A different approach to learning and development budgets

We've seen how lots of different businesses allocate and deploy L&D budgets. More recently, we decided to turn our minds to our own business in context of investing in our continued development. I think that some of our learnings may be of value and application in other settings.

We're a team of seven (soon to be eight). It didn't make sense to simply pick an amount and then let every person decide how to spend their allocation. This approach also also begs the vexed question as to whether everyone's allocation should be the same. On the one hand, picking the same number for everyone is optically fair and simple. On the other hand, an overly simplistic approach ignores reality, such as market forces. The reality is that someone may want to acquire or hone a skill which simply costs more. For example, if two people have different base levels of skill in the same area, then it's natural that it will cost more for the person with a higher base skill to improve.

We're also too small to invest in a dedicated L&D manager (internal or external) and therefore have the natural disadvantage of not knowing how to optimise this part of the budget.

Our final challenge was that, even if we had an unlimited budget and full freedom for each person to select their own way of deploying it, it's still hard to find the time to research different options and to make the final decision. Let alone finding the time to learn or or hone the skill. I appreciate that imbedded in this point is a whole different topic about "making time"... more on that later.

So what did we decide?

We picked one area that's relevant to everyone - crypto and the underlying technology.

Our decision was simple - we had varying base levels of skill in the area, it's an incredibly broad topic and is clearly here to stay (in one form or another). We then allocated a fixed dollar amount to every employee and asked them to pick one thing in this space and do it. Some decided to simply buy some tokens and coins (including learning how to setup accounts, wallets, staking etc). Others decided to learn about NFTs and are now hooked on digital horse racing. Another is trying to solve a specific business problem with smart contracts. It's been fun and, at times, competitive!

Importantly, we didn't let normal 'corporate stuff' kill the fun. For example, we didn't give in to the urge to make everyone sign a contract and we're allowing everyone to keep the gains that they're able to generate from the experience.

While it's still early days, we've already felt a unifying force from learning about the same general area (despite the different applications). Everyone has genuinely learnt something new - which is the whole point of L&D. Everyone was able to participate to their own level of skill, desire and amount of time that they chose to dedicate to the task. From a business perspective, we not only achieved the objective of our L&D budget but we also managed to get the added benefit of investing in our culture.