What's the Opportunity

Training service providers can expect this situation to impact our businesses in more ways than one. While we all hope that this turmoil stops soon and the economic conditions return back to normal, we cannot ignore the reality that the IT industry faced soon after the catastrophe of September 11, 2001.  The financial markets are going to face an unprecedented challenge of bouncing back as several people might lose their jobs and many may need to change their professions.

However, there is an opportunity that lies at the end of this dark tunnel. The overall scenario leads one to consider that there may be a huge shortage in the supply vs. the demand for skilled people, specifically in the BFSI segment. Organizations are going to need a carefully-crafted people development strategy to sustain themselves in such a scenario because good training and retention of domain-specific knowledge is as important as getting a share of the bailout dollar. Finally, as the market changes course, new laws and regulations will come into play, again resulting in an increased demand of change management, compliance, and risk mitigation trainings/certifications. This will result in a large demand for training at a time when organizations are cutting back.

Needless to say, the challenges of the chief learning officer (CLO) have taken a completely new dimension. On the positive side, CLOs will be able to do what they have been struggling to do for a long time. In the wake of aligning the training to business objectives, and ensuring a good return on the training dollar, the CLO will be able to consolidate the training function; he will be able to do away with the “we need training because we are a big company” syndrome; and most importantly, the CLO will be able to generate the required impact on the employee talent.

As training services providers, the only way to sustain our long-term partnerships with our customers is to identify with the “old” but at the same time be ready to embrace the “new-reality” challenges of learning leaders and look at new and innovative ways of aligning with our customer organization. Some of the ways to achieve this are:

• Better preparing customers for the time when the markets will go up by providing consulting services in critical areas, such as:
• Developing strategies that enable alignment of business objectives with training initiatives to provide just-in-time interventions. This will help cut upfront investments and enable business units to budget for trainings as and when a need arises.
• Scrutinizing scores of libraries/catalogs sitting in corporate learning management systems that are seldom used and identify the ones that are “real” training needs. This will automatically lead to development and delivery of effective learning.
• Developing a comprehensive Talent Management strategy that focuses on developing new talent as well as cross-training employees. While developing such a strategy, all aspects of an employee’s contribution to the organization should be considered. Therefore, expecting HR alone to do this may not necessarily deliver the best results.
• Developing learning analytics (metrics) that are directly related to business objectives to measure the impact of every training program. Letting results speak for themselves is the best way to ensure participation and adherence.

• Promoting effective customer education capabilities to improve customer retention/satisfaction and, perhaps, reduce costs to help them through tough times.