How to Make the Most Out of Development Conversations with Learnerbly

As a manager, one of the most important things you can do is support and empower your people's development. 

One-to-ones are your greatest tool in achieving that. In addition to supporting your people's wellbeing and supporting them with work issues, you can help them learn and grow. Learnerbly enables you to get your development conversations right and make them more effective.

In this short guide, we outline some of the ways that Learnerbly helps managers: 

💪 Facilitate skills development and career progression 

💬 Have more effective and engaging development conversations 

3 Benefits of Having Development Conversations

Most managers understand why it’s important to develop their people. 

But far too many of them aren’t using L&D to improve the performance of their team. Those that do have an incredible edge.

By investing time and resources into your people’s development, you’ll be able to enjoy the following benefits: 

🏆 Employees Gain Clarity over Their Career Goals 

🤗 It Helps Direct Reports Feel More Valued

🔍 L&D Conversations Help Identify Skills Gaps 

If you want to learn more about development conversations and their benefits check out this article.

How Learnerbly Supports Development Conversations

Now that you know why discussing L&D during one-to-ones is so valuable, let’s see how managers can use Learnerbly to:

🔑  Establish better processes for discussing development

⭐  Feel more empowered to have these conversations with their people 

You Can Create Personal Development Plans (PDPs)

You can work with your people to create personal development plans (PDPs) within the Learnerbly platform. 

With PDPs, you’ll be able to help your team members.

📝 Define their goals for the short, medium and long term 

📝 Identify focus areas or skills that they want to develop

📝 Outline which development activities will help them achieve their goals

Once you know what your direct reports want to achieve, you can suggest resources from Learnerbly’s marketplace to help them reach these goals. 

Working with your direct reports to create and suggest resources for their PDPs will ensure that their learning and goals are more likely to happen. 

This is because they will feel more encouraged to engage with their learning resources and be accountable to their goals they’ve set for themselves. 

Managers Can Encourage More Learning 

The insights you gain from creating PDPs and having regular development conversations with your people will help you make more informed recommendations on Learnerbly. 

For example, if you find a podcast, book or course you think would be valuable for them, you can suggest it through the platform. 

You could also add a note on why you think they would find the resource interesting or how it could benefit their development. This is a great way to:

🙌 Encourage your people to step out of their comfort zone and engage with different L&D resources

🙌 Continue working towards their goals

These recommendations can also be discussed during development one-to-ones.

You’ll be able to ask your people what they thought of the recommendation and how other L&D resources are helping them work towards their goals. 

You’ll Gain Better Visibility over Your People’s Learning

One of the great things about Learnerbly is that it allows managers to gain oversight of their people’s learning—without being overbearing. 

Any L&D resource that their direct report will be visible to the manager through the analytics dashboard and admin controls. 

This allows you to:

👀 Access data on what your people are engaging with

✅ See if they are making the most out of their personal learning budgets (PLBs) 

By seeing how often your people are engaging with Learnerbly, you’ll also be able to track their learning trends over time. 

It Can Facilitate Better Development Conversations

As a manager, this data will give you better insights to what your people are learning, as well as how it aligns with their career goals and interests. 

If you notice that direct reports haven’t engaged with the platform in a while or aren’t meeting their learning goals, you can keep them accountable and see where you may be able to help. 

This could mean: 

👀 Seeing if goals need to be revisited 

🤔 Checking in on their PDP progress 

🎧 Guiding them towards different resources on Learnerbly 

❌ Seeing whether there are any roadblocks preventing their learning

You’ll Encourage Group Learning 

With Learnerbly’s data, you’ll be able to see which resources are being requested by different people in your team. 

If you notice that a particular book about leadership or business strategy is popular among your team, you could encourage them to create a book club or workshop on it. 

✨ At Learnerbly, we noticed that almost all of our sales and marketing team requested the book Demand-Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta and Greg Engle. 

We used this as an opportunity to learn as a group and created a Slack channel dedicated to discussing the book. 

Some of our people even made notes and summaries on Notion and shared them with the rest of the team. 

Not only did this allow us to engage with each other in a more informal setting—while still learning—but it helped us pick up on ideas we didn’t notice during our own reading. 

Supercharge Your Next Development Conversation with Learnerbly

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to having development conversations. 

However, with a tool like Learnerbly, you can ensure that both you and your direct reports get the most out of these discussions. 

We hope this guide sparks some ideas on how you and your people team can use Learnerbly to guide and supercharge your development one-to-ones. 

Or if you’d like to discuss how Learnerbly can help your business, book a video call with us here.