IS TRAINING THE SOLUTION?

I heard a story about an organization that was having difficulty maintaining its sales numbers. They had tried everything to no avail and they still were not able to increase their sales numbers. They finally reached out to the trainer in the company and asked if she could do something to help get sales numbers up. She agreed to create some content to deliver to the sales team. Some weeks after everyone was talking about how great the presentation was, but the sales numbers still had not risen and the senior management team ended up separating the trainer. What did she do wrong?

Ask yourself, how many times have you been in an organization where they stress training and it never works? I see it more often than I care to admit. There are hundreds of companies that spend a good sum of money on training each year just to not see any success.

Why is that? Why do we stress training, but not take the time to even decide if training is the solution. In Robert Mager’s “What every manager should know about training.” he talks about the simplicity of deciding if training is the solution.

Quite simply the main reason training fails within organizations is no one took the time to look at the options and decide if training was a solution. Majority of organizations just assume that is what you do. The second reason majority of training fails is due to a lack of management identifying what specifically is occurring in the organization that requires training to fix it.

In conclusion, take time to identify what the end goal is and if training is needed to get there. Do your homework. Find the research or create the means to do the research to identify what specifically needs to be trained. Design the curricula around the skills that need to be trained and evaluate your efforts.