Why Action Planning is the Key for Successful Learning

Peter PsichogiosLearning & Development

Your organization can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on training and developing your employees, but if you don’t put that learning into action, then your efforts will be in vain.

It is critically important that 10x the amount of time, energy and resources is spent following up and reinforcing learning and development, as is spent designing and delivering it.

What is Action Planning in Learning?

Action Planning is an application focused exercise for you to implement and discuss during your leadership meetings. Upon completing a learning session, the learner would develop an action plan on how to implement that learning in their workplace.  The action plan would be sent to their direct supervisor and they would work together to create a plan and methods of accountability to put that plan into action.

How to Activate Change with Your Learning Program

Action planning is important to the development process because It creates momentum and motivation to put the learning into action.  It creates accountability for both the learner and their supervisor because it’s a guide to how to implement the learning in your organization.

To successfully transfer learning from the learning environment to a real-life scenario, your focus must be on repetition and reinforcement.

Your learners must fully understand the content and competencies they have learned by repeating the content, practicing, drilling and rehearsing it in a safe environment.

We believe the key to great learning is retrieval. Being able to retrieve the content or the competency when you need it to make a difference with a colleague or a customer.

Once your learner is confident in their ability to retain and retrieve the content and competencies they have learned, create an action plan of how to implement that learning in the organization. It’s important for the supervisor to be directly involved with the action planning step.  This gives the learner someone to be accountable to, while also making the supervisor accountable for putting the learning into action.

Each learning suite is developed to create repetition, follow up and reinforcement as well as accountability, tracking and measurement.

If you would like to learn more about how to implement a microlearning program in your organization with a focus on action planning, get in touch here.