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Operational planning for a training manager is a simple three-step process. You audit existing courses, forecast new courses, and then update your overall training plan. This type of planning ensures you and your training team stick to the corporate objectives and spend your time and resources wisely. You never want management to think your department’s output isn’t essential to the corporate bottom line.
In our Successful Training Manager workshop, we provide an incredible tool, the Course Audit Checklist, to help you audit your training programs and ensure they are exactly what your company needs and nothing more. As managers, we should always be prepared to justify our decision making in case our business turns a spotlight on us.
In the Course Audit Checklist, we have you audit each individual course according to five key factors. Let’s take a quick look at the five factors to see why this tool will save you time and money.
1. Organizational Basis – We want to make sure our course is truly meeting corporate needs. The course would have to be linked to a business objective, address specific job performance deficiencies, be mandated, or address new hire needs.
2. Impact – We want our course to make a difference. Is the course well received by the employees? Does it produce expected performance improvement results, and does it yield measurable results for the business?
3. Content – We want to make sure our course material is still relevant and up to date, and the course length and materials fit our present-day employees.
4. Delivery – We want to ensure the current delivery strategy still makes sense. Should a classroom course be converted to e-learning or the virtual classroom? Is the class still balancing the business needs with quality learning outcomes?
5. Cost – We want to make sure we are still spending our resources wisely. Does a course still run under budget? Can we deliver the course in a more cost-effective way?
If you audit each individual course according to these five factors, and get positive answers to these questions, you can be confident every course you are offering your employees is necessary, impactful, and cost-effective!
