Five critical aspects to getting more return from employee training

Many organizations view training as something to be implemented when time and budgets allow. Those that use training to maximum advantage view it differently. Training is how skills are developed, attitudes are changed, ideas evolve, and the organization is reinvented. A new culture is created as employees learn the skills that will increase sales, build effective teams, improve quality standards, or meet a wide range of other objectives.

To make training cost-effective, it's necessary to ask five questions:

1. Who needs training?
   Training needs can exist at the organizational, divisional, departmental, team, or individual levels. Employees who will be trained and their managers must perceive that there is a need for training, or the initiative will fail. To create change, a large number of employees need to be involved. Employees will make the new process "the way we do things here." Newly promoted and newly hired members of a group should also receive any training provided to the original group. It also may be advisable for the group's managers to take related training.
2. Who will deliver the training?
   Deciding who delivers the training requires creative and strategic thinking. Does the organization possess the needed training skills? The abilities of internal resources are sometimes underestimated.
   Sometimes a blended solution is ideal. The training firm can train and certify in-house trainers— indeed, any employee who has communication skills—to conduct the training. An external resource also can customize one of its existing programs to meet the organization's needs.
3. What form will the training take?
   There are many ways to teach skills: workshops, computer-assisted learning, self-study programs, tuition reimbursement, and mentoring/apprenticeship programs that involve shadowing an employee by a trainer or manager to provide ongoing feedback.
   All training can be customized. Workshops can offer individual coaching and feedback, including ongoing video feedback. Individuals can help choose skills that they want to improve as a result of assessments completed by the employee, his or her manager, and his or her peers, or direct reports (360-degree feedback). This process often is used with broad-based training.
4. How will training transfer to the job?
   How the knowledge and insights from training will be integrated into each individual's day-to-day job. There are several ways to accomplish this. Among the most productive is when participants address their real-life workplace challenges in a training program's skills exercises. These exercises will give the participants fresh ideas about ways to meet their goals.
   
   Another approach consists of scheduling the training so there are workdays between training sessions. Participants can practice and solidify the skills they learned during their workdays and then develop those skills further on the last day of training. Personal action plans also can help transfer skills to the job.
5. How will the training be evaluated?
   Training must be judged on its effect on the organization. This requires hard data on measurable objectives be collected both before and after the training to show increased sales, market share, reduced operating costs, lower rates of absenteeism, or whatever other objective the training was designed to achieve. Although other forces affect these measurable criteria, it is nonetheless important that training be tied to corporate objectives all the way through to the payoff stage.
   
   Training can provide extraordinary improvements in any organization. The key to getting the most return on investment from training is to view it strategically rather than tactically.

BIO: Wayne Turmel

Wayne Turmel is a Master Trainer with more than ten years of training and facilitation experience in the areas of presentation skills, sales, and management/leadership. He has taught programs for organizations in many industries, and has led project teams and designed custom training solutions for clients as diverse as Fidelity Capital, IBM, Sherwin Williams, and the US Postal Service. Wayne is also an accomplished conference speaker and coach as well as a published author on the topic of training effectiveness and management/talent development. His work has appeared in professional handbooks by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) and the American Management Association (AMA) as well as in numerous magazines and websites. He is co-author of The Full Force of Your Ideas: Mastering the Science of Persuasion.