Robb Gomez has been with Paradigm Learning Inc., which uses a
discovery learning approach to corporate training, since its inception in 1994.
Prior to his current position as president, Gomez was executive vice president
of sales. He worked with large clients such as McKesson, Tenneco Automotive and
HCA on strategic communications initiatives.
Q. What should companies train employees in as the economy
improves?
Anything from a training perspective that further engages the
employee in the understanding of how your organization makes money is probably
going to be valuable training. Even as the economy starts to come out of a
rather dismal year and a half, it’s still going to be important to focus in on
making the business better. We’re always going to have another downturn, and
when we have that downturn, we need to really ratchet down on how we look at
our business, how we spend the money to improve our business and all of those
other things that improve margins.
Q. How can companies determine what training to provide
employees?
It’s really just doing a survey of the organization to see
where there are gaps. That’s as easy as going out with a 10-question survey and
asking your employee base where they feel their development gap is in relation
to what the organization asks of them.
Q. How can companies monitor training?
One of the things that we profess in any of our programs is
making sure the participants in a program are truly walking away with some sort
of action plan that gets them committed to doing something different based upon
what they’ve learned. Walking away with one, two or three key behavioral things
that I’m going to do differently now that I’ve been exposed to this content —
that’s the first thing. The second thing is making sure as an organization you
then are doing constant follow-up. You want them making commitments that have
some sort of quantifiable results. At that point it becomes very, very easy to
track some sort of ROI on the training effort that you’ve put in place.
Unfortunately, many organizations don’t do a good job of it.