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In search of simplicity...
Do you sometimes bemoan the complexity and pace of work life, and yearn for the “good old days”? I have a neighbor, Jim, who grows his own vegetables, keeps chickens for eggs, and is a welder of farm equipment by trade. I think about Jim’s work and compare it to mine. (This is kind of depressing, really, until I let it inspire me.) Jim’s work goes something like this:
Prospect: “This harrow is broken.”
Jim: “Yep, it sure is.”
Prospect: “Can you fix it?”
Jim: “Yep.”
Prospect: “OK.”
I thought a lot about the simple elegance of Jim’s labors when my colleagues and I took on the challenge of helping companies get increasingly greater impact from learning investments. We stepped back and revisited a lot of our assumptions about training and training impact, and asked how we could simplify the whole issue. After a while, the fog lifted and here’s what we realized.
Training impact is really pretty simple. Training is typically never a complete bust, nor is it ever a complete success. Almost always, some trainees use their new learning on the job and accomplish some pretty worthwhile results. The rest either don’t use it at all, or try to but struggle and eventually go back to old job behaviors.
So the formula for increasing impact is quite basic: Get more people using their training more like the best people do. Training impact is all about individual behavior. Every person you can move from the “failed to use” to the “tried it and got results” category directly increases impact and ROI.
How do you get more people using the training? Again, it’s simple. Get them to believe it can work and want to try it, help them try it, and support them when they begin to make it work. Manipulating these sorts of factors means getting managers involved, not with lip service but with concrete action.
And so, this is how we go forward. First, find out how many trainees are or are not using the training, and what good it is doing when it is used. Next, find out why those who used it were able to make it work, and what got in the way of the trainees whose efforts were blocked. Based on what you find, you can then move forward to change things for the better.
Can this pay off? You bet it can. Our Advantage Way User Group friends at Ingersoll Rand recently found that just one trainee in a program used training in a way that led to more than $1.7 million in bottom-line value. They found out how that person pulled it off and what they’d need to do to get a few more people using it even a fraction that well. This is an organization hot on the trail to dramatically increased ROI.
Rob Brinkerhoff
Robert O. Brinkerhoff, EdD, is a global thought leader on training effectiveness and evaluation, and creator of The Advantage WaySM and Success Case Evaluation Method®.
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