learning schedules.
- Comprehensive user management: Bulk user imports, advanced user group management, and customizable user roles facilitate efficient and secure management of employee profiles and permissions.
- Centralized content library: A centralized content repository allows you to efficiently store and manage your learning assets, streamlining the process of content updates, version tracking, and accessibility.
Choosing a robust, central hub to implement your annual learning plans will help you to become an integral driver of employee engagement, productivity, and overall business success.
Personalization & adaptive training features
To optimize engagement, your annual training plan should include strategies for personalizing your learner’s experience. Offer diverse learning paths tailored to the needs and goals of individual employees.
Create a classification system
This step gives you an excuse to ask your colleagues to nickname you Aristotle. The Greek philosopher was the first to create a universal classification system that provided a basis for mapping the needs of animals, including the human condition.
You can start by collaborating across departments to outline the skills taxonomy of different roles at your organization. Then, you can instruct each manager to identify where their team members could improve, maintain, or build on their skills. Each job description for your employees can become a list of skills topic tags and create a tree of learning paths.
3. Develop an annual training plan strategy
An essential component of a successful annual learning plan is a diverse and engaging learning content strategy. By offering various types of content, you can cater to different learning preferences, ensuring employees remain engaged and motivated throughout their training journey.
- Blend eLearning with instructor-led training (ILT): A blend of eLearning and ILT will help to improve retention for critical skills like cybersecurity and workplace safety.
- Encourage informal learning: Social learning and collaboration features encourage employees to engage and learn from one another through discussion forums, knowledge sharing, and mentorship.
- Host internal & external content: Simplify the process of collaborating on high-quality learning resources with external providers to create a repository of learning assets.
Learn more: Close skills gaps with custom learning paths
4. Create an employee adoption and engagement plan
Your HR team might have met their retention goals, but what about engagement? A study by Gallup revealed that low engagement lost the global GDP $8.9 trillion, with 62% of employees not engaged at work. Successful implementation of your annual training plan hinges on widespread adoption of your training and sustained employee engagement. New (but essential) tools for employee engagement To maximize user engagement and foster long-term adoption, here are a few tools to consider:
- Interactive platform: An intuitive, user-friendly interface is key. When employees can easily access and navigate the platform, participation rates rise, and friction is reduced.
- Mobile learning: A mobile app ensures employees can access learning content anytime, anywhere, increasing engagement as they learn at their convenience.
- Customizable content delivery: We all enjoy choosing between a video, a podcast, or a TikTok to understand concepts. Enabling employees to tailor learning experiences to their preferences or learning requirements supports increased employee satisfaction and buy-in.
5. Integrate change management strategies
Transparent and effective communication is integral to the success of your annual learning plan. Consistent communication aligns expectations and provides timely support for trainers, learners, and stakeholders.
- Communicate learning expectations and opportunities: Automate emails, announcements, and notifications to inform employees of their learning objectives, available resources, and progress updates. This ensures they remain motivated and invested in their learning journey.
- Establish feedback channels: Introduce surveys and course rating systems to collect valuable feedback from employees regarding their learning experiences. Feedback empowers you to identify opportunities for improvement and tailor your learning plan accordingly.
- Offer real-time support: Integrate support tools, such as chatbots and virtual help desks to provide employees with prompt assistance during their learning experiences.
6. Tracking progress & measuring success
Continuous evaluation and measurement of your annual learning plan's effectiveness are crucial for long-term success. Here are some tips for ensuring you track progress, identify trends, and assess the impact of training on your organization.
- Monitor employee engagement: Detailed reports on content usage, course completions, and user engagement provide valuable insights into how your employees interact with your learning platform and inform potential improvements.
- Evaluate learning outcomes: Use assessment tools, such as quizzes, tests, and surveys, offering valuable feedback to enhance the effectiveness of your learning initiatives.
- Assess the impact on organizational goals: By tracking key performance indicators, such as employee retention, productivity, and performance improvement, you can assess the impact of your learning initiatives on your organization's overarching goals.
7. Evaluate your training plan
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your annual learning plan is crucial in assessing the plan's effectiveness and informing future decisions. Advanced analytics and reporting don’t need to be intimidating if you familiarize yourself with key metrics for the employee lifecycle.
- Identify key performance indicators (KPIs): Establish KPIs that align with your organization's goals and learning objectives, such as improved employee productivity, increased skill levels, or reduced error rates.
- Gather data: Track course completion rates, skills improvement, and employee performance metrics, to track the progress and impact of your learning initiatives.
- Calculate training costs: Compile and analyze all associated costs related to your learning plan, including course development, platform fees, and time spent on training, to determine the total investment in your learning initiatives.
- Assess the ROI: Evaluate the ROI of your annual learning plan by comparing the benefits gained from improved performance, productivity, and employee satisfaction to the total cost of implementation. This analysis can reveal the value of your learning initiatives and inform future decision-making and resource allocation.
The power of long-term thinking
Presenting an annual training plan is a career-building opportunity to demonstrate that your team thinks strategically about your organization’s bottom line.
Consider how your current resources for employee upskilling and reskilling support your organization’s ideal results. Is it a new cybersecurity course to reduce spam tickets for IT? Personalized learning pathways for decreased employee turnover?
Remember – asking questions that lead to other team objectives is a great start for creating an annual training plan. Pitching your long-term goals to high-level decision-makers can result in a bigger budget, more targeted goals, and more collaboration with departments that prove you care about their bottom line.
