Nick Shackleton-Jones: If I could change one thing about HR...

Some of you may be fortunate enough to find yourselves in joined-up organisations - but I suspect many of you aren't. And the impact on L&D is significant: for most of my career I've plugged away at the challenge of improving the quality, appeal and impact of learning interventions.

But as a rule of thumb a solution is only as good as its implementation - our audience suffer from a glut of gripping, entertaining and informative media.

No matter how good our courses, there is almost certainly something else people would rather be doing. So success is largely dependent on our ability to regulate and control the consumption of learning activities within the employee lifecycle. In practical terms this means a focus on the following areas:

1. Onboarding: Staff probably do most of their learning in the first few weeks after joining. For this reason it is essential to ensure that staff complete an induction programme which achieves the various aims of protecting the organisation and the employee from risk, integrating them into a healthy atmosphere and set of social contracts and raising their awareness of development resources at their disposal.
2. Line managers: Like it or not, the role of the line manager is essentially that of parent and teacher. Staff look to line managers for guidance and inspiration (our own research confirms this). They expect line managers to set an example, and to care about their development. Line managers who are not keen learners themselves will erode the value of learning throughout the organisation. A good line manager is one who is not afraid to be seen to be learning, whilst poor line managers will try to maintain an illusion of omniscience. Too often the attitude to learning is actually 'do as I say, not as I do'. In order to improve their learning culture, organisations must look to the recruitment process and the ways in which attitudes to learning are specified therein. Sounds parochial, I know - but where things change fast we depend on people who learn constantly, and if we don't recruit learning leaders we can't expect a dynamic organisation.
3. Performance development: It is clear that having a conversation along the lines of 'is there any training you'd like to do?' once or twice a year is not a great approach to development. Best-in-class organisations understand that learning typically results from - rather than precedes - challenging projects and new roles. Effective performance development must therefore be about an ongoing pattern of project-based learning and review rather than sporadic breaks. Our 'should do' and 'might do' categories of training should lend themselves to the kinds of projects that staff will be asked to undertake, principally as a means to build their confidence and allow them to fail safely.
4. Mandatory training: We should be able to separate out those aspects of our learning portfolio which are 'must do', 'should do' or 'might do' respectively and give staff clear guidance as to which is which. Typically, this is dependent on an HR system which links staff roles to training via a competency model and training matrix - but this is not the only possible solution. For example, the BBC lacks a coherent competency model, but we have been able to construct training plans dynamically by means of an automated 'training advisor' which generates these categories of training by means of a series of questions about the tasks an employee performs. Either way, making it clear to staff what constitutes doing a good job, and what resources are in place to enable them to perform better need to be tightly integrated.
5. Entitlement blending: Where we combine online and face-to-face elements of training it is essential that booking on the latter is contingent on completion of the former. Our training management systems should support this functionality. Otherwise we end up with a lacklustre, under-utilised online portfolio comprising principally of cost-cutting exercises.
   

It's a familiar dilemma - a member of staff who is compelled to undertake learning tends to expect a miserable experience. But unless they are compelled they will generally rely on their immediate peers for their development - and this may not be the best solution for the organisation.

It is up to us to ensure that any learning which staff are forced to undertake is a truly worthwhile or enjoyable experience.

Driving the effective use of training will often involve a number of elements: authentic communication and support from the top, managers who take development seriously, a robust system for tracking and reporting, the correct placement of training in relation to change, and a strong approach to administration of the process.

In particular, where training is part of a change management process or a strategic initiative it would be nice if it were not an afterthought, but instead embedded into the new process in a way which makes it unavoidable.

As to the future, there is definitely a shift in the balance of power in respect of learning. Once we expected learning to be concentrated in the hands of 'experts' residing in the training department and dispensing knowledge in a top-down fashion in line with the strategic objectives.

To an increasing degree we can now expect employees to enter our organisations with valuable skills and knowledge - perhaps even networks - which we need to capture and share as efficiently as possible. Successful organisations, in other words, will depend to a much greater degree on their ability to share what their employees already know.

The challenge for HR is how to help put systems in place to support this activity and - more importantly - how to encourage, recognise and reward proactive knowledge-sharing as part of the employee's role.

This kind of improved integration of learning and HR holds great potential: one of the world's most recognised brands/companies is already experimenting with a system in which employees can not only share their knowledge, but evaluate their peers' expertise. In such an environment it becomes much easier to 'know what we know' - i.e. to pinpoint expertise or talent, rather than relying on the rather blunt instruments of competency models, appraisals and resumés.

• If I could change one thing about HR...: Read all the posts in this series