When we design development opportunities for our employees, do we do it in a vacuum, or do we have them collaborate? Because honestly, getting the most from learning and development requires a network.

Learning opportunities for your folks are great, and you should provide them – learning should really be part of your fundamental culture – but simply making them available them is only part of what you need to do. You also want to make sure your employees are maximizing their learning and putting it into practice, and one thing that helps with that is offering a learning network.

Sitting in a class or going through an on-the-job training plan is all well and good, but to get the most out of it, people need to prepare in advance, and need to reflect on what they learned afterwards. They can try and do that on their own, but they will get much more out of it (and ultimately, YOU will get much more out of them) if they have a support network that facilitates preparation and knowledge extraction.

For example, before undertaking a program, you might connect them to others who have completed it in the past, who can give them a sense of what to watch for and what the highlights are. Afterwards, they might connect with others who have completed the program with them (or, in a dispersed company, at around the same time). The last step in a training course, for instance, might be a discussion group that talks 2 weeks later about how they are applying what they learned. People gain a better understanding of things if they talk about them rather than just thinking about them, so consider how you might encourage that conversation.

Such a network, by the way, does not have to be solely within your company. If there is a LinkedIn group for people who have been through the same program (PMP prep and Lean Six Sigma come to mind, but there are surely plenty of others), then have your people join that group, and require some sort of demonstrated participation on their part. Perhaps you might create a network among peers at different companies who all use the same training vendor. Or, you might just do it in-house. How you carry on those discussions is up to you; online for a global company, perhaps, but over lunch for a small startup.

Development can be a costly investment and you want to maximize your return on it. Simply sending people to classes or saying “learn on the job” doesn’t do it. Preparation and reflection are critical to getting the most out of learning, and people do that better when they have others to talk to.