Management Voice Index
Subscribe to Management Voice

Every day, formally and informally, thousands of hours of training are delivered in organisations all over the country. Despite major improvements in understanding how people learn, and the best efforts of training departments, a huge amount of this training effort is wasted. It's worth reviewing just what are …

The Critical Success Factors for Training Results

Organisational training is primarily intended to deliver value for the organisation. So what does an organisation need?

Before you start designing you will need to do some Business Analysis.

• Be clear about the goals of the training. What is it you are trying to achieve, and HOW does that link to the organisations needs?
• Look at your organisations' Key Performance Indicators, (or balanced scorecard, corporate objectives etc). Make sure you can explain simply and clearly how the training will ultimately impact on the Performance Indicators.
• Think about training programme design with the KPI's clearly in mind. Make sure anyone delivering the training understands the link to the KPI's and that they can explain this to all the delegates. If self directed learning is the option, make sure you explain at the beginning how completing the programme will impact the KPI's.

We will look at how to do this business analysis in more detail in our seminar “How to Design Training Around KPI's” on June 22 nd – see below for more details.

Once you have the business impacts clear in your mind, you can start on Training Needs Analysis to identify the gap between what is happening now and what the business needs to happen. We will talk more about training needs analysis in future issues of Management Voice.

After your Training Needs Analysis, establish the critical elements of the programme before getting into the detailed content. Critical elements would normally include:

• Win hearts and minds – if people have not bought into the goals of your organisation, their contributions may be reduced, unfocused or even misguided.
• Give skills and tools – provide people with the skills and tools they need, but don't overload them with ‘nice to haves', it is confusing and reduces the overall impact of your training.
• Little and often is generally better than one extended event. One or two days won't change behaviour, you need multiple interventions which may include many styles of learning and communications over 6 weeks to 6 months depending on the scale of change required.
• Practise support. Skills need to be practised so provide ongoing support through short clinics, follow up coaching, or buddying partners.

This approach can seem like a lot of work, and it feels easier to go out and buy an off the shelf programme. However, if you want to make a difference, and see value for money from the total cost of the programme (which of course includes the real cost of everyone attending as well as all the direct costs), it will be well worth your effort.

Management Voice Index
Subscribe to Management Voice