Leveling Up

Prioritizing Needs in Learning and Development with Sunita Arora
Learning and development plays a vital part in the efforts of any business to level up. Today we are joined by Sunita Arora, the Head of Learning and Development at GE Digital. Sunita is a learning and development strategist with over 20 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies in Silicon Valley startups. She is known for her global leadership development, instructional design, workshop facilitation, project management, communication, and organization development skills. Today she joins us to discuss the importance of understanding your business’s main need in learning and development and ruthlessly prioritizing your focus. Tuning in, you’ll hear how to approach leadership buy-in through demonstrating the impact on the business, the types of programs that Sunita’s designed that have been the most effective, and the different ways to measure the success of a program. Find out what ‘built-in nudges’ are and how they can remind people what they have learned long after they have completed a program. With a wealth of experience, Sunita shares some great advice with us and provides helpful examples of how she has implemented these concepts in her own work, so tune in today!
Key Points From This Episode:
An introduction to Sunita Arora and her career in learning and development.
The importance of understanding the business’s need and prioritizing it.
How to approach leadership buy-in and the importance of it.
Sunita’s advice to a new or expanding talent development team: start with the North Star.
Sunita shares the success story of how she used this principle to develop a training program and a framework for the leaders of an engineering company.
How she incorporated the input of the leaders to develop this framework.
How she helps companies ruthlessly prioritize their focus, and how this is especially important when resources are limited.
The most effective types of programmes that Sunita has designed for managers and emerging leaders.
What ‘built-in nudges’ are and how they can remind people what they have learned long after they have completed a program.
The different ways that the success of a program can be measured.
How training is different for managers and emerging leaders versus senior executives.
Sunita’s views on the challenges posed by the ongoing pandemic as well as some of the opportunities it presents.
Sunita’s go-to resources and how her company has been using newsletters.
What advice Sunita would give her former self when she started to take on leadership responsibilities.