Photo by: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay
When I deliver Langevin workshops, I often share with clients that it takes a triple play at an organization to ensure training success. What do I mean by this? For training to be successful, every organization needs three groups of people working together to ensure positive results. The three groups responsible for ensuring training success are: managers, training professionals, and employees. Each one of these groups has specific responsibilities to ensure training works for everyone.
All levels of management need to:1. Support training programs financially.
2. Allow subject-matter experts to work with the training department to design and verify content.
3. Set positive examples by attending or kicking-off training programs and supporting training managers.
4. Make sure employees are held accountable to apply the new skills learned in training back on the job.
5. Reward employees for their development growth achieved through the application of new skills.
6. Allow training management to “have a seat at the table” during executive business plan meetings so training can set their strategic plan in a timely manner.
7. Request training only when it is legitimately needed to fill knowledge and skill gaps.
8. Explain to employees what they need to learn and do that they’re not currently doing on the job.
9. Share with employees the reason they are attending training and what they will be expected to do with that training back on the job.
Training professionals need to:
1. Design and deliver training programs according to industry standard best practices.
2. Hire, develop, and retain professionally skilled trainers and not just subject-matter experts.
3. Build and maintain strong business partnerships with management and subject-matter experts.
4. Know the cost of training and how to best quantify the benefits of training.
5. Work together with management to ensure new skills are transferred from training to the job.
Employees need to:
1. Fully participate in training sessions, both online and in the classroom, and take learning seriously.
2. Transfer new skills from training back to the job and ask for help if needed.
3. Consistently apply new skills and help co-workers do the same if necessary.
4. Sit down with their manager after training and work out an action plan to immediately apply their new skills.
If any one of these groups fail to do their part, training success will be in jeopardy. Hopefully you can influence the other two groups in your organization to do their part so you all win!
To learn more about who is responsible for ensuring training success and how to create a training partnership within your organization, check out our workshop, Make Your Training Stick. This workshop will give you a set of comprehensive tools and techniques to ensure that training really “sticks” back on the job, long after a course is completed.
