How to Maximize Your Investment in Training
- 1). Ensure you get commitment and approval from senior executives in your organization. Training should align with strategic objectives defined for your organization and reinforce the mission, vision and values set forth by your leaders. If senior leaders do not see the value of a training investment in terms of improving business performance, they may be less likely to provide additional funding in the future. Encourage business managers to rate their employees on their skills and experience to identify critical performance gaps so that you can justify training investment in particular areas.
- 2). Reinforce formal training efforts with informal support, such as coaching, mentoring and online resources, such as job aids and self-paced training including audio and video materials. Encourage employees to take advantage of career development opportunities provided by your company, as well as free courses available on the Internet, but monitor and track these activities. Maximizing your training investment involves managing training course costs as well as accounting for the time employees take away from their regular jobs.
- 3). Mandate that employees create an annual performance development plan that ties their training activities to improving their on-the-job performance. Each employee should set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely objectives to learn and develop new skills. They should also be rewarded for coaching and mentoring other employees based on their own expertise.
- 4). Link training investment to strategic initiatives. Once your organization identifies performance gaps and lists the associated operational metrics, you can validate that providing training results in improved performance. For example, offering education and training related to following a new sales process can help sales employees locate more customers and close more sales. Discontinue training programs that have little or no impact on business results.
- 5). Deliver training on an ongoing basis. Offer flexible alternatives to traditional classroom training. Use social media technology solutions, such as wikis, blogs and forums, to connect students to each other as well as to instructors and to business leaders. Encourage participants to publish articles about what they have learned in their formal courses, as well as informal development activities, so other people can benefit from their knowledge without additional costs. For example, customer support center representatives can publish troubleshooting techniques and solutions so that other employees can solve customer problems in a more timely way. In this way, customer satisfaction metrics also improve as a result of the investment in training your employees.