A few days ago, I met with a colleague whose professional world brings him into contact with the Learning and Development profession and the theme of skills development in the manufacturing sector. The next day I had a similar conversation with Third Sector professionals.

The main subjects of the two conversations were changes in demand for learning and development delivered in new ways and the related issue of access to participants and the pressure to reduce the costs of delivery. So, three themes dominated:

• New forms of delivery
• The delivery of targeted content
• Cost reduction in delivery

Clearly, these are very pragmatic considerations and a little to one-side of questions around connecting the development of people to the performance of people and to the evaluation and the measurement of impact from interventions.

So, in this very short article, I want to very directly address these themes of modes of delivery, targeted delivery and cost reduction in delivery. The SPICE Ecosystem™ has been developed to address each theme very directly.

Modes of Delivery
Any Learning and Development worth their salt, will be familiar with the term “blended learning” and will probably know of the rule of thumb ratio 70:20:10*, where people learn most from challenging experiences/projects, from relationships and connecting with colleagues and least from formal coursework. The thinking here is that work-based learning and development needs to be contextualised in practical work-based experience and that this needs to be delivered across a range of resources that are accessed as close as possible to colleagues’ work.

(*https://trainingindustry.com/wiki/content-development/the-702010-model-for-learning-and-development/)

Targeted Delivery
The increasing demand being reported is that work-based Learning and Development should be based on targeted delivery addressing the specific needs to businesses and their colleagues in the context of their operational world. There is increasing dissatisfaction with ‘sheep dip’ general courses that might form complete qualifications (however valuable for other reasons) but take colleagues away from their operational activity. There is also increasing dissatisfaction with eLearning that is fine for compliance and mandatory training but of limited value for people development unless mapped into a blend of resources.

Cost Reduction
There’s a common insight that Learning and Development is the first thing to be cut in times of financial pressure. Right now, there is such pressure on many businesses that need to find ways to manage budgets but keep people developing and performing.

One of the points I was able to make in conversation with my colleague from the manufacturing sector and colleagues from the Third Sector just this week is that the SPICE Ecosystem™ has been developed to address all three of these themes. It does so in bundles of applications that can be purchased through a simple, no commitment monthly subscription through to completely free-standing instances of the SPICE Ecosystem™ that can be integrated within business systems. It really is do simple, and so flexible.

Written by System Administrator

August 24, 2023