As Roberto Di
Matteo and many football managers know you are only as good as your last game
which for Di Matteo was a 3-0 defeat to Juve. If ever there was a profession
that personified the phrase “ it’s a results business” it has to be the fickle
yet beautiful game.
This got me
thinking ? What if Mr Abramovich decided to employ me as a freelancer or he
decided to buy a training company. Would we be able to say well, Sir you spent £x amount on training and this is how it affected the profits of your business.
Maybe this
lack of demonstrable value add/ROI is the reason why the first thing to be cut
back in times of recession is training.
But equally not
investing in training can be devastating to a business as Toyota learnt ,when the problems that resulted in product recalls
in 2011 were down to the fact that proper training hadn’t been carried out.
It strikes
me that in times of austerity the only training that gets done is the mandatory
stuff.
Why is that
? It comes back to lack of demonstrable
value add. Training without application and transfer of learning is
entertrainment and we’re not in the entertrainment business. So as professionals
we need to be more than simply order takers .
So if we are
asked to run a training event we should consider asking some of the following
questions:
- What is the issue that the event is trying to solve ?
- How does that issue manifest itself ?
- How much is it costing you currently ?
- How much extra income would you expect to be generated as a result of the training
- What needs to happen (post event) to make sure that the training or new skills learnt on the day are successfully transferred back into the workplace
- How will we know that the training has made a difference ? (measures of success)
So as a
profession we need to ask the right questions of our customers in order to be
able to show that we’ve made a difference and be able to quantify that
difference, then training wont be the first thing to be chopped in difficult
times.
Until we start doing this, training will just be seen as a cost by the bean counters.
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