A Harvard Business Review survey revealed that companies waste $13,500 (£10,599) per employee on ineffective training and that only 12% of employees use the knowledge they acquire on training programmes.
That means, 88% of your team and work colleagues are not taking the value from their training.
The bottom line is this: you are wasting 88% of your training budget if you do nothing to change this.
Bums on training seats (virtual or otherwise) will never be a good enough measure of training success. Being able to report high numbers of training hours in your training reports might feel like an achievement and no mean feat, but so what, if nothing changes as a result?
The challenge is transforming your team members from passive recipients of training into highly engaged learners so that they can experience skills development and behaviour changes that benefit themselves and the organisation long after the training event has ended, delivering a significant ROI rather than wasting thousands of pounds.
So how do you stop wasting your training budget and start increasing learner engagement?
Developing a learning culture will increase learner engagement. This will involve helping team members to understand the true value of learning opportunities, as well as giving them access to learning in a way that really works for them. It’s also about team members being able to see the demonstrable differences and clear outcomes of the training itself so they are more encouraged to continue their learning and apply what they learn in the workplace.
- Develop a Learning Culture
- Communicate the Value of Learning Opportunities
- Give Access to Learning That Really Works
- Help Team Members Apply What They Learn in the Workplace
- Demonstrate Clear Outcomes of Training
Glenn Fletcher, Managing Director at Tribosonics, high-tech specialists in the development and deployment of sensing solutions, saw this transformation first hand when he offered a cross-section of the organisation the opportunity to undertake Notion’s innovative online management development programme STAR® Manager.
Glenn’s primary goal was to scale up and drive forward a culture that helped everyone to be more innovative. Rather than a bums on seats approach to training, Glenn put all of the attention firmly on how each learner could contribute and easily cascade what they’d learned through the organisation.
The virtual nature of the STAR® programme meant that the team at Tribosonics were able to undertake the training at their own pace and customise their action plans around their own everyday operational activities without the lingering resentment that can occur when you take highly operational people away from their very busy jobs for training they don’t necessarily want. Glenn said:
“What the [STAR®] programme has really helped us to do is realise that you can introduce innovative training programmes into a busy team schedule and you can actually, without fear of failure, try some of those operational things in the business the very next day. It’s changed our mentality; we can do on-the-job training that isn’t necessarily [functional] skills focused. This has changed our attitude to training; it’s experiential, if you’ve got the ability and the skills and the confidence to do something and fail, then the next time we do it better and that is pure gold dust for a management development programme.”
This approach resulted in significant and measurable outcomes for the team at Tribosonics and, over a six month period, their learners developed the confidence and tools to manage incredibly complex projects in an innovative and collaborative way. One of the key features that made a real difference to learner engagement was that they were able to implement their learnings immediately in their day-to-day operations and witness the fast and tangible impact for themselves, which, Glenn said ,“synchronised beautifully with the growth stage of the business”. Glenn also reported longer-term benefits in terms of several promotions and a future plan to double staff in the next 18 months which is evidence of an increase in momentum triggered by the learning.
Maintaining learner engagement can be challenging, but when team members have access to programmes that have the flexibility to fix around their busy work schedules and which help them to deliver results that matter to them, like the team at Tribosonics achieved, they start thinking about training differently and quickly evolve into highly engaged learners. Into the bargain, when leaders of organisations see the same results, they stop wasting money on ineffective training and are far more excited about investing in developing their people.
Would you like to make sure you’re investing your training budget wisely?
How would you describe your team – passive or highly engaged learners?
What could you do to help your team to develop into more engaged learners?