How Managed Learning Can Help You Transform into a High-Impact Learning Organization

Every learning organization is on a journey to become high-performing.

And every one of those journeys is unique. The goal is to become as agile and responsive as possible while constantly:

Despite their best efforts, many organizations struggle to reach their transformation goals. However, those who succeed often find solace in the support of a managed learning partner. Attempting a learning transformation alone can be a daunting task, often leading to painful, expensive, and time-consuming processes. But with the right partner, these challenges can be alleviated, and the journey can become more manageable.

Like climbing a mountain, becoming a modern learning organization is challenging. Reaching the peak of high performance is not straightforward. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, constant adaptation and reassessment are crucial. This is where the role of a learning partner becomes critical.

Just as climbers rely on experienced guides (known as sherpas) to navigate treacherous mountain terrain, organizations can benefit from partnering with L&D experts. These experts, like sherpas, provide invaluable assistance in planning, guiding, and mitigating risks during the challenging journey toward a modern learning organization. By forging the path forward, they significantly increase the organization’s chances of success.

3 Ways a Managed Learning Partner Can Transform Your Learning Organization

1. Critical Planning and Preparation

Planning and preparation are critical before an L&D organization undertakes a complex transformational journey. While many learning leaders have the deep experience necessary to lead the organization on its mission, some navigate uncharted territory without the skills and support needed to be successful.

Choosing a path less traveled requires significant planning and preparation. But experience is critical for success. Sherpas often spend their lives climbing the same mountains over and over. They ensure safe passage by evaluating the terrain for hazards and making the ascent more manageable for others. Similarly, managed learning partners are highly skilled and experienced learning professionals who spend their careers focused on L&D.

To begin any new learning and talent-development endeavor, you must first have a good handle on your vision and existing capabilities. This helps to uncover obstacles and challenges that you will need to overcome. Learning experts often do this by conducting a learning organization health assessment. Such an assessment usually involves a diagnostic tool and consultative approach to help determine how the L&D organization views itself, how learners view the organization, and how the organization’s practices compare to relevant industry best practices. With an unobstructed vision and understanding of the obstacles and barriers that may impede the organization from achieving its goals, a learning expert can map out the best routes for consideration.

For example, if an organization has a vision to create a global, integrated learning function, assessing its technology stack uncovers many critical factors that could impede future success. If several learning management systems (LMSs) are utilized across the organization to meet different goals, but the organization’s goal is to harmonize into a single technology, understanding why and how each LMS is used is critical.

With the knowledge uncovered by a health assessment, managed learning partners fully understand the situation—including each business unit’s pain points and achievements. After gaining a genuinely holistic view and understanding the risks involved, experts can chart a path by defining the desired technology strategy. They then create a plan for implementation and deployment based on the organization’s current state.

Complex transformational journeys will have many barriers to navigate and many routes to travel. Managed learning partners can bring the experience, tools, and strategies needed to accelerate your journey and minimize risks, ensuring you successfully reach your goals.

2. Strategic Collaboration

During a climb, sherpas carry essential gear and supplies up the mountain. Their endurance and strength are counted on for moving heavy loads, particularly at high altitudes. A managed learning partner offers similar support along an organization’s transformational journey. They often take on time-consuming yet critical tasks and provide extra hands to keep the project moving forward.

Learning experts shoulder the burden, bringing the strength and endurance to tackle a learning function’s critical and foundational needs such as learning administration, content design and development, event management, and training delivery resources. Consider the administration of your LMS—it can be a tedious but necessary task, particularly when compliance comes into question. Data accuracy and timeliness often mean the difference between an audit’s success or failure. Relying on an expert to perform these time-consuming and critical tasks allows you to focus on other critical work, like your learning organization’s AI strategy.

With the pace of technological innovation, justifying investment in adopting and integrating new technologies is becoming more challenging. As we enter a new wave of technology with the introduction of generative AI, organizations quickly recognize the value of having a partner on the front end of this exciting wave, particularly with a lens on its incredible possibilities for L&D.

3. Continuous Guidance for Ongoing Transformation

Like a climbing expedition, a learning organization’s transformational journey is rarely short or direct, and it is laden with many considerations and risks to be mitigated. It is often said that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so special. Climbers often stumble along the ascent, but they also periodically stop to rest and appreciate their achievements—and the view—along the way. They count on their guides to continuously monitor conditions, especially as they near the summit. Sherpas understand that the journey isn’t over once they have reached the top; it continues with a descent that can be equally challenging.

Learning organization transformations are not typically characterized by an ascent or descent. The path is more of a journey to achieve milestone after milestone as the organization evolves and changes with the business environment over time. This is the essence of transformation: an ongoing process of change and evolution. Reaching the top typically only offers a view to the next summit.

Managed learning partners assist organizations in changing their strategies, structure, and operating models as their business needs and leaders change and as learning technologies and methodologies evolve. They guide by developing road maps, project plans, and risk-mitigation plans, and they assist in significant learning transition by developing and deploying tool kits and conducting diagnostics and assessments along with other critical solutions that can help simplify the path to success. In addition, they introduce innovative technologies and methods—like ground-breaking AI solutions—to provide the support organizations need to efficiently and effectively meet their dynamic needs for talent development.

As milestones are achieved individually, managed learning partners can continue to provide valuable assistance in various ways. They do this by bringing change- and project-management support to help realign to shifting priorities. A managed learning partner may also leverage demand planning and forecasting processes and tools to assess future needs or employ measurement and analytics tools to evaluate performance and effectiveness to achieve an organization’s goals. Additionally, they can provide recommendations for innovations and improvements that continue to move the organization toward true talent transformation.

Sustaining Success: The Value of Managed Learning Partners

Navigating a transformational journey that essentially never ends can be daunting. The longer the journey, the greater the need for a managed learning partner’s wisdom and experience. Managed learning partners have extensive knowledge of what it takes to be a successful, high-performing learning organization and what it takes to traverse the challenges of a continuous and increasing pace of change.

Working with a partner who has deep experience in navigating the journey can significantly reduce the risk, shorten the timeline, and improve the odds of success. With an understanding of your vision and an assessment of your capabilities and needs, a managed learning partner meets you where you are and takes you where you want to go by offering:

So, while you contemplate the future of L&D and the mountains you will climb to become a high-performing modern learning organization, ask yourself the following question: If I could leverage a learning sherpa to forge a path of least resistance, lighten the workload, learn from the success of others, and improve my odds of success, why wouldn’t I?

About the Author

Heidi Milberg is a Vice President at GP Strategies Corporation. She is responsible for growth and development of the company’s global managed learning services, and has oversight of several strategic global client relationships. She has more than 25 years of experience designing, implementing, and managing learning outsourcing solutions and has led the strategy, implementation, transformation, and ongoing operational efforts for numerous global engagements at Fortune 500 companies. Heidi holds a BA degree in Business Administration from the University of Miami and a MBA from Wayne State University. She is a Certified Professional in Training Management CPTM (Training Industry, Inc.) and is a certified Bersin by Deloitte consultant.