Fix It or Ditch It: What to do with your Learning and Talent Technology

The HR department is no longer predominantly focused on payroll and benefits. Their primary role has now expanded to Learning & Talent Management, which is a broad set of practices aimed at optimizing every facet of the company’s most indispensable asset: the employees. All things talent acquisition, management, and optimization go under the Learning & Talent Management umbrella. 

The goal is to ensure that the workforce, through strong training and education, stays happy, satisfied, and prepared to meet the challenges that come their way. Employees are considered to be more than just a cost of doing business—they are assets whose efficiency can be molded and maximized through long-term strategic investment and management.

This is where Learning & Talent Management technology comes into play: It unifies and streamlines everything from hiring to retiring.

Bluewater has partnered with several companies to implement these technology solutions and oversee its optimization. While every case is different, there are a few common hot-button issues that almost everyone faces, often revolving around talent management systems. Because of these issues, HR managers are often faced with the task of fixing their learning and talent tech or just plain ditching it. This article will explore three common pain points and what can be done to fix them, not ditch them.

Companies implement Learning & Talent Management technology intending to tackle talent development and management challenges through a master record for each employee. This technology acts as a centralized HR infrastructure that provides various advantages over various disparate systems, making it easier to share data in real-time. But sometimes, the technology systems implemented are either misaligned with their goals or are too challenging to use and navigate by employees and HR leaders. This is often the result of not optimizing the technology to meet the company’s needs. One software solution will never fit all. It must be tweaked to reach their ever-evolving talent acquisition and management goals. 

In some cases, the problem isn’t the technology, it’s low data quality. Bad data, or even lack of data, corrupts the system and leads to flawed insights and bad decisions, like employees failing to get the right training at the right time and the decision-makers failing to understand the training courses’ effectiveness. 

In many cases, companies excitedly race to implement a new system. They set it up and get it running, but they never get around to learning the actual nuts and bolts of it. The HR managers often lack the technical expertise about the workings of this tech too. There is tech, but how is it used to achieve specific employee management goals? How can HR use this technology to make onboarding more streamlined? How can this technology be used to gain more significant insights on which training courses are translating into increased productivity? Many critical questions like these go unanswered, which is sad, since Learning & Talent Management technology is a pricey investment, and lack of knowledge deters the company from making a full ROI.  

Learning & Talent Management technology comes with a learning curve that most companies don’t budget for.  The most significant outcome is that the technology gets underutilized. We don’t know what we don’t know; not having a complete grasp of the features present in tech, its purpose, and the way to use it puts people at a disadvantage, as they fail to utilize the technology to its fullest. In some cases, they’re left with the same challenges as before they implemented the system. 

It’s not just the HR managers and other decision-makers that cut themselves short. The employees suffer too, as the lack of knowledge and skills to navigate this tech translates to plenty of missed growth opportunities for the staff. Due to lack of appropriate training, their skills remain stunted and their weaknesses don’t turn into strengths.

Often company leaders will struggle to eliminate bad data from their systems while trying to figure out which data to collect and continuously share with the decision-makers. They struggle to decide which reports to generate and which data to use in their reports. 

Even if they figure out which data to use, there’s the hurdle of how to extract it without compromising its quality, and how to present it to the decision-makers so it can reliably guide their current and future strategies. 

Bluewater offers a robust decision analytics service that aids companies with discovering critical data, extracting it, and reliably getting it into the right hands at the right time. This way, essential decisions never have to wait, and bad information doesn’t have to tarnish the obtained narratives and conclusions. 

Luckily for you, Bluewater offers end-to-end technology selection, implementation, and optimization to help companies like yours leverage their employees to the fullest.

Bluewater assists companies in selecting the right Learning & Talent Management solution that perfectly aligns with their HR needs. The Bluewater team thoroughly trains staff on using the technology to meet internal goals and use the system to get the right data into the right hands in the most effective way.

With Bluewater’s assistance, you will be able to pick out the best system for your business, train your people to use that system effectively, and learn how to build effective reporting for your top decision-makers to drive real change in your organization.

Download our Fix It or Ditch It Checklist and see where you stand with your LMS technology.

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