India|February'2009: Waking up to the realities of recession, India Inc is now increasingly looking at relating training to quantifiable value returns and thereby revenue growth of the company. This has been identified as a key driver in the learning & training domain in 2009 by Mentor Learning Services – a leading learning Company offering solutions to the IT, Manufacturing, FMCG, Banking, Financial Services & Insurance, BPO & Retail industries in the area of training, learning, people development and learning management and seeking to define the Learning services industry in India.

A fast evolving offshoot/discipline of training & HR, Managed Learning Services (MLS) is a systematic and scientific approach providing continuous and intense organizational learning solutions to ensure skill transfer and ownership of learning to employees. MLS addresses all the learning needs of an organization – across levels and across locations. The MLS model delivers the entire spectrum of learning services, right from learning strategy to planning, implementation and measuring effectiveness of learning in the context of required business goals. The learning services industry is currently worth $1 Billion plus and poised to grow multifold as there is now a strong need for specialized & skilled workforce to propel India’s growth story in this gloomy financial scenario.

Business results of any kind – revenues, productivity or customer satisfaction – require appropriate display of employee skills & behaviours. Effectively developing & aligning these behaviours/skills improves the chances of delivering the required business result.

FMCG Sales force drives revenues for the organization through Coverage of outlets-Reach & Conversion of effort to orders – Productivity. Creating & deploying focused training programs which develop the necessary behaviours/skills for achieving reach & productivity is the right way to deliver business results.

Similarly achieving higher customer satisfaction in a BPO today requires more than meeting Service Level Agreements. The customers want the BPO associates & managers to think & innovate, suggest improvements on behalf of the customer organization. This can be achieved only by aligning necessary associate/manager behaviour with the innovations required by the customer organization.

“This is the time to develop organizational sensitivity to delivering business relevant, timely, measurable & cost effective learning to employees. This is the job of a specialist team and many Indian organizations need external support to do it” says Desikamani, Founder Director of Mentor Learning.

C.K.Ranganathan, CMD of CavinKare which has been trying the MLS model for the last two years says, “In tough times like this there is a necessity to achieve sustainable skill development, measure it through rigorous indices and transfer responsibility of learning to employees. Managed Learning Services model presents an excellent opportunity to do it”

Reachout's News Bureau
 February' 2009