Learning will be your Competitive Advantage

How will your company survive in this fast changing world? What will be your competitive advantage? Let us take a look at how learning will be your competitive advantage. We will also understand the tips to use learning as your competitive advantage.

We will drill down our thoughts systematically as below :

• Future Trends affecting organizations
• New Winning Formula aka the Competitive Advantage – The L&D (Learning and Development)
• Strategy to utilize the Competitive Advantage fully for your organization
• Useful Tools and Technology to implement that strategy

So let us start :

1) The Future

If you look at the future trends affecting your organization, primarily there will be three trends :

• Digitization : Each and everything will be digitized. You are going to use a lot of software.
• Automation : You are going to see more and more things getting automated. Each and every operation that is manual, will be explored for automation. If full automation is not possible, semi-automation will be tried.
• Subscription : We are not going to buy products in future, we will by product as a service. e.g. Instead of buying an oven and maintaining it for years, we will look for a oven as a service. Oven manufacturers will start selling ovens as a subscription. Imagine if they come up with a great monthly plan, whereby you can pay some monthly amount for future years and get the new upgraded oven models at a decided frequency, may be every 4 years! This is called as a Subscription Economy, where everyone will not sell just products, they will sell Product as a Service.

What will happen to products, has already started happening with software.

In summary, what this means to your company is this :

Technology is going to make your life easier. If your company is not using technology, you will face uphill tasks.

2) Learning will be your Competitive Advantage

What does this mean to your company? You not only will have to adapt to the new business models but also to the new technologies. Whatever your company is doing today, you will need to use technology – To make things easy and scalable. This will demand that your organization is continuously learning.

The winning formula is now changed. How your company OutLearns your competition is going to matter a lot.

The old style of merely learning to adapting will not help, you need to be proactive and should be adapting to learn to lead the competition.

This is how you can scale up your company. You can’t run the show alone, you need a team, for that you need to delegate and to delegate you need to have trust in your team members. This Trust will only come, if you train them.

A true leader builds a system which trains his people so that he can simply relax and be ready and available only for the critical tasks.

The real job of Top Management is nothing but to TRAIN YOUR PEOPLE AT SCALE!

Which gets reflected in you employees, customers and company culture as below.

The BEST Leader is not the one who is managing the show all the time but the one who is relaxed because his team is managing the show for him.

This has tremendously increased the importance of HR (L&D) in the organization.

3) Why Internal Trainings (and NOT External Trainings)

There is a basic problem in what we learn in our academics. We are trained to find a solution to a well defined problem, but in real life you have to define the problem yourself. Many of the incoming talent can not do this.

They need to be trained on specifics related to your own internal issues. No external trained or academic course can satisfy your internal needs fully. You HAVE to use your internal employees to share tips/best practices/SOPs with your new staff. This will also help you document your CRITICAL processes, reduce your dependency on heroics of few and train your new talent on exactly what is needed to perform. Hence never ignore your internal trainers.

Internal trainings will be the most effective trainings because they will train your people on the practical things, The secret sauce.

4) Why you need your OWN Corporate Academy

This importance of Internal Trainings, lead you to a very strategic move, Creating Talent. Considering the hiring cost and the risks associated with it, it is always a great strategy to focus on Creating Talent inside your organization.

The academic education can never satisfy what you want from your employees, specifically in YOUR specific context. In addition to this, it is not only employees that you need to train, you need to train all the stakeholders : customers, vendors, dealers, distributors, channel partners et al. This is why you will surely need your OWN corporate academy. Earlier the better.

5) Why you need an LMS

With the clarity in your mind that considering the future trends, Learning will be your Competitive Advantage, and the need to use Internal Trainings effectively to achieve that, you can now think of the technology and tools to implement it. LMS, Learning Management System, will reduce your burden much more effectively, because it is designed for the same purpose.

The next question that will come to your mind is “Which LMS to choose?” We have written a detailed blog on the same topic. Check “The Ultimate Checklist for Buying an LMS” for the details.

We hope this blog is useful to you. At GetAConnect, we are on a mission to use Common Sense and Technology for ‘Everyday Learning’. We can Scale Up your business using Training and Development. Do check out more here and book a demo call with us to know more.

Thanks for reading and our BEST wishes to you for your future!

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