“CREATING THE PLAN”

Today many corporations are either developing for themselves and/or looking for support from a vendor in order to address their specific training needs.

If you choose the latter route, you need to choose a vendor that will listen, be able to understand what you want to achieve, and then work with your organization in order to design and/or implement a training program that will meet your objectives.

The key to any successful training initiative is to make it an integral part of your organization’s business objectives. Successful companies map out a training plan that coordinates training with their corporate goals. This kind of up-front planning helps ensure that your investment in training will deliver measurable results.

It is critical to focus training where it will have the greatest effect on performance. Using needs assessment and task analysis techniques, you can identify the greatest opportunities to improve performance through training.

Today, rich on-line skills assessment tests are readily available which will help you specifically target the “learning gaps,” making it possible for you to eliminate much of the waste in traditional training regimen. By specifically targeting time-spent-in-classroom, much labor cost waste can be eliminated.

But, in order to be successful, a training plan must become a solution that can be implemented within the existing structures of your organization. From broad decisions, such as curriculum design or the integration of new technology, to details such as staffing, scheduling and equipping the learning environment, your task is to transform the training plan into a smoothly functioning reality.

The bottom line is that you may have to design a training system from the ground up — or, you may choose to partner with the necessary expertise in order to make your existing system more effective.