According to a study by LinkedIn, 94% of employees say that they would stay longer at a company that provided learning and development programs. But unless your organization has adopted a culture of training, it’s easy for training to be seen as an afterthought—costly, difficult to measure, and challenging to prove the effectiveness of. As a corporate trainer, part of your job may be to justify what you do, why it’s necessary to align initiatives with training programs, and what learning metrics impact your organization.
Julie Dirksen has spent several decades as a training consultant and instructional designer and is an expert in designing courses for maximum engagement. She is also the author of the seminal book Design for How People Learn.
She notes that when employees in an organization are assigned training roles, they can struggle for the following reasons:
1. Many companies approach training as an add-on at the end, rather than a strategic investment from the beginning.
2. Many people who take on their company’s learning program have not had formal training.
3. It can be challenging to determine all of the outcomes of training, especially compliance training.
Metrics and numbers can help prove success, but corporate trainers can struggle for budget allocation if ongoing education is not prioritized in the company. It's often a catch-22 where without the budget, it's difficult for trainers to produce results, and without results, the budget isn't allocated. Dirksen points out that in justifying one's role (and securing more budget), concrete data needs to be shared:
- A/B testing for establishing value of training efforts
- Clear sales numbers for sales training or product training, both before and after applicable training courses
- Surveys for more qualitative data
- Employing Brinkerhoff's Success Case Model (a broad survey of audience + qualitative interviews, user testing, and smaller cohorts to measure results)
"For organizations to strategically embrace training better," she says, "There should be more emphasis on performance improvement, and training/learning is always part of that. Does management see you as a necessary evil? It's clear when there's no training that that doesn't work very well. But when training is doing its work well it can be somewhat invisible. You're not always able to demonstrate your value or show the value of the things you're building. But finding that feedback loop for your own professional development and for your organization is important."
If you are a one-person training team, you will experience challenges within your organization. However, with BlueVolt, it’s easier than ever to prove your worth—not only does the BlueVolt platform allow you to track enrollments and completions, but it can help you gather specific data to present to your company. Additionally, BlueVolt offers end-of-course surveys that can not only be used to generate leads, but to gather qualitative data on the effectiveness of your training. Build a culture of learning at your company and watch it grow.
To learn more about creating a culture of learning at your company, check out this article.
