This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 6:28 am by Dawn and is filed under Industry talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
“We are clearly on the edge of a recession.” – Alan Greenspan
I followed this article last Thursday with another that very effectively argues how corporate training is viewed by most executives as simply a cost to the business. A function that clearly fails to present a business model that can justify its existence.
The sum of these parts - a looming recession plus a perceived cost center - doesn’t bode well for training organizations.
But how did it get to this point? Doesn’t every best-in-class company claim that its greatest asset is its people? And isn’t corporate training responsible for the development of this human capital? It seems to me that the contribution of training should be obvious to the long-term success of a business. But it’s not.
I’m a financial analyst by training, so I look for a solution to corporate training’s problem through the lens of other functions within the organization. Functions whose value propositions are well understood in every enterprise
Procurement vs. Training
I have a Mac at home and I love it. In many ways, I feel that it has changed my life. Would I love a Mac at work? You bet! Sadly though, I haven’t run across a corporate procurement department willing to issue me one. They have this strict rule about investing only in the level of hardware necessary for an employee to perform his/her job most effectively.
On the other hand, when I view corporate Web training courses, it becomes clear that no amount of time and expense has been spared to create this flashy, eye-catching web course. It’s like the Mac of on-line courses. Could I have learned just as much without the Flash music video or Prada-grade design? Probably, and it depends on the topic, but it wouldn’t have seemed as impressive.
When times are lean, corporate attitudes trend further towards substance over style. You’re better off trying to wow them with decreased turnover costs and increased productivity than with graphical sophistication.
Finance & Accounting vs. Training
You know I’ll be honest here and admit that I find nothing terribly exciting about internal controls. But you know what? A funny thing happened on the road to compliance. All of these strict rules and procedures not only brought consistency and integrity to the finance organization, they enabled a set of best practices that had a direct and real impact on the bottom line. Is it any wonder that the next step on the corporate latter for many CFOs is CEO?
Training is not bound by such restrictions. Eight years ago, monolithic, instructor-led training was all the rage. Today it’s e-learning. And training is wasting no time re-creating their plethora of legacy print content for the Web. Sounds like a good plan. That is until tomorrow’s tools come around and all that legacy e-learning content has to be re-created yet again. That should have a real – and negative – impact on the bottom line.
Understanding the full cost of content during its lifecycle and being rigorous about measuring the value you bring to other departments communicates that training is a full partner committed to helping the company meet its business goals.
Operations vs. Training
When I was doing financial analysis, it was for a large manufacturing company. And you know what I discovered? Operations rules. From inventory management to re-engineering, operations were who the organization looked to for delivering obvious and permanent cost-cutting results.
I read Bryan Chapman’s blog the other day and he reported that it typically takes 34 hours of work to create one hour of instructor-led training. The real shocker here is that it often takes an additional 33 hours simply to convert the PowerPoint slides from this same training into e-learning.
Training stands on its pulpit proclaiming the virtues of blended learning. Yet if the raw task of translating a message to another medium takes as much time as creating the message in the first place, the C-suite crew is going to lose that religion real fast.
In summary:
Be more like procurement: justify your expenditures for course development.
Be more like finance: police yourselves through future-proof content and reporting policies combined with best practices for generating content.
Be more like operations: put systematic and repeatable processes in place that produce sustainable cost-cutting.
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