Realising the value of "training"...

Been on a training programme recently? Was it worth it? Did you apply the learning principles and start seeing a difference in your pipeline and won business? Welcome to "time to value", which is how you capture your return on investment from training. Most businesses will not realise the time to value until several months or years after the training intervention, if at all - longer we leave it, longer we cannot correlate whether the training made a difference at all. Of course, this does not mean that we did not benefit - after all we learnt something new, (or hopefully we did!) which is a benefit in itself as it furthered our knowledge though did we apply this learning to the benefit of the business? Learning is one thing, application is another, getting results is quite another. The cynicism behind training is often well placed when we have no plan to set time aside to think through how we could brainstorm, test and experiment with implementing some of the new ideas learnt. If we don’t get into the practice of operationalising our learning, we may find we are heading for disaster…we may find our businesses getting squeezed financially, our people demotivated and longing to move out, products/services becoming commoditised/ uninspiring. In essence our businesses may lack a future. As a training provider, it is frustrating not being able to see how delegates apply the learning from their training programmes. As a result, we have put into place 3/6/9/12 month training reviews to see how training programmes have made a difference. Nowadays, I call this the “time to business value review” and involves delegates reviewing constantly the new practices they have put into place and measuring the results they have achieved from both a financial and non-financial standpoint. My advice is simple…measuring the impact/return on investment both financially and non-financially of any training programme is essential and training companies need to be held to account after programmes have concluded. It is my hope that you choose your training provider carefully and be clear on what you want to achieve and review this constantly after the training event with your people and training provider.