If you are a manager or responsible for training in your company, how many of these sound familiar?
"We should make it a job requirement that our staff take a minimum of "X" days of training per year."
"We'll assess the success of the program by having everyone take a well-designed test at the end of the class."
"They can learn what they need to know out on the Internet."
"We need to take time to craft well designed learning objectives for this class."
"We're in a budget crunch. We need to cut our training initiatives."
"We're going to switch to a web-based training model."
And how about these?
"We wasted a lot of time in that class."
"We spent a lot of money on that training, and it was useless"
All of these phrases should raise some flags of concern. Specifying the number of days of training assumes everyone needs the same amount of training to be effective in their jobs. While it is true that tests should be well –designed, passing a test only evaluates the immediate learning due to the course; it does not determine if there is a net benefit to the organization. The Internet can be a good learning medium, but it requires a self-motivated learner who knows what they need to know, where to find it, how to tell good information from misinformation, and where to turn if they are having difficulty grasping the information. How many people fit that profile? Budgets are always a concern, but how many times have organizations put themselves at a competitive disadvantage by not keeping their staff competitively knowledgeable and capable? Web-based training has a lot of benefits, but it is only one tool and not good for all jobs. You choose the right tool for the job, not the right job for the tool.
A significant percentage of corporate training is simply broken. Many companies are pouring a lot of money into training with questionable results. The reason for this lies in the lifecycle of an effective training initiative. To be effective, training must be rooted in an understanding of the overall strategic objectives of the organization. To know it has been effective, it must be assessed in the context of corporate and individual performance outcomes. Too often, companies jump straight to training and testing, which means they are skipping the proper starting place and never getting to the proper ending place.
To give you a bit of an analogy: my wife and I are building a house. The beginning point for building the house was an examination of our lifestyle and life goals. How many children were we planning to have? What kind of entertaining did we want to do? What did we want the resale value of our home to be? These kinds of factors influenced the number of bedrooms and bathrooms we wanted. They gave us a set of general requirements: the basis for a design. Of course many other factors had to be considered for a complete set of requirements to be determined.
With this general architecture in hand, we began to design the house itself, making decisions about materials, room size and placement, and so forth. Only when this design was complete were we ready to build, and only when we had built it were we ready to inhabit, and only when we had inhabited it were we ready to assess. No one in their right mind would begin to build a house by going to Home Depot and buying materials. Nobody should assess the success of the project by simply looking at the completed building.
Yet this is what corporations do with training all of the time. They set out to build courses and tests, but they make no link to the corporation's strategic goals and objectives. They assess the training as soon as it is complete by administering tests and handing out evaluation forms, but seldom assess changes in job performance.
As with house-building, this is a formula for spending too much money to create and deliver training that brings little or no benefit to the corporation. Ignoring the training lifecycle is like ignoring the law of gravity: you can do it, but you'll pay the consequences.
There's another parallel between house building and training: building on the investment. My wife and I have made modifications to our personal objectives periodically over the years. That has caused us to go back and reassess our design, and our implementation, and add to it or modify it to reflect the new reality. We didn't go out and start a whole new house. So it is with training. Once the work has begun, it is seldom necessary to go back and re-invent the wheel. The programs need maintenance, but they can also be built upon and leveraged to increase the overall value of the investment without starting from scratch.
Over the coming weeks, I will begin to explore this lifecycle and some of the places where companies bog down or move too quickly, and perhaps even some strategies for avoiding these pitfalls. I invite you to make this a dialogue and add your comments and your perspectives as we move along.
Michel