On training, its relevance and application

Many professionals find themselves unable to apply their training to their routine work, and have no idea how it will influence their individual performance.

MANY Indian companies and bodies corporate spend large sums of money on the training and development of their employees. The question that nags every HR trainer in these organisations is how much of this training was really relevant and whether it was of any use at all?

HR departments of Indian (and foreign) companies have discovered that they have an employee base that are well trained on the specifics of the processes and the tools of the trade but are surprisingly clueless in the application of the training they have been given. They find them unable to apply their training to their routine work, and have no idea how it will influence their individual performance and subsequently the bottom lines of the company.

It could be the very term training. The word immediately gives rise to a vision of animals in a circus going through the set of tricks that have been `whipped' into them. This does no good to the process. It is necessary to distinctly separate one from the other. The one is training and the other component is the education. The latter is as important as the other if not more so. Education teaches the whys and wherefores, training, teaches the hows. Without education, no amount of training will contribute to the development of the individual, the job or the company.

Its what I term a `honey-trap' when software vendors offer training to companies when they buy products as a value added product. Such offers are irresistible as they are a value addition to the efforts of every HR department - it looks good on every report to end up conducting more training programmes than budgeted for, at the beginning of the year. The problem is that vendor provided training is only about the product; it is rarely about the organisational benefits. Typically, vendors have no idea what your company is and what it really needs. For them it is only a sales tool designed to entice the buyer into making the purchase decision. The result is that such training often fails in telling people the `whys, wheres and whens' and concentrates only on the `hows'. This means that those trained will have little idea of how to translate all the new skills to action beneficial to the company.

Outside trainers need to understand the requirements of the organisation they are training and they must work in tandem with in-house HR departments to ensure that `education' about the training to follow will explain how to apply such training for individual and organisational benefit. With planning for next year's budget looming on the horizon HR honchos would be well advised to consider the plans they have for training. The spend may be minimised through vendor offers, but unless the positive effects are felt by the organisation, such training will not be viewed with anything but passing interest by both the trained or those sanctioning the budget!

It is essential to make certain that the training provided is less skill-centric than business-specific, and for this proper planning is paramount. The benefit of such planning is evident in that the trained and the organisation itself feel the improvement in productivity and the organisational bottom lines show significant improvement. One factor that all HR departments must keep in mind is that unplanned training almost never benefits the organisation. Only when trained personnel leave to join other companies do they realise how to leverage the learned skill from the past job for better productivity at the next! In short, your department will have provided a trained, skilled person for a competitor!

Abhimanyu Acharya

abhimanyu@india.com