Corporate
Knowledge

Training

Why Do Companies Have Difficulty with Training?

In most companies, the biggest problem with training is that it eventually fails. There may be several causes for this:

No training done at all: Frequently, any "training" done is on-the-job training. Depending on who the "instructor" is, the student may get a decent education. Most often, however, the original instructor was never trained and has only his "think" on what the training should cover.
Generic training: Training isn't specific to the job. The student may get "training" on Accounts Receivable, the training doesn't address the company's AR, so he keeps wondering how to apply this information.
Incomplete training: The student gets shown what to do. Usually this is a cookbook or recipe set of instructions. If there's any variation at all, he's totally lost.
Wrong kind of training: The student gets training on something, but never had any orientation to the area; this generally results in incomplete training.
Training wasn't retained: The company trained 1,300 people on the new system, starting 60 days before the "go live" implementation. Well, the implementation gets pushed out another couple months and there are major changes in the way the system behaves. There is usually no training system available at all in the initial training, and there's "no time" to re-train the people. This results in incomplete training and wrong kind of training.
New personnel didn't get the training: No training done at all - the vicious circle.

Formal training, if done at all, usually rests in a single department. The trainers there are usually too few and too overworked. Which departments get cut at the beginning of any "re-sizing" or "right-sizing"? Yes, it's documentation and training.

In many systems and applications training, the documentation (training) gets done, if at all, by the programmers (MIS) who programmed or implemented the system. Ask your MIS department people how they like doing the documentation and check out how well it was done. Usually, it's a case of "here's the system, we did our part".

Training Methodologies

Fundamentals of Learning and Training

People actually all learn in basically the same way. They get data (facts), which they build into knowledge, which becomes understanding that can be applied. How do they do that?

Types of Training

Training usually gets all lumped together into one generic "train the people". This really is a grave over-simplification; there are many different types of training.

Training Target Media

How the company delivers the training really determines how it is constructed. This has to be part of the initial training design.