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Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) and their teams understand the importance of aligning learning and development (L&D) programs with organizational strategic priorities to drive measurable business impact. Yet, making this connection is often challenging. This new article highlights five L&D practices from interviews with CLOs who’ve made meaningful progress in achieving this alignment. The article features examples from companies like Standard Chartered, PwC, Nestlé, Novo Nordisk, and L’Oréal. One practice involves designing workplace learning around strategic priorities rather than individual roles. Novo Nordisk exemplifies this by focusing on enterprise-wide initiatives, such as digitalization. Previously, such training would have been developed for individual functions, but the current program covers organizational-wide topics like digital enablers, patient profiles, digital marketing, and automation in production. This approach has improved digital acumen by 46% and increased digital experiments by 85%, which the company views as proxies for business impact. Another practice is shifting from participation-based to outcome-based KPIs. For example, Nestlé measures the impact of its leadership program on performance, promotions, and turnover, with results showing that participants often move into more complex roles within two to three years, and their teams achieve higher promotion rates. As a bonus, I’m resharing this BCG article, which includes a section on metrics for assessing the impact of learning programs.
