Workplace training and development, while often used together, actually refers to two specific sets of activities. Training often means the planned activities that are related to providing skills and knowledge as it relates to a person's current role. Development occurs when these activities go beyond their current role requirements and begin to focus on preparing the employee for additional scope and responsibility.

Organizational training and development programs may include:

• Workshops (in-house or externally provided)
• Academic courses partnered with educational institutions
• On-the-job training
• Attending conferences
• Computer or web-based programs (e-learning)
• Individual coaching and counseling
• Mentorship program where senior staff mentor junior staff
• Job rotation and cross training

Types of Training to Boost Your Competitive Edge

https://www.alis.gov.ab.ca/pdf/cshop/SkillsDesign.pdf

In today's competitive marketplace, creating a learning culture is not a “nice to have” it is absolutely a “must have.” This is achieved when an organization considers staff training and development to be an essential investment. Their ability to tap into the human capacity, creativity and innovation of staff is not only profitable, but it is paramount to their success.

• Increased job satisfaction through higher motivation levels of staff
• Increased productivity
• Improved safety awareness and performance
• Increased creativity and innovation amongst staff
• Increased employee retention due to higher job satisfaction
• Opportunity to promote from within the organization
• Attracting and retaining competent and creative talent, especially younger people who expect to be trained and developed, and exposed to new opportunities for growth

(Conference Board of Canada & Canadian Council on Learning)

http://www.workforce.com/section/11/article/23/95/44.html

The needs for training may result from:

• lack of basic skills
• legislation requirements/changes
• poor performance
• new jobs
• new employees
• customer requests/complaints
• new technology
• higher performance standards

If you are trying to determine if training is the likely solution to a performance problem, you must assess whether:

• The performance problem is important and has the potential to cost the company a significant amount of money from lost productivity or customers
• Employees do not know how to perform effectively. This may be due to little or no previous training or the training was ineffective.
• Employees cannot demonstrate the correct knowledge or behaviour. Employees were trained but they infrequently or never used the training content (knowledge, skills, etc.) on the job.
• Performance expectations are clear and there are no obstacles to performance such as faulty tools or equipment
• There are positive consequences for good performance, while poor performance is not rewarded.
• Employees receive timely, relevant, accurate, constructive, and specific feedback about their performance
• Other solutions such as job redesign or transferring employees to other jobs are too expensive or unrealistic.

Training: Knowing When to Use it

Any training you provide must align with your business needs - these should be clear from your business plan. Make sure you've conducted a training needs analysis or assessment before embarking on any training - this, as well as consultations with your staff, should form the basis of your decisions about what training is appropriate.

A needs assessment, refers to the process used to determine if training is necessary. A needs assessment typically involves organizational analysis, person analysis and task analysis.

Organizational analysis involves determining the appropriateness of training, given the company's business strategy, its resources available for training, and support by managers and peers for training activities.

Person analysis involves:

• determining whether performance deficiencies result from a lack of knowledge, skill, or ability (a training issue), or from a motivational or work-design problem,
• identifying who needs training, and
• determining employees' readiness for training.

Task analysis includes identifying the important tasks and knowledge, skill, and behaviours that need to be emphasized in training for employees to complete their tasks.

http://canadabusiness.ic.gc.ca/servlet/ContentServer?cid=1081945276519&lang=en&pagename=CBSC_ON%2Fdisplay&c=GuideFactSheet

It is necessary to identify whether your company has the budget, time, resources and expertise for the training required. This can impact your choice of an internal versus external program.

For instance, if training is required on equipment specific to your organization, you may be wise to select a SME (subject matter expert) to facilitate the learning in-house and customize it to your needs.

If you choose to train in-house, you can purchase “train-the-trainer” programs and have an employee learn how to facilitate them internally. There are many training companies that offer these types of services.

If you “google” corporate training, a list of 25 million sites are matched which is overwhelming to say the least.

We are a proponent of supporting local business therefore choosing a provider in the London area would be optimal. Training providers may offer public workshops, customized programs or both.

The University of Western Ontario, Fanshawe College, along with the various colleges in the London area provide both established and customized programs.

http://www.uwo.ca

http://www.uwo.ca/cstudies/

http://www.fanshawec.ca

http://www.fanshawec.ca/EN/ce/default.asp

Also, many professional associations in London & area provide both established and/or customized programs, or a directory of professionals in your area. Some of these professional associations include:

http://www.iapa.ca

http://www.cstd.ca

http://www.hrpld.ca

Lastly there are many consultants in the London area who specialize in the area of training design, development, and delivery.

Yes. Soft skills compliment hard skills which are the technical requirements of the job. Soft skills training can be targeted at awareness of strengths, limitations, ways to be more effective, and learning new ways to maximize an employee's existing set of soft skills.

Soft Skills include:

• Personality characteristics: character, ethics, and attitudes.
• Interpersonal skills: such as written and verbal communication, sales and presentation skills, and leadership skills.
• Time and resource management skills: including drive, focus, decision making, planning, execution, dealing with task overload as well as self and team evaluation and improvement.

Businesses need professionals who are able to interact with other departments and to communicate effectively with outside organizations. They need people who are self starters, plan, execute, adapt to change and learn from their experiences. They need people who can manage resources and time and bring projects in successfully and on time in spite of obstacles, deadlines and various external pressures.

Training programs that emphasize personal and professional effectiveness provide a strategy for organizations to prosper and succeed in this era of technological advance. Soft skills represent a fundamental attribute that today's knowledge based economy is demanding of its employers, employees and businesses.

The major issue surrounding soft skills can be the difficulty putting in place appropriate evaluation to measure a change in behaviour, and in measuring the return on investment, as they are not as easily measured as hard skills.

Training programs, especially those in the area of “Emotional Intelligence” can be of great value to all employees.

Informal learning occurs through day to day interaction with others and not through structured events by an employer or a trainer. In other words, what people learn on the job from others.

Examples of informal learning include:

• Mentoring people in entry or mid level positions
• Job shadowing
• Appointing someone to an “acting” position to gain additional knowledge, skills and experience
• Exposure to special projects or workplace committees

Although not well tracked or monitored, approximately 42% of learning occurs informally (Conference Board of Canada L&D Outlook 2007). Many companies, however, focus only on formal learning programs, losing valuable opportunities and outcomes. To truly understand the learning in your organization you might want to recognize the informal learning already taking place and put practices in place to cultivate and capture more of what people learn. This includes strategies for improving learning opportunities for everyone and tactics for managing and sharing what they know.

The reason why informal learning is becoming so popular relate to immediacy and relevancy. Informal methods of learning are often found in the work environment as they are seen as techniques that a learner can take advantage of right away and with immediate application to their job and in a self-directed manner.

http://www.wilm.ca

This is a free and easy to administer tool that measures informal learning in the workplace. The skills that the WILM measures are those that most people feel they have acquired in the workplace while on the job, and not through formal training. The WILM is a tool, not a test.

Matrices are provided and employees self assess their level of competency in each of the eight categories including: oral communication, problem solving, decision making, learning skills, working with others, leadership, workplace culture, and diversity.

The biggest barrier to the transfer of learning following training is the lack of reinforcement on the job for the newly acquired skills and abilities. Direct supervisors play a significant role because employees expect their support and encouragement to help them apply their learning on the job.

Post-training strategies include:

• Meet with trainee immediately after the program in order to debrief them to discover what took place, identify mutually foreseen barriers to transfer, and begin to explore possibilities for use of the training material
• One on one meetings that provide psychological support “Tell me what I can do to help you apply what you have learned.”
• Encourage their commitment to behavioural change from within themselves rather than being asked to do so by you.
• Provide trainees with a reality check that acknowledges there will be difficulties and frustrations that impact the transfer of their learning and that you are there to support them
• Providing actual opportunities for application by assigning trainees to the kinds of jobs, tasks or special projects that will not only give them a change to use what they learned but actually require them to apply it.
• Reduce job pressures initially to give the trainee a period of time to experiment and get up to speed and to take time to solidify new patterns of behaviour
• Mechanisms for review and refreshers of the material periodically
• Making available and using reminder devices and job aids
• Making role models available in their supervisor or with another more experienced employee who provides them with on the job guidance and immediate correction if necessary
• Offering positive reinforcement for successful progress

Developing ROI for training requires a key modification of Donald Kirkpatrick's model of evaluation (levels 1-4) because his does not focus directly on the ROI issue. To obtain a true ROI evaluation, the monetary benefits of the program should be compared to the cost of implementation in order to value the investment.

Dr. Jack Phillips is a renowned expert on measurement and evaluation and he has developed what some call "level 5" to Kirkpatrick's model called Return on Investment or ROI Methodology. His level 5 is developed by collecting level 4 data, converting the data to monetary values, and comparing them to the cost of the program in order to represent the return on training investment. When the ROI formula is developed, evaluation is conducted at all five levels.

Calculating the ROI requires a detailed process in order to utilize a formula. The formula is the annual net program benefits divided by program costs, where the net benefits are the monetary value of the benefits minus the costs of the program. This model also recognizes there should be intangible benefits that will be presented along with the ROI calculation.

ROI (%) = Benefits – Costs x 100 / Costs

For additional information about evaluation and return on investment consider:

• Evaluating Training Programs, consider Donald Kirkpatrick's book: Evaluating Training Programs (3rd Edition). It is a how to book designed for practitioners who plan to implement and evaluate training programs (levels 1-4).
• Jack Phillip's Return on Investment may be obtained through the ROI Institute at: http://www.roiinstitute.net or in books: Return on Investment in Training and Performance Improvement; Managing Retention, The Project Management Scorecard and How to Manage Training Results.
• Canadian Society for Training and Development at http://www.cstd.ca/investing_in_people/tools.html

There are two training evaluation instruments that are being used in the ROI studies that are available at no cost to you, including the

• Immediate Impact Questionnaire
• Job Impact Questionnaire