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By Julian Dable (May 2008 Issue)
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Any talent-management expert knows that succession planning is truly effective only when you identify the strongest candidates, assess them on a regular basis, and carefully nurture and develop their individual strengths.

Training and development are critical building blocks for a winning team, and e-learning techniques are bringing new dimensions and added value to that. While training is key to identifying rising stars and helping them reach their full potential, it is the measurement of its impact that gives training a strategic role to play in successful succession planning.

Classroom-based and other traditional forms of training continue to play important roles. However, the medium-to-long-term effect and recall of these courses are hard to track and test. Dialogue between trainer and trainee generally ends when both leave the classroom, and managers who were often not present on the training day are left to assess its value and impact.

This is one area where e-learning has a valuable role to play: its dynamic nature lends itself to self-paced study and appropriate content can be digested at a time that is right for the learner. Furthermore, tracked assessment programmes, both immediately post-course and in the longer term, provide managers with real-time updates on their employees’ desire to learn and progress.

Companies integrating e-learning techniques into their training and development programmes can make their training timetable more flexible and modular. Importantly, for effective succession planning, e-learning can be tailored to the individual need.

The strongest team members will often strive to learn more and faster than their peers, and individualised electronic testing can reveal this very clearly. This helps to validate managers’ feelings about the strengths of team members and the emergence of successors to different roles.

Succession-planning programmes can also benefit from e-learning as part of a blended approach to soft skills training. While leadership, management and team-building skills will continue to be taught effectively by traditional methods, e-learning adds further value. For example, it can assess decision-making abilities and responses to different managerial scenarios with engaging multimedia components and through a wide variety of exercises.

It can also increase the effectiveness of the wider training investment by communicating theory, facts and models ahead of more traditional workshop training models, which can then focus on higher-level aims.

It is a well-known maxim that the best employees start to ‘do’ the job above them long before it is formally bestowed on them. Such people also often manifest a desire to coach, train and transfer knowledge to their peers and even their managers.

Now, companies can put training tools in employees’ hands more easily than ever before. They effectively become subject matter experts within an organisation and can be enabled to pass that knowledge on using e-learning authoring tools. These are now as straightforward to use as standard office software, and putting such tools in the hands of passionate staff can create a strong and self-sustaining learning environment.

E-learning has a valuable and strategic role in succession planning. The impact of training on each individual can be more fully understood, which not only makes the learning
process more accountable but also helps cement the identification of potential ‘stars’ by supporting it with hard facts.

The flexible nature of e-learning means that rising talents can learn at their own pace and have their ability and desire to learn more readily recognised and accommodated by their managers.

Julian Dable is the regional manager for North EMEA at Trivantis, which provides tools and services for creating and managing e-learning content. He can be contacted on +44 (0)207 692 0832.

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