Aligning Learning to Strategy: How Professional Development Supports Your Work

Successful nonprofit organizations must navigate through change, evolve their procedures to meet new challenges, and stay agile in response to an ever-changing external environment. But how can your organization ensure these goals are met? One means of doing so is utilizing professional development in a manner that offers nonprofit capacity building in a way that aligns with your strategic plan. To help focus the discussion further, let’s break this approach down into its two essential components: learning and strategy. In this blog post we will show you why integrating learning objectives affects successful strategy implementation while also exploring practical steps on how introducing professional development initiatives can help support your work.

Learning: Defining the Purpose of Nonprofit Professional Development

Nonprofit professional development serves a special purpose within capacity building. It engages professional capacity in the form of staff, volunteers, and recipient stakeholders to sustain or grow the capacity of nonprofit organizations through deliberate and intentional learning. It focuses on increasing organizational knowledge and competency to deliver strategic outcomes to meet needs in communities or systems of interest. Through learning-focused capacity building, nonprofits draw upon internally held human and capital resources as well as resources from external sources. Effective professional development initiatives continuously innovate, measure results, and generate creative responses for changing contexts to build capacity more effectively so that their impact is felt more broadly throughout their respective communities.

The Benefits of Professional Development to Nonprofit Teams

Organizational learning through professional development is a great way to invest in your mission-focused leadership and your organization as a whole. Focusing on this deep and ongoing engagement allows for meaningful conversations, increased efficiency in the workplace, and improved employee retention. Professional development teaches new skills that can help employees understand their mission-focused objectives and learn how to manage current trends across different departments and functions. Additionally, it creates a culture of learning within the organization, which in many cases further incentivizes current employees and also attracting new talent who want to work with an engaged team. Investing in professional development is an excellent way to grow with your mission and keep up in an ever changing world.

Professional development is vital to the success of any organization, as it helps employees become better versions of themselves and face their challenges with greater confidence. Beyond these wide and diverse benefits, however, there's a distinct benefit to professional development that links learning to strategy in a way that can amplify your organization's effectiveness.

Three Strategies for Aligning Professional Development to Strategy

In order for professional development to be successful it needs to align with the overall strategy of the nonprofit. Let's consider three strategies that could help achieve this alignment:

Analysis should be done regularly by leadership teams to identify gaps in performance or knowledge.

What does this look like? A simple needs analysis can reveal the differences between the behavioral abilities, knowledge, and skills that exist within your team and what will be needed to successfully achieve your strategic plan's outcomes. A great approach is offered by the Academy to Innovate HR , including a useful template.

Training should be customized according to individual roles and departments

What does this look like? It's unnecessary (and irrational) to suggest that every team member become deeply knowledgeable about every aspect of the strategic plan's implementation. Rather, challenge the team to identify where additional capacity can be built within roles and departments to fill learning gaps and ensure strategic success.

Seek to use continuously accessible resources to deliver learning gains

What does this look like? While conferences, bootcamps, and certificate programs offer tremendous value, there is a significant risk that their condensed content may not deliver long-lasting value. Many organizations are now bringing on continuously accessible training models, which may be ongoing coaching, regular small-group roundtables, and online training platforms. These types of options offer team members the opportunity to more regularly nurture their learning.

Optimizing Training Outcomes Through a Capacity Needs Evaluation

Beyond a learning gap analysis specific to your strategic plan's elements, many nonprofits choose to assess their overall capacity. In this sense, "organizational capacity" speaks to how well you do what you do. Capacity building is a crucial component of any learning program. Evaluating capacity needs can provide insight into the capacity that exists at the organizational level, as well as areas where capacity may need to be strengthened in order to maximize outcomes. A capacity needs evaluation can also help organizations develop a strategic plan for training and development initiatives, enabling them to plan, allocate resources, and redefine their learning-focused outcome targets. The Impact Capacity Assessment Tool is an effective way for organizations to assess capacity needs in an efficient, systematic way. With this tool, capacity needs are thoroughly evaluated so that organizations can effectively tailor their initiatives to strengthen capacity and optimize training outcomes.

Technology as a Learning Tool: Using Online Learning to Create Professional Development Opportunities Year Round

As noted above, online learning provides a great opportunity for businesses and professionals to access in-depth information, skills and knowledge on their own terms. Not only does online learning create professional development opportunities year round, it also makes it easier to customize learning experiences according to individual goals or learning preferences. Consider microlearning, for example: by providing individuals with short and focused online lessons throughout the year rather than a complete course or program at once, learners can attain and rapidly apply new skills on their job almost immediately. This type of online learning has been shown to be highly effective in terms of quickly integrating changes into day-to-day business operations while providing the support needed to bring out the best in any professional. Some learning platforms, such as Merit Nonprofit Professional Development , also provide leaders with robust reporting and the ability to present custom training content within the same learning environment, which are all features that potentially create a ready-made learning culture.

Innovating to Bring Learning to Life in Achieving Strategic Goals

In all forms of professional development, the most successful outcome is seeing the professional apply what they have learned in a way that furthers the nonprofit's mission and strategic goals. Whether the learning was done online or in person, the only way to ensure that learning takes root and is applied successfully is through an organizational culture of innovation. Organizations must create a culture where knowledge sharing, creativity, experimentation, and risk taking are encouraged and rewarded. This mindset of innovation will inform how training initiatives are selected and can lead to more effective experiences for team members as well as better outcomes in achieving the objectives of the strategic plan.

Innovation, in this regard, means recognizing the importance of learning within the context of an organization’s mission and goals, as well as understanding that a rich mix of approaches to professional development is essential for creating meaningful learning experiences. Organizations should strive to find creative ways to not only address gaps in knowledge but also provide team members with access to diverse resources and tools and give them the opportunity to practice and apply the knowledge they have gained in a safe, supportive environment.

At its best, innovation in learning will create a culture of continuous improvement and will ultimately lead to better outcomes for an organization’s mission and goals. The key is to remember that professional development initiatives should be seen as investments in the future success of an organization, and organizations should strive to continually innovate in order to create meaningful learning experiences that move the needle on achieving strategic goals.

Is your organization ready to align learning and strategy? Check out the https://www.meritnonprofit.com/ platform to unlock your team's strategic superpowers!