New Report: Which Training Technology CLOs Consider The Smartest Investment

With just-in-time skilled workforces becoming a game-changer in achieving organizational excellence, the role of CLOs is becoming more holistic and profound. As Harvard Business Review points out, training leaders are now turning into the transformer CLOs by adopting the right training technology. 

The main goal of a transformer CLO is to ensure continuous business and talent growth in spite of constant market changes, technological disruptions, and other factors. There are three ways CLOs can achieve this: by aligning learning goals with specific business KPIs; by digitizing learning and making it highly personalized, just-in-time, and scalable; or by reshaping the in-house L&D department and making it more agile.

In turn, these three ways of ensuring the company’s future success have greatly influenced transformer CLOs’ training technology investment strategies. 

Transformer CLOs invest in training technology not to save but to innovate

No matter how badly training leaders want to increase learning budgets to put their transformational changes into practice, very few companies are ready to increase their budget allocations. As a result, one of the tasks that CLOs tend to face is reducing learning costs while showing better learning results. 

That’s why 2020 is the year of smart training technology investments that go beyond a pure decrease in learning expenditures. A CLO’s purpose is to answer the question of “What tools do I need to invest in to drive our ROI and support the growing needs of our company?” 

The second question deals with a smart way of fostering an easily adaptable to changes organizational culture. Here, the transformer CLO’s question is about “What training technology will help me not only to upskill our workforce but also reskill it at the point of need?” 

Transformer CLOs are now focusing on investing in tools for business innovation to prepare today for what’s coming tomorrow. This is why they find themselves more and more often at the executive roundtables contributing to the overall business strategy. 

What major challenges smart training software should solve

According to the Chief Learning Officer report, 80% of companies see investment in smart training technology as at least a medium-level priority over the next 12 to 18 months. Moreover, 33% rank it as a high priority, and 16% consider it an essential strategy to future-proof business. However, investment in training technology comes with the challenge of picking the right tools for the right company or industry that can optimize L&D initiatives and accelerate business growth.

As the report shows, there are eight challenges training leaders want to solve through the right L&D technology. But the questions of how to align L&D strategy with business goals, as well as align business operations, practices, and systems (while staying within the budget) are the most pressing ones.

In spite of imminent challenges, 71% of CLOs are pretty optimistic about finding the right training technology within the next 12-18 months. Among them, 78% expect their companies to adopt new L&D tools, 68% plan to develop more personalized training content, and 66% expect learning to be better integrated into other talent management functions. In light of this, CLOs are ready to largely invest in a number of L&D technologies with eLearning delivery, workforce performance analytics, and competency management being the most anticipated investment areas.

As we can see from the report findings, transforming training technology that can solve L&D challenges and innovate business should incorporate more than just an LMS that serves as a repository for learning resources and a delivery tool. 

Learning in the flow of work: integrating training technology in the work processes 

Training technology that makes the biggest impact is usually an integrated data-driven platform with all the relevant tools and features on hand. To describe the general mechanism of how such systems work, let’s take the Rallyware Performance Enablement platform as an example.

Say we have a company with 15,000 employees. For every user, a smart training technology will deliver a personalized learning journey aligned with the learner’s needs, current performance issues, upcoming business activities that require the acquisition of additional skills and knowledge, etc. This journey is also directly linked to the specific company’s goals, ensuring that every completed activity contributes to certain business objectives. This way, every employee gets a specific learning activity at the right time to solve the current task or prepare for upcoming tasks at the scale of a large enterprise and without distracting those who don’t need this training. No information overload, no waste of time. 

Personalized learning journeys are driven by the ML engine, which analyzes aggregated performance data to prescribe only relevant pieces of content at the point of need to the right individual. Other than that, the platform comes with a real-time analytics dashboard that provides insights into every employee’s performance to keep track of their current progress. To solidify productivity growth through smart engagement, Rallyware’s platform comes with data-driven gamification technologies, custom engagement programs and a set of collaboration tools that enable companies to ensure on-demand support and provide just-in-time rewards and recognition to celebrate every single employee’s achievement in a way that’s most relevant to them. 

If you want to see how a smart training technology can become an integral part of an employee’s performance improvement journey and drive business growth at scale, schedule a demo with our experts today!