What does a Strategic Learning Partner do?
Good question? The world of learning has become a continuously evolving paradigm and so it comes as no surprise that I have been asked this question countless times since I commenced in the role of Learning Partner with the Salvos.
I’ve done a lot of thinking around how I should craft a response to this question. I’ve also given equal thought to the assumptions that are often made about the role of professional development in the workplace and the kaleidoscope of perspectives that has fashioned views around the purpose and value of workplace learning. For many of us, the post 21st century modern workplace has brought with it many new opportunities as well as challenges. The demands of organisational and Mission progress has necessitated that traditional approaches to education give way to a new future of workplace learning. This includes looking beyond training as a self-diagnosed and self-prescribed shopping list of training experiences – rather learning and development has become an important strategically aligned approach to preparing the workforce for the challenges that lie ahead.
So, in answer to our primary question – What does a Strategic Learning Partner do?
Simply put, we consult with our people as mission collaborators to help contribute to bringing the Salvos vision to life. We ensure that national capability development is aligned to the changing needs of the movement, as the Salvos journeys along-side communities, providing a holistic approach to caring for people’s material and spiritual needs.
Hence, as skilled learning partners we need to understand the business problems we are often presented with, before we can ever think about diagnosing and prescribing a learning solution. This means that we will ask a lot of questions to get to the roots of a matter, so that we can provide specialist learning advice and options that will contribute to desired outcomes. Engaging with our leaders helps us to truly understand what our learners require. Good relationships with our people helps to keep L&D informed of the outcomes needed by the Mission in order to achieve objectives.
Our Strategic Consulting approach naturally involves a collaboration between our Learning Partners and our Mission and business leaders to determine relevant capability development requirements in order to best help meet business needs. The consulting process will normally identify whether a training strategy can meet these needs by optimising strengths, or through helping solve problems, as sometimes a multi-faceted approach, or non-learning solutions may yield better results.
What this ultimately means, is that as strategic Learning Partners - we are all about supporting our people to develop modern learning skills, so that every person has the opportunity to become self-reliant and has the opportunity to learn from all kinds of experiences on their professional development journey.
So next time you engage with one of our Learning Partners, you will happily find that our strategic consulting narrative will always begin and end with our most important asset – our people.
