How to build a smart personal learning road map

Boost your career growth by focusing on practical application instead of getting lost in endless online courses

- Somak Ghoshal [e-mail]

January is a propitious month for setting learning goals—not just because it's in human nature to want to start the new year with positive resolutions.

It's also the beginning of the last quarter of the business year, when Learning and Development (L&D) teams in corporations around the world must take stock of their roadmap for the coming three months and ensure that the year's budget gets spent fully and meaningfully.

L&D teams are meant to support and customise your learning needs thoughtfully. But in large organisations, it isn't feasible to design individual learning paths that do justice to specific training needs analysis (TNA). As a result, TNAs subsume a wide range of employees into a single learning programme.

The mindset of L&D teams also aggravates this one-size-fits-all approach. In a recent viral post on LinkedIn, L&D expert Matt Furness identified “organisational fairytales” that management still falls for, which affects adoption of learning. In his words, these are:

►People will read our carefully crafted emails.

►People who ask for learning will turn up.

►People will patiently search our LMS.

►People will change because they intend to.

►People care deeply about business success.