Corporate training positions your company for future growth

Open your wallet

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

Do you want to keep your top employees after the job marketopens again? Do you want all of your employees to be happy and to enjoy theirwork right now? Investing in training and education is an important part ofhelping you do just that. The average business spends about $1,060 on trainingand education per employee per year, according to research by ASTD.

“That’s an average, not a recommendation,” Galagan says. “Inthat pool of companies, some are large, some are small, some are government,some are private.”

There are also effective ways to spend a little less, ifyour 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 foryour employees is often less expensive than sending them to open enrollmentcourses, as are distance learning and online courses. Some businesses opt tolook within for employees who are experts in a specific area and can train therest of the staff.

“We often talk about the blended learning, but some of thebest training is provided by direct supervisors on an ongoing b
as
is,” Nunnsays. “Work-based learning doesn’t have to take three hours out of our day togo over to a classroom.

“You build skills as you tackle real problems and get realresults that are used in the course of the business.”

Keep an eye on results

At last, an answer for our corporate training firm and ourtechnology company in the Midwest. That previous training session, as it turnedout, was not to blame for lower sales numbers. No, the culprit was instead thefact that the technology company executives had recently installed a drasticrestructure of the compensation program. That program encouraged the sales team to try and sell only one of theirmany products, and that is whatchanged everything.

The training had not been the problem at all.

In fact, without that recent training session, the technologybusiness might have planted itself in more trouble because of the new structureof the compensation program. The best money spent might well have been themoney spent on the training — and the worst might have been the money that wasabout to have been spent unnecessarily correcting that training.

“You can create dashboard indicators.” Nunn says. “If you’veidentified that there’s a process within your business that needs improvement,you want to make sure that training intervention is helping that processimprovement.

“Everything we do in training should impact the bottom linewith respect to productivity as measured in either revenue or sales or somespecific process we can drill down into.”

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 theprogress from the planning stages through the training itself, then during themonths, even years, beyond.

“We know that organizations that are not learningorganizations are losing ground every day,” Nunn says. “It’s just modernbusiness. Things change so fast, companies that are not investing into thelearning environment and creating a learning culture are not able to keeppace.”