Building Bridges: More Strategic Partnerships to Form for L&D

Adding to yesterday’s post, here are a few more strategic partnerships you’ll want to form for your L&D department in 2018 and beyond.
Budget and finance. It’s important to have strong ties with your finance department as an L&D professional. You want to make sure you always know what funds you have available to you, your team, and your efforts, as well as what you’re required to do to receive those funds.
Before you develop or implement a new learning technology or initiative, you want to make sure that it can be sustained and supported long term. And you can’t do that without a proper budget or regular stream of funds.
For some helpful tips on how you can prove the worth of your L&D programs and initiatives to finance executives, read “How to Maintain Your Training Budget When Your Organization Starts Downsizing,” Part 1 and Part 2.
Operations managers. Operations managers have a unique perspective in your organization, as they have firsthand insight into what makes employees more productive, and they know exactly what hinders employees’ productivity.
They will be able to offer you regular data and feedback on employee performance and where employees might need refresher trainings and where employees might need additional training to be more productive and engaged while they’re at work.
Sales managers. Sales managers will be able to offer regular insight into what types of training help their teams earn your organization more revenue or clients. They’ll be able to determine what training programs directly increase sales revenue and targeted leads and which ones fall flat. They’ll also want to work with you on a routine basis to keep their sales teams engaged, well-informed, incentivized, and happy.
Customer care managers. Customer care managers will be able to let you know what customers are concerned with the most and what employees need to do or learn to provide the best customer service possible. And this can change and evolve with new or updated product offerings and services.
Some employees might need refresher courses in how to handle customer requests or complaints, while some employees might benefit more from a course that focuses on emotional intelligence skills, and so on.
External stakeholders. As an L&D professional, you might end up developing courses or programs that you’ll want external parties to be able to access or take advantage of online. When this happens, you’ll want to form strong relationships with third parties that will host or administer your learning content, as well as your new customer base of learners.
You’ll also want to connect with other L&D professionals from other organizations within and outside your industry to continually swap best practices and advice.
Forging the strategic partnerships highlighted above and in yesterday’s post will ensure the success and longevity of your L&D department and its programs and initiatives.