In 2013, more than £40 billion was spent on employee training; about £2,500 for each person. While this may seem like a lot of money, these numbers represent a 17% decline from two years before. Of those figures, £18 billion went for off-the-job, off-site courses, equipment, travel and subsistence.

The question that you must ask is this: Is such training productive or unproductive? Does it make your organization run better or not? Does it make any difference whatsoever?

Those who provide the training, of course, will defend to the death – their death – the value of what they do; after all, their livelihood depends up it. And if you agree with them without doing anything else, then you deserve the unproductive training that you’re likely to get because it has your tacit approval.

How can you make sure that the training you send your staff on actually makes a difference to your organization? How can you ensure that what they learn makes them more productive? How can you avoid the high cost of unproductive training? That’s what this article is about.

Know what you want beforehand

It’s been said that if you don’t aim for anything, then you’ll get it. Same thing is true here. You have to decide in advance what you want the training to accomplish before you send anyone on it. Usually this means that you have a problem that needs to be solved. It could be an industry requirement, or the desire to develop a new skill, or the need to overcome some interpersonal complications. Whatever it is, you need to identify in advance why you’re sending someone on a course or to a workshop.

Identify what success looks like

The next thing you have to do before you agree to send someone for training is to identify what success will look like. A lot of people fall down here. They don’t know. They see the problem and they want it to go away, but they don’t know what it will look like when it does. They’re a bit vague about that.

Listen. If you’re vague on what success looks like, then you’ll get a vague solution. In fact, it won’t look like a solution at all. That’s because almost anything will seem different. Not necessarily better; just different. Trainers will promise you some improvement, but since you won’t know what it looks like, you won’t be able to do the next step.

Decide how you will evaluate success

This is not the same thing as identifying what success will look like. Instead it’s about understanding the extent to which you got what you wanted.

For example, suppose that you want to send someone on a course so that they can learn some efficient ways to deliver products to your customers. If that person learns only one way, then the training will have been a success; but you see that’s not really enough. Maybe that way is impractical or too expensive. The point of the course is so that the person will be able to implement one or more solutions that will actually make deliveries efficient. That’s the goal. So you have to decide what constitutes efficiency. Is it 1%, 5% or 10%? You have to be specific about these things.

High cost of unproductive training

There’s a huge cost involved in failing to do these three steps. If you don’t know what you want, you certainly won’t get it. If you don’t know what it will look like, then you won’t recognize it even if it’s staring you in the face. And if you don’t know how to evaluate what you do get, then you won’t even know if you broke even on the cost of the training.

How long do you think you would remain profitable if you approached your business like this?

Each part of your organization, including those who spend money for training and development, has to account for every penny that’s spent. You have to treat them like cost centres.

If you insist on these three things from the outset, then you’re much more likely to get the ROI that you want. If you don’t, then the high cost of unproductive training will be your responsibility, and you’ll have no one else to blame.

If you want to know how to improve the ROI from your training – contact us here