5 Ways to turn your training budget from a waste of money to a brilliant investment
How many of us have been on a dodgy training course?
As a very experienced training professional I am happy to confess to being really rather fussy when I attend other people training. I am probably your typical nightmare attendee, sitting at the back, or these days in the corner of a Zoom meeting carping away about how I could have done it better. And in the current climate, why would a savvy business want to waste money on training that fails to hit the mark or improve performance?
You don’t do you ?
So where does the problem lie and what can we do about it?
Here are my 5 top tips for getting a lot more bang for your training buck.
Have A Plan
It is good practice to review your staff training needs at least once a year and plan how to meet them. Training Needs Analysis involves looking at current performance levels for each staff members and identifying what is holding them back from greater job success.
Needs are normally broken down into:
Compliance needs
Skills development for promotion
Addressing performance deficits
Updating on changes to the business
Meeting staff requests
Qualification training
Induction training
The plan should be regularly reviewed to make sure that it is both up to date and you are keeping up with demands. Needs change over time. Too many organisations sadly never get beyond doing the bare minimum to meet compliance requirements. These are often businesses that have low levels of staff engagement and high levels of turnover, but mistakenly believe that they are saving money by not ‘wasting’ it on people who are just going to leave anyway.
Be clear about what you are looking to achieve and make sure delegates know this.
Objectives are important.
You cannot make sure they are met if you don’t know what they are in the first place. Too often organisations will decide that a group of staff need training on something. Let’s use “Delegation Skills” for our example. It is easy to go shopping for delegation courses or commission something. But what is the point and purpose of the training?
Are we looking to:
Increase delegates knowledge of how to delegate successfully?
Improve delegates mindset around trusting subordinates?
Reduce incidents of micro-management?
Improve the tracking and completion of tasks to increase accountability?
Each of these four examples would have a different target audience, from people who have never delegated before to more experienced team members who think they are great at delegation and the problem lies with everyone else. The content of each session should also be different – from a simple ‘how to’ session to ones which aim to really unpick the reasons for entrenched behavior and get people to see that there might be another way.
Where most dis-satisfaction comes is from people feeling like their expectations have not been met – the training did not do the job they either thought it was going to do or wanted it to do.
How can we fix this problem? One way is to use data informed training. Not just using poor KPI performance as a way of identifying who should go on a training course, but we use Talent Diagnostic software to interrogate delegates before they join a course – they might think they are all going on delegation training, but we can identify the micro-managers from the control freaks and the new to delegating to the ‘wouldn’t say boo to a goose’rs and deliver personalised training accordingly.
Treat Different Types Of Training Differently
There are a lot of tick box focused training courses to demonstrate staff have been trained in the million and one things – Health & Safety, regulatory compliance, or HR requirements.
You need to know the training has happened, but, too often there is little thought put into whether any learning has taken place. There is a massive range of on-line content aimed at this market and it does the job of demonstrating compliance beautifully. More employers should probably be using online training to streamline their compliance related training.
But online training is much less successful at changing hearts and minds; challenging current behaviours and inspiring new ways of working.
Go for what will work best not what looks best on your website.
Training is great for imparting knowledge and teaching new skills. A couple of hours or even a couple of days are never going to have a dramatic impact on someone’s behaviour when they get back to work. The pull of the status quo is just too great. And if the course was vanilla and didn’t really get to the point then the long-term impact will be minimal. Try combining training and one to one coaching to create a longer programme with a focus on implementation or explore more formal competence-based qualifications or Apprenticeships which will do a similar job.
While university-based education can look great on a CV, the academic nature of the course means there is likely to be minimal impact on work performance. Many businesses spend a fortune paying for staff to do an MBA as part of their brand strategy. Great. But NVQs and Apprenticeships assess competence in the workplace and so the change of performance improvement and return on investment is much higher.
Use a great trainer
There are an awful lot of rubbish trainers out there. It takes more than just a great personality to create a training experience that resonates. Too many trainers have not been formally trained to deliver to adults and so their courses are not clear on what it is they are trying to achieve – this is especially true for induction training which often is packed with the dull bits it is felt people ‘need to know’ with no consideration about how that will help them get started on being a productive worker.
I have sat through induction training that was highly entertaining and no use to man nor beast at getting me started in the role because it was full of content that the trainer thought was amazing but it was not relevant to the task at hand – getting me knowing what I needed to do in the next few weeks and with a detailed plan on how to do it.
As no one was holding me accountable to that mythical plan, I failed to achieve half of what I could have done.
A lot of great training experiences are about sharing experiences – learning from each other, being poked and prodded to think in a different way. They can be quite ‘content light’ because the knowledge is in the room and the skill is in teasing it out. The skill is also in making sure the training is still adding value to all participants.
In my experience, the best trainers are those who have formal adult teaching qualifications and who have worked in the FE sector – at colleges or in Training Providers. These people are often innovative and creative in their well-planned delivery.
How can Be Astute help you get better return on your training investment?
We can help you devise a great staff training programme, using both face to face and on-line delivery
We advise on how to get the best from the Apprenticeship programme for your business
Our data led short training covers a range of topics – Delegation, performance management, remote management, sales, or conflict management
You can visit our website to find out more or book an initial conversation using the button below;
Julia Stock/August 2020