Training ROI

As a member of the training team, your responsibility is to share knowledge with individuals, groups, and organizations. Your goal is to encourage satisfaction so that the audience learns the content to the extent that they apply it. Your key to increasing application so that it positively impacts an organization’s return on investment is to listen, listen, listen.

You design and deliver content to the masses. You are stretched so far, you can’t guarantee that all of the content is within each class let alone that it will be used. Everything becomes your issue. If the staff is not performing, you need to develop more training. If the phone lines or intranet stop working, you need to train another method of communication. It never stops. You are the experts even though you rarely apply the content outside of the classroom or test environment.

If your team plans on being successful in transferring learning to behavior, you will need to recognize the impact of how you train and organize the delivery of these events so that learning is integrated in the initial approach and there is continuous reinforcement. Take a step back from training and assist the

organization in the learning process. Where training is usually a single or series of events, learning contains continuous activities. Learning also allows for reinforcement. Plan for what your participants will forget. This is easily recognized through Level 2, knowledge assessments, and listening to your operation partners. With the gaps in knowledge shown in the Level 2 evaluations added to the feedback from your clients, you can use adult-learning techniques to bridge those gaps while building upon the strengths of previous learning events. Bridges that can be built and crossed when we choose…

You are on the expressway headed into work for another long day of training. You hope to get in early this morning to prep for the class this afternoon. This class will be full of front-line employees who are learning the new system being brought in “to make things “easier” in efforts to meet our financial goals”…

Traffic slows to a crawl just as you near the ramp to the toll road. Without hesitating, you merge onto the ramp. You’ve seen traffic back up on this road before and know that it adds an extra 20 minutes to your commute if you stay on the original path that is.

Traffic is clipping along at a nice pace even as you near the first toll. You slow down and look for some change on the dash or the cup holders. You do not seem to find any coins, so you reach into your pocket, and take out a couple of dollar bills. As you near the booth, you realize that you are in the “exact change” lane and need to merge. You do so, but cut in front of a couple other cars. One honks at you.

You pay the toll, thank the collector, and begin accelerating into the funnel of lanes. There are only two lanes and five booths with cars exiting at all points. You speed up and slow down with similar motions and manage to make your way into the flow of traffic.

The cars pick up speed and so do you. You can exit at the next ramp and take the streets from there. However, you choose to travel one more exit and backtrack a little as planned.
You hit rumble strips again and remember the second toll. You take the second dollar out of your pocket, slow down, and roll down your window. You pay the second toll, which is slightly more than the first, and begin the race for the lanes again. You can’t speed up too much since the exit for which you were waiting is right on the other side of the toll booths.

Now, the easy part, backtracking through the side streets and getting into work…

Expressways and toll roads are great ways to reach your destination. We pay for expressways through our taxes. Toll roads, however, have various collection points to remind you of the convenience of using them…yet, you also pay taxes that support the same materials for the toll roads. Would you have thought about the detour? Would you have exited a little earlier? Would you have gone in early that day instead?

We all may have that first and possible second detour already planned within our training. We may even decide to go out of our way to add content that has little or no connections to the original scope. We do this because someone said, “we also have to train this topic with the new system because we don’t have any other time to train it.”

Interesting, we don’t have time to train that topic any other time, but we will pay the price of putting too much into the one training event we are able to schedule right now. In fact, this would be similar to the multiple cars merging into a couple of lanes. While not impossible, others have to speed up or slow down for things to fit together and flow smoothly.

As a training team, your focus needs to remain on the design and delivery of training that has avenues of reinforcement. Without reinforcement, you will pay for the labor, but not reap the application results. Most technical skills are lost within 20-30 days after training if they are not used in the same way they were trained. Most soft skills become dormant if someone doesn’t remind the learners of the reason why they attended a learning event on specific topics within 5 – 10 days. As adults, we assume we know the softskills even before the class since we know the definitions. Reinforcement of the class details becomes important if we wish the material to be applied in a particular way.

In order to accomplish all of the tasks that land on your plate, you need to remember to recognize the impact of the content and the training itself, organize the delivery for the initial class and the continuous learning events afterwards, reinforcing the content, and integrate learning with previous training sessions to show value and provide your learners with a solid base of understanding before and during application.