Faces of HR: How Income's Lawrence Chan builds a flexible L&D function

Structure the team into a learning partnership model, with a dedicated learning partner for each business function who will pair up with the respective HRBPs, advises Lawrence Chan, Head of Organisational Development, Talent Management & Learning, Income.

Q What is the role of L&D in the future of work from an HR perspective? How can L&D professionals promote continuous learning?

The role of L&D is as an enabler, to support the business’ expansion and growth ambitions, in the areas of preparing and equipping our people with the necessary future skill sets required to perform the roles of tomorrow.

L&D is also actively promoting the 70-20-10 learning philosophy, where 70% is on-the-job learning, 20% is learning from others, and only 10% is classroom learning, and is building a culture of self-directed learners, where learners are empowered to take charge and own their learning.

Q What are your current strategies to build a flexible L&D function in your organisation? How do you improve functional flexibility to bridge skill gaps?

Structure the team into a learning partnership model, with a dedicated learning partner for each business function who will pair up with the respective HR business partners for the business function to diagnose ways to help employees do their roles more effectively through learning interventions.

Each learning partner is empowered to make certain decisions/recommendations based on the development dialogue with the business, and is aligned to the larger business goals in recommending targeted learning interventions.

Q How do you work closely with the technology teams and other business units in your organisation towards elevating your future L&D initiatives?

This is done through the potential to work with cross-functional teams to get their expertise to co-create in-house curriculum such as project management or agile. Here, the projects team will have the expertise and experience, while L&D will come to package the contents in a learner-centric angle.

Q How can L&D practitioners get stakeholders on board with investing more in learning tools?

We will have to have a more collaborative process and to involve the stakeholders early on, such as in determining the success metrics and how we wish to measure the success factors for each learning intervention. This then gives direct line of sight on our return on investment on the learning interventions.

Q What do you want delegates to get out of your session during Learning & Development Asia 2019?

I'd like to share with them more about:

• Building core expertise and competency: What should be done in-house and what can be outsourced?
• Modernising L&D strategy by leveraging new media, technology and learning platforms.
• Working closely with tech teams and other functions towards elevating L&D future initiatives.

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Catch Lawrence Chan’s session at #LearningDevelopmentAsia this 17-18 September 2019 as he delves further into Income’s strategies to build a flexible L&D function to lead evolution.

Visit the event website to check out the stellar speaker list and reserve your seat! Or you can simply email our friendly colleagues at: renamelt@humanresourcesonline.net and ryanc@humanresourcesonline.net to find out more.