Corporate training positions your company for future growth

Open your wallet

Those members of the corporate training firm remained in the
offices for a couple of days. They wanted to follow every lead and turn over
every stone. They wanted to find out what had happened to the sales team after
that apparently disastrous training and development session. And the technology
company executives had no problem paying to keep them around. They wanted to
find out what happened, too.

Do you want to keep your top employees after the job market
opens again? Do you want all of your employees to be happy and to enjoy their
work right now? Investing in training and education is an important part of
helping you do just that. The average business spends about $1,060 on training
and education per employee per year, according to research by ASTD, the world’s
largest professional associated dedicated to the training and development field.

Businesses that have the most success tend to spend between 2
and 3 percent of their total payroll cost on training, education and
development. The average is in the middle, of course, right around 2.3 percent.

There are also effective ways to spend a little less, if your
revenue is still down or if you opt to not invest as much in training. Turning
toward local colleges and universities to design a custom program for your
employees is often less expensive than sending them to open enrollment courses,
as are distance learning and online courses. Some businesses opt to look within
for employees who are experts in a specific area and can train the rest of the
staff.

“A lot of organizations certainly should consider the local
universities and colleges, maybe rather than the big national training
organizations,” Lane says. “We’re cost-effective, local and can customize
programs. I think there are often opportunities to provide blended approaches
to training and development — some of it may be a stand-up delivery and another
part of it may be online. And there are options for training internally.”

Keep an eye on results

At last, an answer for our corporate training firm and our
technology company in the Midwest. That previous training session, as it turned
out, was not to blame for lower sales numbers. No, the culprit was instead the
fact that the technology company executives had recently installed a drastic
restructure of the compensation program. That program encouraged the sales team to try and sell only one of their
many products, and that is what
changed everything.

The training had not been the problem at all.

In fact, without that recent training session, the technology
business might have planted itself in more trouble because of the new structure
of the compensation program. The best money spent might well have been the
money spent on the training — and the worst might have been the money that was
about to have been spent unnecessarily correcting that training.

“You can do everything from a more formalized needs assessment,
where you conduct focus groups, talk with managers and employees, and develop a
full survey that provides a comprehensive view of the needs that would go out
to all employees, to conducting internal meetings with managers and listening
to what skills gaps they have noticed,” Lane says.

The only way to know where you are is to know where you were.
In order to receive a more relevant return on your investment, watch the
progress from the planning stages through the training itself, then during the
months, even years, beyond.

“Every organization can buy the same equipment, put in the same
systems and set up the same processes,” Lane says. “But it’s the people who
make those processes go faster and create the innovation. People compete on the
level you need.”