How to build your business case to invest in learning

When I work with companies I realised that often L&D is focusing on being reactive rather than being strategic. How do you align your L&D strategies with your organisations overall business strategies? How do you start looking at the bigger picture?

What you should ask yourself is "What should I be paying attention to so that I am successful in my job?"

To build a business case, you need to know where your organisation wants to be and how it intends to get there. This is your starting point. Think about your role as an L&D professional and how you contribute to your organisation overall vision.

So first question you need to ask is:

What is the vision of your organisation and the strategy to achieve it?

The most important part of your role is that you are the one helping your employees to develop their knowledge, their skills and their capabilities so that they can contribute to the vision and complete the journey. I see too often that instead of thinking strategic, the L&D professional is evaluating employees surveys and aligning their strategies around just that. It is not wrong but it is not supporting your overall business case if you are not addressing the pain point of your business. Of course looking at current needs are important but from a business case perspective, you need to be more strategic than that.

Who do you ask to find this out? The person to ask is the person who guides the vision. It is often the CEO or the GM of your organisation. To understand the vision is important as your job is to make the vision a reality.

Establishing the vision is an ongoing thing as this will constantly change over time. Your organisation might respond to marked needs or you have a new leadership in place. You might need to change because of new regulations or government fundings. As you understand the vision, you will be able to develop your own L&D strategy which means that you will be able to create your own plans to fulfil that overall strategy.

Once you have plans in place, the next step is looking at cost. What budget is required to do what is needed? And to do that, you have to look at the next big thing:

What behaviours are needed from employees to take the organisation on that journey?

Focusing on behaviours sounds obvious but too may L&D people think about knowledge and skills. It not about knowing things but how to get the tasks done. What do people actually do? What behaviours do they have? What skills are needed for those behaviours to be taking place? How can you (L&D) change this over time?

So looking at behaviours make you think about capability and performance. And your business case is around performance or results. That is what your leaders care about.

The last thing would be around benchmarking which leads us to the next question you should ask:

What is the gap between current skill level in your organisation and required skill level?

You have to remember that L&D is not all around training. It includes everything that your employees do so they can perform better at their job. What they are capable of doing. And remember, this is not only job-based skills. It is everything that they do so that their task is performed in the best way.

So how big is the skill gap? How is that gap changing over time? What happens to that gap if L&D don't change your current strategy? What changes are needed to to close that gap and to be more aligned with your organisations strategies?

These are just a few but very important questions you need to ask yourself before you look at solutions. Have these clearly defined or ask for help. Over the years, I have been working with many organisations that don't have answers to these but these questions are a good starting point before discussing solutions. How can you be sure that the solution you are looking at will support your organisations strategies? And what is the timeline to achieve this?