Much like tending a garden, effective training programs must fertilize potential and nurture talent that may have been lying dormant.

One of the amusing offshoots of the coronavirus pandemic is the exponential spike in plant fascination. Suddenly,  everyone was a gardener or a farmer. And with the abundance of plant varieties available, it has become easy to just select and collect and collect. 

But I’m  sure many, including myself, learned a painful lesson — cultivating plants should be planned and organized. Otherwise, you end up with beautiful and sometimes expensive specimens that are dried,  damaged, or worst of all, dead.   

In Learning and Development, we face a similar situation. Organizations have recognized the impact of training on their employees and companies. And it’s easy to get sidetracked by the amount of choices out there. Sometimes the tendency is to pursue the trendiest programs at the lowest price. The caveat here is that Training Programs, if not intentional become chaotic, and unproductive and even leave organizations worse off from where they were before.  

So how do we select the Learning solutions that will cultivate success?  

The key is to customize.  Capability building should be tailor fit to an organization’s target employees, setting, and goals.   

A thorough assessment should first be done to understand existing skills, identify performance gaps, and define desired capabilities. This will lead to program design that will not only focus on content delivery but also foster the ideal conditions for learning such as business application examples, collaboration,  mentorship opportunities, and recognition.  

Once the main sessions are done, learning should be maintained by having regular conversations and reviews of the skills acquired, applied, and evaluated. Essentially, it’s finding the right mix that will fertilize potential and nurture talent that may have been lying dormant.   

The objective of plant cultivation is to have a healthy garden that bears lovely flowers or productive crops. Just as gardeners enjoy the fruits of their labor, organizations reap the benefits of a well-developed workforce.  

Skilled and capable employees are more productive, motivated, and better suited to deal with the challenges at hand. This translates to competition, innovation, and ultimately, success of the organization in the business arena.