Dive Brief:
- Many employers will embark on new employee training programs this fall, but much of this training is, unfortunately, worthless, according to an article at Forbes.
- For example, McKinsey & Co. found that only 25% of respondents to a 2010 survey found that training improved employees’ performance.
- The biggest problem: managers have no strategic focus to training. Christo Popov, CEO and founder of FastTrack, writes that employers don’t train employees in the skills most critical to the business’s stage of development, send the wrong people to the training, over-train them and spend too little time on implementation.
Dive Insight:
So how does Popov propose to fix these serious problems?
Employers must "plan first, train later," he says. That means employers must have a clear strategy and execution plan in place. The strategy should clearly articulate three to five core skills and competencies and three to five key activities that will make execution possible. Training should then focus on these skills and competencies.
People attending the training should be those responsible for acting on it. If they won’t be on the front lines using it, they shouldn’t be there because they won’t be sufficiently invested in absorbing what is being taught, he says.
He offers several other strategies in the article, but he concludes by bluntly saying that at the end of the day the question to ask is: "Will the training change the way we do stuff around here? If not, don’t waste your time and money. Take your team to the movies instead."
