An Interesting Imbalance in Employee Training

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve had the great privilege of traveling all over North America conducting workshops for corporate trainers.  That has given me a wonderful opportunity to discover the reality of training within a diverse group of organizational entities ranging from the armed forces to a small business.

One common element of employee training has become clear. There is a significant imbalance in the training strategy of many companies and I’m using the word strategy loosely by the way.

There is an inordinate amount of time and financial resources spent on designing and delivering “training” without a plan to effectively translate that training into meaningful changes that impact a company’s bottom line

An example of this is the emergence of e-learning.  There is a lot of attention and dollars being given to its use in delivering training…and rightly so. There is a compelling need for variety in corporate learning. There is software available that’s pretty easy to use.  But to use it takes time and attention, particularly when training is developed from scratch.

With that in mind what is the value when there is no meaningful follow up or plan in place to implement what’s being learned? Is that a significant waste of time, energy, and money?

I’ll leave that question for you to ponder. In the spirit of effective use of your most precious training dollars, consider the balance of resources spent to deliver and resources spent to integrate and translate the learning into desired outcomes on the back end.

In these economic times, some companies may be tempted to cut back on employee training.  I suggest an alternative course of action, use the same dollars and train smarter instead.  You can start by accessing your ratio of delivery plan vs. implementation plan and tracking your real return on investment.

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