Training Industry Magazine - September/October 2020 - 23

A vice president (VP) approached her
saying that he needed an innovative
training experience for his frontline
salespeople, specifically a virtual reality
(VR) experience. When she asked how he
determined a VR solution was needed,
the VP casually provided anecdotal
evidence to illustrate the need. Emily
agreed to do some research into VR
training for sales reps but asked the VP
to come back with reliable evidence to
demonstrate the existing need, so that
both teams could identify the direct
business impact of the training through
evaluation later on.

JUST-IN-TIME
RESOURCES
AND TRAINING
REINFORCEMENT
HAVE BECOME
VITAL TO THE
WORKFLOWS OF
MODERN LEARNERS.
As I'm sure you can guess, no evaluation
data was ever provided by the sales
leader, and the L&D team created a
visually and instructionally dynamic sales
training course. Six months after the
launch of the initiative, Emily asked for an
increased budget for a new instructional
designer role. The company leadership
asked her to account for the budget
allocated to the large sales training as a
way to help them build a business case
for this new role. While she had a very
impressive looking course, she had no
data to justify the time and budget spent
on the training, and no clear way to show
that the training positively impacted
business performance.
So, what can we learn from this example?
* As L&D leaders, we are in charge of
making sure all training, especially
training that uses a significant amount
of your budget and time, addresses a
measurable need. Even if the budget
is coming from another department,

you must be able to demonstrate
that your team invested in a
worthwhile endeavor.
* Looking to the tried and true wisdom
of Dr. Donald Kirkpatrick's Four Levels
of Training Evaluation, "Learning and
performance professionals must be
able to show the organizational value
of their training... On the surface,
demonstrating the value of training
to the organization might seem selfserving; however, it is necessary
not only for a training department
to sustain itself, but also to earn the
respect of other departments and
the entire organization."

interfaces or the content is buried within
an hour-long training video covering
several processes, utilization is doomed
to be low. Ask yourself the following
questions when you're planning your
next training initiative:
* Who are my executive sponsors?
* How will this training be integrated
into our current culture of oneon-ones, quarterly reviews and
performance evaluations?
* What internal marketing channels
can I utilize aside from an email
blast?

* As with any training intervention,
considering and engaging the
specified audience is essential to
planning training. This will not only
make your learners feel heard and
appreciated but also provide you
with key insights into the actual
training need rather than relying on
assumptions from the executive level.

Have you ever heard the saying, "The
first bite is with the eye?" The same
principle applies to when someone
first hears about training. Don't waste
valuable time making every training
launch fun and gimmicky, but the
better you can promote the assets
your L&D repository has, the better
your utilization will be.

ARE YOU CREATING
A LEARNER JOURNEY
MAP?

HOW DO WE
PREVENT L&D
BOTTLENECKS
MOVING FORWARD?

Just-in-time and training reinforcement
resources have become vital to the
workflows of modern learners. There
is no question that everyone uses
Google as an information directory on
the job these days, but the one thing
Google and other search engines lack,
compared to a top notch L&D team,
is a clear architecture for information.
That is where learner journey mapping
comes into play.
For instance, the spacing effect suggests
that 90% of learning that occurs in a
training event is lost after just one month
without any additional interventions.
However, if you have reinforcement built
into your learner roadmap, knowledge
retention improves significantly.

WHAT ARE YOUR
CHANNELS OF
DELIVERY?
Like it or not, we are in the age of Slack,
Twitter and TikTok. You might have a
robust, internal corporate university, but
if your material is behind multiple sign-in

Everything you create must be developed
with business impact in mind, meaning
you need to evaluate and identify direct
correlation between training and business
outcomes. Once leadership knows that
L&D is creating training that impacts the
bottom line, you'll see support from the
executive level to ensure everyone is
utilizing your L&D resources.
Now more than ever, learning and
development is recognized as an essential
cog in the gears of organizational success,
but that valued position will quickly be
overlooked in an economic downturn if
training is not being used. By identifying a
clear evaluation approach early, validating
what training needs exist, having modern
and navigable channels for delivery, and
tying interventions to business success
through data, our L&D teams will not only
weather storms but thrive and grow in the
scope of their influence.
Daniel Sowards is an L&D advisor
for AllenComm, where he focuses on
measurable impact. Email Daniel.

T R A I N I N G I N DUSTR Y MAGAZ INE - BUILDING A GREAT TRAI NI NG ORGANI ZAT I ON I WWW. T RAININGINDU S T RY . C OM/ MAGAZ I NE

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Training Industry Magazine - September/October 2020

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