Five Ways to Improve Learning With Performance Management

The convergence of learning and performance management creates an opportunity to diagnose and prescribe ways to better develop critical talent. By integrating learning and performance, organizations can more easily identify workforce trends in a more predictive manner, target organizational capability gaps, and enhance connections to build alignment with the business needs.Whether the integration of learning and performance is driven by the organization’s learning group or HR, both groups need to know how to take advantage of this convergence. This paper describes five ways that performance management can improve training initiatives:
Producing development plans that work
Improving leadership development programs
Making learning opportunities more visible
Aligning the training department to organizational needs
Making learning and human resources more strategic
Introduction: Integrating learning and performanceWhen it comes to retaining critical talent, managing succession plans, and giving employees the skills they need to succeed, learning management and performance management processes need to converge.Taking the paper out of the paperwork may be reason enough to automate performance management, but Human Resources (HR) can use performance management to maintain a strong workforce and manage talent to drive top-line performance and competitive advantage. With career and succession planning tools organizations can reduce employee turnover and maintain a strong, productive workforce.However, an organization also needs to complement performance management with learning management that enables workers to build competitive skills and helps align employee training and career goals with business goals. The convergence of learning and performance management can significantly help an organization get the most out its workforce by helping to:
Develop employees beyond assessments with immediate, actionable development
Retain critical talent, develop leaders, and reduce turnover
Control succession risk and reduce the cost of turnover
Align employee goals with the organization’s goals to optimize workforce productivity
Link merit-based compensation to employee performance
Automate performance and development activities and reduce administrative hassles
Whether the integration of learning and performance is driven by the organization’s training group or HR, both groups need to know how to take advantage of this convergence, and in particular, how the training group can improve training initiatives with performance management.The following are five ways that training can use performance management to help create a true talent development framework.1. Producing development plans that workMost organizations struggle to adopt development plans managed independently through the Learning Management System (LMS). When performance management is automated and tied into the learning process, organizations and employees alike are more likely to buy into the integrated development plan. The development plans align directly with the organization’s goals and are therefore linked to the company’s overall strategy. Employee engagement in prescribed learning is certain to improve when employees see how this development ties directly to their performance evaluation and merit considerations.2. Improving leadership development programsLeadership development is one of the most popular learning initiatives – and for good reason. Demographic shifts, increasing employee turnover, and increased specialization in the workplace all contribute to significant talent shortages. Performance management, equipped with career and succession planning tools, provide the diagnostics to zero in on the job functions and targeted individuals that need leadership development the most.Performance management tools help the learning group systematically develop an organization’s critical talent. They can complement generic leadership development programs by helping to account for roles, flight risk, and potential.3. Making learning opportunities more visibleIn most organizations, the LMS is just one of countless other applications employees need to use. Engaging employees to log in and look around can be a challenge.However, an unanticipated benefit realized by Learning customers who have integrated performance and learning is a significant increase in the number of individuals who sign up for optional courses.Once mandatory processes are tied directly to salary increases, LMS usage numbers start to increase. As aspiring employees focus on competency gaps and individual development plans, they spend more time developing career plans with unsolicited development opportunities.4. Aligning training more to organizational needsIn many organizations, budgets allocated for learning and development are among the first to be cut during a recession. An effective way for a training group to change this fact is to prove how training programs directly relate to organizational strategy.With integrated performance management, talent development professionals can see precisely which development is needed most. Aggregated review data, showing competency gaps and aligned strategic initiatives, highlight the areas where learning and development groups should focus. It thus becomes easier for the training group to justify the significance of talent development within the organizational strategy. Many companies that have integrated learning and performance have been able to drastically improve their ability to forecast for and anticipate formal development needs.5. Linking training and HR for strategic valueWhen learning and performance functions converge to create a true talent development framework, both functions benefit by becoming more relevant to supporting the organization’s critical strategy.Traditional organizational development activities important to the business, such as managing mandatory compliance and certifications, are improved by automated tracking and reporting. But there are other strategic areas of the business that need strong formal and informal learning. These include many pressing talent management issues: retaining critical talent, managing succession plans, and giving employees the skills they need to succeed.Truly actionable talent development is only feasible when performance management and learning management converge.Conclusion: Applying the benefits of integrated learning and performanceThe convergence of learning and performance management creates an opportunity to diagnose and prescribe ways to better develop critical talent. Strategic integration enables organizations to more easily identify workforce trends in a more predictive manner, target organizational capability gaps, and enhance connections to build alignment with the business needs. The integration enables organizations to put together actionable leadership development programs for key employees, so they’ll be better prepared for promotion.Learning management system (LMS) solutions are part of our industry-leading unified talent development software suite, which helps organizations build a complete platform for developing more competitive employee skills. Training organizations can take advantage of our complete, best-of-breed talent development solution to make their businesses better – by making the employees better.

Digital Marketing to Promote Businesses to Greater Heights of Success

Conventional or off-line marketing has existed since the beginning of history. But, these days, if a business is to achieve success then, there is just no better alternative to on-line marketing. To put it in short, on-line or digital marketing is all about promoting a business across the virtual domain of the Internet. Some of the core strategies for this line of marketing include web designing, email marketing, social media promotion, search engine optimisation, content marketing including videos and others. This modern marketing concept is potential enough to make or break major international brands and small-scale startup businesses, along with everything that range in between.Overlapping domains of conventional and digital marketingAny marketing approach through digital media channels is digital or on-line marketing. The domain of digital media is fast expanding. Presently, social media channels, websites, TV, radio, mobile handsets and even non digital media like billboards and transit displays are considered as digital marketing components. In other words, at present, conventional marketing include aspects like P2P (person to person) marketing, elements of direct marketing that on-line marketing does not cover and print advertising. Actually, the domains of off-line and on-line marketing are fast overlapping each other. Elements of traditional marketing like on-line directories, URL landing pages, web banner advertising, QR codes and others have a strong connection with on-line marketing.Reasons to assign greater importance to digital mediaIt is not just marketers and business owners who are driving the shift to digital media. Even consumers are contributing to this phase change. The majority of digital media channels, including various social media platforms and websites, can be more easily tracked. Whereas, print media and other traditional marketing approaches are hardly easy in that aspect.In contrast to traditional advertising, its on-line counterpart is much cost-effective. Unlike running conventional advertising, one does not need to invest a fortune in running on-line advertising campaigns. The modern advertising approach is equally ideal for small, medium and large-scale businesses, as well as for startup brands.These days, consumers do not flip through yellow-pages or directories anymore, to find any business to avail its products or services. They Google the required information, either using their hand-held mobiles, laptops or desktops. Thus, businesses hardly have any better alternative other than depending on on-line marketing using the platform of digital media.Dependable web solutions companiesIn this vastly changed landscape, businesses need to hire reliable web solutions-providers. Actually, modern marketing efforts for businesses revolve around building smart and business-friendly websites. A corporate website should ideally represent both the business and the brand. It is also important to ensure that it is easily navigable and user-friendly. Last but never the least, businesses need to invest on optimising their websites, so that the sites rank higher in SERP (Search Engine Result Page).There are many freelancers, providing web design, development and SEO services at reasonable rates. It is better to pay a higher price and hire a professional brand that provides comprehensive web solutions than working with freelancers. There are many brands that provide a wide and impressive range of services including web design, search engine optimisation (SEO), content marketing, PPC advertising, social media marketing and many more. Hiring such companies will give better mileage in course of time.

Free Home Based Business Leads – Are You Getting Them?

Free home based business leads. Every online marketer knows you gotta have them, particularly when you’re just getting started and especially if you don’t have an endless supply of money for marketing your home based business. But what’s the best way to find them? Ah…that’s the question every online affiliate or mlm business owner desires the answer to. Do you have the answer to that question? If not, or you just want to pick up some extra tips, than this article is for you.In reality, there are quite a few effective methods for generating free home based business leads at the time of this writing, so I’m going to share a few with you here. But keep in mind, when it comes to attracting home based business leads on the internet, the rules of the mlm lead generation game are always changing, and sometimes they change fast. That’s just the nature of the internet…constantly new and better methods being developed all the time.That leads me to your mlm lead generation system that you are currently using. You are using one, right? Your best bet for being able to stay in the game until you create that incredible mlm income is to use a system that instructs you on how to consistently generate free home based business leads that come to you, how to turn those targeted leads into prospects, how to monetize those prospects with your system’s funded proposals, and then lastly, how to get a percentage of those prospects to ask you about your online mlm business.As I previously mentioned, things change quickly on the internet, so mlm lead generation strategies that work really well today may not be as effective a few months from now because so many people are using them. That’s why it’s so very critical that the mlm lead generation system you use constantly provides you with training on the newest cutting edge strategies to keep your free home based business leads coming in on an ever increasing basis.Keeping that in mind, here are some of those strategies to begin generating home based business leads right away. You’re most likely familiar with some, if not all of these techniques, because a lot of folks are successfully using them. However, there are “tricks” and techniques you can use that will provide you with an advantage, but I’m afraid that would involve a lot more room than we have here right now. So here are the basics of a few of those strategies.

Blogging. Blogging has been around for quite a while now, but done right, it is a great way to develop your reputation as an authority on your niche so that people will be drawn to you. The system you use should provide you with step by step instructions on how to get started with your own blog, how to incorporate your system’s funded proposals into it, and how to effectively promote it. This is not the fastest way to start generating free home based business leads, but using it with and promoting it with additional lead generating techniques is a great way to brand yourself as a leader (which people are attracted to) and is great for the long haul too. Google loves good content blogs! Just make sure you are providing lots of valuable niche specific, keyword optimized info on your blog and not creating a huge blatant sales page.
Article Marketing. Article marketing is a terrific way to generate lots of free highly targeted leads. The more keyword optimized articles you write on your best niche topics, the more exposure you will enjoy. If you create articles that provide valuable content for your readers and use the author bio to point them back to your content-rich blog, you can generate lots of free home based business leads for years to come.
Social Media Sites. Social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook provide a fabulous way to connect with millions of people online. However, there is a correct way and an incorrect way to use them. The mlm lead generation system you use should provide training on how to effectively use these sites to build relationships and network with other like minded people. This is an excellent free resource for generating home based business leads that everyone should be using.
Video Marketing. Video marketing is an extremely valuable asset to add to your mlm lead generation arsenal. It’s simple and yet highly effective, and is a method that can generate free home based business leads very rapidly. Your system should provide training on the most effective ways to use video marketing to promote your blog, your articles, and well, simply put, You. If you’re not making use of video in your marketing, you may be losing out on the 6 out of every 10 people online that are watching video!
Pay-Per Click Advertising. PPC is probably one of the most effective mlm lead generation strategies on the entire internet at present, but I left it for last because you must have a marketing budget that will last several months to truly use this effectively. Most people starting out in internet marketing don’t have the money for this. However, once your funded proposals start generating some consistent income, I would highly endorse utilizing this method. Your system should provide training on how to use PPC the right way, and when you do, it can literally begin generating free home based business leads in a matter of hours of writing your ads!Now this is in no way a comprehensive list for generating home based business leads, but it offers an excellent place to start. Forum posting, niche-related blog posting, etc. are a couple more ways you can get backlinks to your blog and increase your search engine ranking. The list goes on…Bottom line, there are several effective mlm lead generation strategies you can make use of to attract targeted free home based business leads to your site or lead capture page and put you on the fast track to the mlm income you’re dreaming of. Of course, how you process your leads after you get them is a whole different story that we’ll have to save for another time. Until then, keep it real, and keep taking action!”It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.”
-Napoleon Hill