Categories

Subscribe to My Feed   Follow Me On Twitter   Join Me On LinkedIn   Friend Me On Facebook

When Your Training Programs are Not Excelling – Part I

Background Information

One of Abudi Consulting Group’s (ACG) newest clients has been developing and running their own training program for the last eight years. Early on, all was going well. Programs met the needs of employees and managers supported attendance in the workshops. Over the years, a few more programs were added. However, over the past 3 years, attendance has been dropping fairly considerably. Managers no longer encourage employees to attend workshops and, in fact, some managers seem to promote external training over taking the internal workshops.

An employee survey about training indicated that training programs were not very engagement and didn’t help employees in their jobs. A number of employees commented that they couldn’t utilize the training they got back on the jobs. What they learned just didn’t seem “usable.”

Human resources leadership reached out to ACG to discuss the situation and to determine next steps and set a plan to move forward determining what should be done with internal training programs. This was done due to a directive from senior leadership for HR to “fix the problem” if they were going to continue to offer training to employees.

Our First Meeting

During our first working meeting with the client (specifically five HR professionals and leaders) we collaborated on areas to explore further. These areas would enable for us to develop a plan collaboratively with the client to determine how training should look within the company.

The areas where further information was needed included:

  • What is the plan for the organization over the next 3, 5 and 10 + years (strategy)?
  • Based on the organizational strategy, what are short-term and long-term workforce needs (skills, competencies, roles)?
  • What challenges do employees currently face in fulfilling their roles and responsibilities?
  • What is the perspective of supervisors and managers as it relates to training needs, meeting organizational goals and managing challenges ahead?

HR leadership would follow up with senior leaders to get further details on the organizational strategy and workforce needs.

ACG would develop a combination of surveys and interviews with employees and supervisors/managers in order to understand more about challenges and training needs.

Part 2 of this article will focus on the initial data gathered.

Comments are closed.