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LatitudeLearning recently partnered with Brandon Hall Group, a consulting firm in the learning arena, to deliver a webinar entitled “Extended Enterprise Learning: Has the Pandemic Changed Anything?” I joined Brandon Hall Group’s human capital management podcast for a fascinating discussion on the pandemic’s prolonged impact on the corporate learning environment.
Reflecting on this webinar with its flurry of insights, some finer points, in particular, stood out that are important to highlight:
Transition to Virtual Training on the Rise
It’s vital that you have a straightforward way to measure the impact of your training. Dealerships, networks, and partners are bringing in younger talent that requires additional training, a recurring theme only exacerbated by the pandemic.
With the onset of the pandemic, organizations quickly pivoted away from instructor-led training. In its place, alternative forms of training were adopted – primarily virtual meeting services like Zoom, WebEx, Google Meet, and more.
To the credit of many of these companies, they took advantage of every opportunity to ensure they maintained training without missing a beat. They could engage the people they needed to train, even if there were still many things they could not do in a virtual meeting environment compared to a traditional training environment.
Training Centers Feel the Brunt of Backlash from Leadership
The transition to virtual training was going so well that it set the stage for managers of these networks to ask, “Why do we need to go back to instructor-led training at all? Why do we need to spend all this money having training centers and pulling people off the shop floor for training when we need them most?”
No wonder those who provide instructor-led training feel the squeeze in multiple ways. Their jobs have become much more complicated as they are trying to deliver more with less, supporting an increasing need from partners while experiencing severe pressures from company management rapidly concerned by the cost of in-person training. These same managers might say, “I sell cars. Not train people. Why are we spending so much money on training?
In contrast, entering a Zoom session in one’s training is not very difficult. The logistics are easy.
What’s become far less easy is for an instructor-led program to prove its value, making it imperative for trainers to go far beyond providing training alone. They need critical measurement units to tie training to sales and support success.
Two vital questions can help reveal the opportunities to demonstrate training’s value and impact on the organization.
#1: WHAT UNIT DO YOU FALL UNDER AS A TRAINING ENTITY?
Does training fall under corporate HR training? Practically never. It typically falls under the product, support, or sales teams. So it’s essential to identify the structures you fall under and what the motivations are of that particular team. Wherever you fall within your organization, understand how training drives business, how it is being measured, and how you can do everything possible to optimize that connection.
If you can do that, you become an invaluable asset that helps move products and improve what teams are doing.
#2: HOW DO YOU MEASURE TRAINING EFFECTIVENESS?
If you’re measuring the number of people that have taken a course, you will need an accurate measurement of impact to report back. It’s one of the worst ways to measure training and creates an environment where you’re seen as little more than a training entity. Worse, to management, you’re seen primarily as a cost center.
The analogy is training someone to shoot a rifle. How do you measure success if you’re shooting a rifle? Does it simply come from firing 25 bullets downrange? No, because you’re not measuring whether they had a target.
Instead, as a training entity, you need to become a real business partner. Beyond knowing what your owner is striving to achieve, how they’re measuring success, and the optimal path toward that goal, you also need to understand what your dealerships need. Namely, if you are working on the product side, the mission of training should be to ensure that you are training people how to sell products.
Regarding the measurement of success, it would be best to analyze how many units are being sold and the correlation to training’s impact on those sales numbers.
Don’t be dissuaded by the sales numbers alone, however. Even if the sales numbers are incrementally small and challenging to measure, this is not the only unit of measurement of training effectiveness.
For example, are team members doing a lot of repair work? That means people are getting trained. Are they demonstrating vital metrics for repair work? Do they consistently have the right mix of parts to use? By using the metrics driven by your management, they can understand and be informed about how well your training impacts what they’re doing.
At that point in time, you won’t be a cost center. You’ll be a valued partner all the way.
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