By Ginny Stibolt, web content consultant & adjunct faculty at Howard Community College

This is the first of a series of articles on how technology has influenced training and how businesses may take full advantage of what's available.  First a quick overview:  the main purpose of Training and Development is to anticipate change and to respond proactively it.  Changes include a wide variety of occurrences:

• The changes in the organization due to mergers, acquisitions, growth and downsizing.
• The changes or advances in technology requiring new skill-sets. 
• New competitive pressures requiring more efficiency.
• New rules or regulations that change how the organization runs and/or ones that change the makeup of the workforce.
• Making sure that the new employees or employees moving to new jobs have the basic knowledge and skills to accomplish the job, even if there's been no change. 

A Learning Organization: An organization that has the capacity to adapt and change with a changing environment.  This means that as the employees need to accomplish new tasks, they receive the needed training for the new tasks and the development needed to be prepared for the long haul.  Most of the really successful businesses are learning organizations. 

Training:  The learning activities designed to provide employees with the skills and/or knowledge they need to accomplish the tasks for their present jobs. 
 a) Training can be formal, classroom type training or web-enabled training with set agendas and assignments with various methods of assessment.  
 b) Or the training may be informal, on-the-job-training.  The informal training is harder to manage, but it constitutes the majority of all business training.  

Development:  Training activities designed for future needs of the business and the employee.  This includes cross-training, so employees may be effective quickly in the case of a change to have the skills and knowledge to do another job.  This is often seen as key to keeping the organization flexible.  This is also important for employees who work in a team to accomplish a certain task, and then become part of a different team to do another. 

Analyzing present training efforts:  Before you can assess the success of the training, you must have determined the objectives and the goals of the training.  What is the desirable outcome of training & development?  You need to systematically examine the present jobs and the skills and knowledge necessary to accomplish the tasks associated with those jobs.  There will be organization-wide goals and then there will be specific objectives for each job-training program.  Then examine the present methods of training from the orientation to high-level skill and/or management courses.  Who is doing the training?  How are the courses taught?  How much training do new recruits need to accomplish their entry-level jobs, past the standard orientation?  Could you be making better use of technology and resources, etc.?  After employees have been through a training program of some kind, how do you know whether they've learned anything?  You need to come up with a system to assess or test the effectiveness of the training - a way to measure if the training is working for the organization.  

There are two ways to assess training: 
1) After a training session or program, examine if there is an improvement on the job performance.  Is there a higher production rate, more sales, fewer sexual harassment problems or other specific and measurable goals? 
2) For content learning, there should be some kind of test to pass.  With an assessment or grade received for the content, you can be assured that the employee didn't just "sit" through a session without any retention.

Designing a training program:  Depending upon your situation, during this process, you may need to bring in an outside group to look at your situation and help figure out how much training can be put on-line, how much should be outsourced and how much needs to be kept in-house.  There is no one correct answer for how to structure a program and even after you have crafted the best possible program for your company, you will need to keep working on it.  The laws keep changing; your company will change; technology will be upgraded and more. (HIPAA is a good example of a new law that has affected every company that has to deal with medical records.)  After people go through a series of courses, they'll be ready for another higher-level round.  Training is a never-ending process in a good company.

Orientation:  Redesigning the training received during orientation may be the most significant section of your training program.  Various studies on this topic conclude that an amazing 83% of people surveyed believed that formal orientation programs motivate & increase retention of personnel.  Because of the complex legal environment these days, you will want to be sure that new employees know the rules - the informal corporate structure rules and the very formal legalities that apply to your business.  This is also the very best time to "sell" the company again to the new employees - make sure they know the history, the story or whatever else makes the company stand out.  It is very expensive it is to keep hiring new employees. (See last week's column by Tony Horwath.)  Here's where you can make a significant dent in the turnover rate.  

Many companies limit the days new hires may start (e.g. the 1st and 15th of each month) so that the orientation can be well-organized and that new employees receive the attention they need to feel comfortable.  With the huge role that computers play in today’s businesses, new employees need to receive thorough training in your company’s technology and the rules for its use.  Also, here is a good opportunity to incorporate some on-line training.  Orientation training could include on-line exercises and quizzes to make sure that they have absorbed the material.  Many companies no longer have printed employee handbooks, but have a series of webpages set up on the company's Intranet with the rules and regulations. This way as regulations change or rules are updated, a simple, one-time change is made on the webpage.  Then the employees are notified in some way to alert them to the change.  New employees should receive information on how to use this handbook during the orientation training.  

You may be interested in these articles on orientation and initial employee setup methods: http://www.workforce.com/archive/feature/22/25/54/index.php 
http://www.workforce.com/archive/article/22/10/43.php   

Organization Development: Training and Development is an on-going task to keep your whole organization well-tuned. The organization-wide effort to put strategies, structures and processes to accomplish the organization's goals.  There are various ways to accomplish this such as surveys, evaluations of events, Quality Circles and other means.  If you don't ask or you don't have a means to obtain feedback, then it will be difficult to move the organization forward. 

Next training article will cover Learning styles: People learn differently.  How do you make sure to accommodate different learning styles when you design your training program.

Ginny Stibolt has been "into" computers since 1981 when she opened a retail computer store.  She also owned a software development company during the '90s and is now working at Howard Community College.  www.sky-bolt.com