| | MAY 201919Consultants Reviewmetaphorically sums up why an L&D consultant may be useful in this age and what you need the consultant to do. Let us now decipher the What in more detail.Since the primary purpose of the L&D Consultant is to bring in an outside-in approach, a new way of looking at your existing ecosystem, it is important that the consultant is well-versed with the new world order. What that means is multi-fold.The first element is awareness of how the digital world is shaping the way we learn and awareness of the new frameworks that may thus need to be introduced. Time availability is the biggest challenge in today's world and it is ironical that while the things to learn are increasing the time available to learn is decreasing. That means adopting a different approach and a new framework that takes care of just in time learning in the flow of work that is personalized and device-agnostic. And it is not just about the framework, but also about identifying changes to your current policies and processes to adapt to this new framework and identifying new metrics that would measure and thus drive the new behaviors both for your associates as well as learning teams.There is no doubt that this cannot be made possible without leveraging technology. That is the second most important element. However it is important that technology is the second most important element and not the most important, since using technology for the sake of technology is the best way of killing user adoption. The consultant has to be well versed with new technologies and devices and the specific use cases of their adoption to identify the right technologies for your organization depending upon your use cases.The next element is identifying new content that may be needed and its availability in the new ways that learners today want to consume content. The problem for the learner today is not in terms of identifying what to learn, but in terms of identifying what exactly to learn ­ because the shelf life of both the technology and the need is short lived and the content available on the net ­ most of it free or extremely low priced, is humongous. So while it is easier for the learner to decide to learn say AI or Blockchain or Analytics, what exactly to learn and where to learn from is a difficult choice to make.It is obvious that there is not a single supplier who would be able to provide you with all the learning technologies or content that you need in all the various mediums. The L&D consultant should be aware of the various suppliers which exist in each of these layers of the ecosystem and be able to help you draw the right parameters to evaluate and select them. S/he should be able to define a robust supplier evaluation processes, advice on the required contractual elements and set up a governance framework that will help you manage it.For your learner though, this is all transparent. Their need is to have a seamless learning experience, and that would require a seamless integration of all the above elements. The L&D Consultant should be able to guide you through the complex integration required for such a purpose.What then is the role of your internal teams? The external view is only relevant when it is applied in the internal context of your organization and that can be ONLY provided by your internal teams. Hence they are the most important cog in this learning ecosystem.The L&D Consultant role as envisaged above essentially requires an external world view, however it is a `role'. If there is someone from the internal team who has these competencies, it may be a good approach to appoint him/her as a Consultant and assign this `role'. The best way for luxury retailers to handle consumers is to make their online and brick-and-mortar experiences merge together, offering exceptional customer experiencesRiaz Mulla
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