Training: How to make it work as a real investment

In fact, the topic of managing training as an investment has long been discussed and is nothing new. Regardless of the industry or business they are operating in, leaders and human-resources practitioners alike would expect to see ways to get better results from training investment.

Some of you might think that this article is just a rehash of an old story, as various gurus have written on this subject with so many best-selling books.

For example, we all know about American academic Donald Kirkpatrick’s “four levels of learning evaluation” arguing the “ROI of Training”. However, many years have passed and we can still see ourselves in an ongoing debate about how actually to evaluate training programmes and their return on investment.

What’s worse, we can still see that many are struggling only to find out that the training courses they selected did not yield the expected results compared with the effort and the money spent on them. The courses did not change their people’s behaviour or their capabilities.

What went wrong?

Some people have been trying to fill in the gap by opting for pre- and post-testing for training evaluation, which they assume could help HR staff realise the importance of that training – whether it can truly develop their people’s capability levels and change their behaviour.

But the problem with this method is that it tends to overlook the fact that they are dealing with people. When they simply set up the system to evaluate matters concerning people just like the ones used with machines, it is not viable.

Rather, we must remind ourselves that there are such factors as mindset, environment, culture, motivation and leadership. They come together in creating a bigger picture to make people feel like wanting to develop themselves in line with the organisation’s goals.

Here, I’ve proposed a few questions as guidelines to see the gap your organisations are having in conducting a training programme that returns on its investment.

l In conducting training programmes, do you know what the actual needs of the training are and who should be the target group of each training?

l What methodology do you use to find the answers to the above questions? Does this methodology determine the organisation’s actual needs?

l Are the executives, leaders, supervisors and staff given the opportunity to learn the motive or reasons behind the training?

l How well do management and executives support these training efforts?

l Do the staff attending the training sessions see the importance and understand the reason for the training? Or do they just attend the training as assigned?

l Do the staff attending the training get the opportunity to use what they learned in their everyday job? We all know that only 10 per cent of things learned during training is retained once back in the office.

l And if they are able to apply it at work, is there continuity in transforming training to learning?

l Do the leaders even know what training topics their staff have taken and how they help support their applications at the staff’s workplace?

l What kind of system/mechanism/culture does the organisation have in place to help staff increase their capabilities as expected?

l What can staff expect to receive from the organisation if they can increase their capability levels? What’s in it for them?

If you don’t have the answers to these questions, I doubt that the training programme you are investing in is worth your budget, let alone your time.

In today’s world, an organisation doesn’t want to have merely "learners as learners", like school or university students who study just to pass exams. Organisations need learners who have been trained to produce results for the business.

Of course, there are many factors to consider here. But if you can develop people with improved capabilities and a positive change in their behaviour that could last for your future organisational success, wouldn’t you want to invest in training?

Shouldn’t you want your training to build good students or skilled practitioners? How do you want to make it work? These are the questions you need to ask yourself today.

Prapairat Pavasant is a strategic business development director at APM Group, Thailand’s leading organisation and people development consulting company. You can contact her at [email protected] or www.facebook.com/apmgroupthai.