Our staff have expressed interest in receiving more training in areas that are core skills for their jobs. However, when we’ve sent people to workshops or courses in the past, they usually haven’t come back and implemented any of their new learning – at least not in the long run. They just return to their same old way of doing things. How can we help to make sure that our training budget is being put to good use and that people are implementing their new learning?

Here’s an issue that’s been with us for a long time. Usually called ‘transfer of training’, it speaks to the all too frequent phenomenon of what trainers refer to as ‘extinguishing’: people receive training but don’t use any of what they learned when they are back on the job.

One way to begin to combat this is to position training as an investment, not a cost. With an investment, you’re looking for a positive return. When the investment matures, something is measurably better than it was before the investment was made. In other words, something changed. When nobody applies new skills on the job, that’s a negative return. Nothing changed. In cost/benefit terms, it’s all cost, no benefit.

Here are some ways to manage training like an investment:

1. Training events happen in response to business needs

This means that employees need to acquire skills that they don’t currently have in order for the organization or the unit to meet a goal. For example, they may need to learn how to use new software in order to be more accurate in their work. To ensure transfer, disable the old software while they’re being trained and install the new software.

I was once asked by a manager to provide time management training for all fifty of his employees. When I inquired as to the problem, he said: ‘There’s no problem, but everybody can get better.’ In cost/benefit terms, he wasn’t even trying to identify a benefit. There was no business need.

2. The training event equips learners with skills, and not just knowledge

Who would you want on your baseball team? Someone who can describe the aerodynamics of a curve ball, but can’t throw it, or someone who can throw a curve ball for strikes but can’t explain the physics behind it?

Trainees who don’t practice the new skills that they learn about during training won’t practice them on the job either, because they never acquired them in the first place. Care is needed to ensure that just because an event is labelled ‘training’, it’s not just somebody lecturing with slides while the trainees sit and listen. Sitting and listening are presumably not the new skills that they need, but it’s what they’re practicing during training. They’ll never do anything different on the job, because they never learned how.

People almost always need to learn something new before they do something new. But if the doing part is omitted during ‘training’, then really no training occurred. Learning happened, but training didn’t. Your pitcher knows about pitching, but can’t pitch.

If I showed you a video of someone changing a tire on a car, and then declared that you were trained in tire changing, you’d just laugh because you had no practice, right? The same applies to any kind of training. No practice, no change.

3. Supervisors support the application of the new skills

For this to happen, supervisors need to do more than send their employees on courses. If that’s the extent of their involvement, it’s unlikely that they even know what their people are learning how to do. It’s also unlikely that the training is in response to a business need. If there’s no need for change, there’s no need for training.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m using the word ‘training’ narrowly to mean the acquisition of skills by employees who need those skills in order to get their work done. Good for you for noticing that. I don’t mean watching a video, or a Powerpoint presentation, or listening to a motivational speech, or a weekend retreat by the ocean, even though all those events usually get charged to the ‘training’ line on the budget. So to get more out of your training budget, be sure that it’s being spent on actual training that can give you a positive return on the investment.

I’ve got nothing against employee development, but development isn’t the same as training. Development is about preparing an employee for a future role that may not even have been identified yet. Training is about learning how to do your current job skillfully.

If employees know that their supervisors expect them to use the skills that they acquire during training, that alone is the biggest incentive for them to apply them, and for you to realize a good return on your training investment. Supervisors then need to support the continued application by coaching and giving feedback on how well the skills are being used.

Now, back to the question at the top of this column. There are two things that ought to happen before training occurs:

1. Find out why people are looking for training on their core skills. If they’re asking for training, they’ve identified a need for something to change. What you don’t know at this point is whether the desired change can be addressed successfully through new knowledge and skills. There may be something else motivating the request that training can’t address.
2. If it turns out that there are knowledge and skill deficiencies that need to be addressed (in other words, there really is a training need), and you’re truly talking about core responsibilities, you might consider on-the-job training rather than sending people to an external event. On-the-job training uses less budget than any other form of training, and it occurs right in the workplace where the job conditions are simulated more closely than any outside training can do.

To submit a question for a future column, or to comment on a previous one, please contact editor@charityvillage.com. No identifying information will appear in this column.

Tim Rutledge, Ph.D., is a veteran human resources consultant and publisher of Mattanie Press. You can contact him at tim_rutledge@sympatico.ca.

Disclaimer: Advice and recommendations are based on limited information provided and should be used as a guideline only. Neither the author nor CharityVillage.com make any warranty, express or implied, or assume any legal liability for accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information provided in whole or in part within this article.