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.

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.

“This is a good time to begin thinking seriously about it,”
Margulies says. “Now is the time to ready yourself for the upswing, because the
upswing is coming. I can’t tell you that it’s coming in 2011 or 2012, but you
know it’s coming. Here’s the opportunity for you to help develop your internal
talent so that you’re ready. Whatever you want to do, how do you ready your
folks for that?”

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.

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.

“The larger macroeconomic trends are both in
favor of and against training, paradoxically,” Levenson says. “The argument
against is that, when you have such high unemployment, it should be easier to
reach outside the organization and buy the capabilities you need in the
external markets. The argument in favor is that it almost doesn’t matter what
happens in the external market, that by investing in training, you’re showing
them you are investing in them, that this is a shared destiny for the
organization and the individual.”