Turning Learning into Profit

I have recently connected on Twitter with Dr Ed Holton who is a professor of HR in the States. This led me to his blog, in which he argues passionately for more attention to be paid to how learners in the workplace transfer the benefits of their new skills so that they and their employers can benefit from it.

I think the problem is with the whole concept of training. 

What the organisation needs from its staff is changed behaviours, and what the staff need is more engagement with and fulfilment from their jobs.  Asking the question "How can we transfer learning from the workshop to the workplace" could be taken to imply that there is nothing that needs to change about what actually happens in the seminar room. In which case all we need for focus on is how to make teh trasnfer of learning happen.

Well, I think we all knows what comes next!

You'd think the Human Resources departments woudl be focused on the word "human". Many of course do, but sadly we often encounter the mechanistic approach in such departments. In short:

"Thank you for attending the training course on XYZ. You will be contacted in 4 weeks time to evaluate the amount you learned and the extent tow hich you have trasnferred your learning to the workplace. Your next 3 quarterly appraisal meetings with your manager will have (yet another) form to fill in assessing the extent of application of learning. Keeping your job after the next round of redundancies will be partly dependent upon your completing a detailed record of acheivement demonstrating the times and situations when you applied the learning and evaluating the financial benefit to the company."

Crazy? Well, yes, because I made it up and I tend to exaggerate, as you know.

What we actually need is a shift to what many of us are trying to do, which is to move away from training as an event and towards development as an ongoing relationship between a team and the trainer.

I work with teams over a period of time, in short sessions with lots of contact between sessions in a combination of face-to-face, email, telephone, and Moodle. In each session, learners are coming back knowing they are accountable to the rest of the group to verbally report back on applications of learning. Spread over time this becomes a habit and the team can take over where I leave off.

The downside for HR departments is that it is more complex to purchase and manage an ongoing development programme than to send employees on a "sheep dip" training course, make them fill in forms, then complain that senior management don't appreciate the value of training.

As training consultants then, I guess it's our responsibility to make the purchasing and management of longer-term ongoing team development programmes easier and even more transparent.

All the best,

Dave Bull
Team Coaching Network Ltd - http://www.teamcoachingnetwork.com