How do you ensure employee training transfer through stakeholder collaboration?

Effective employee training transfer requires strategic collaboration with stakeholders. - Involve key stakeholders in the training design to ensure it addresses real workplace needs. - Set clear training objectives and communicate these to all involved parties. - Create a supportive learning environment with mentoring and practical application opportunities. - Use feedback and monitoring tools to evaluate training effectiveness and make necessary adjustments. - Encourage ongoing learning and development post-training for continuous skill enhancement. Collaboration in training processes not only ensures effective learning but also aligns training outcomes with organizational goals.

Identifying the right stakeholders sounds so simple, right? Just ask the manager who to involve. But what if the nominated stakeholders, are always the same employees in the team? In my experience, this is quite common. Although not always an issue, it does mean that those frequently nominated stakeholders benefit from closer engagement with the training content than others. Consider a mix of stakeholders and include one or more who are: - vocal and extroverted - introspective - can contribute work experiences - is energized an interested in the topic

If I had a dime for every time someone disagreed with how we should learn because it's not how they would learn, I'd have many, many dimes. Taking some time to review the training goal is key. I often frame this as what we want to be able to do, know or understand at the end of the training. It is really helpful when stakeholders can collaboratively review the goals and benefits and discuss any inconsistent perceptions of what the training needs to achieve. That way, we're all holding the torch and not being directed off track by the person/s with the most influence.

We are HUGE on the measurement aspect of learning. That’s why our metric gathering always includes the managers of participants. Only when managers see skill gaps closing do we consider learning truly successful. We are transparent with participants about our intention to survey managers and offer suggestions to participants on how they might increase visibility. This creates motivation and accountability, and also gets participants recognition for their hard work and new skills. Having an engaged manager is essential for learning application and utilizing management success metrics is crucial for senior leadership to consider the program a success.

One of my favourite ways to make learning sticky is to get people involved in the design and delivery. This works because we're all naturally creative, even though some think they are not. When we create together, we are more likely to support the team and organisation's transformation because we are part of creating it's progress. Getting involved in design is also effective at improving our recall of the training content long after the training programme has been delivered. Collaboration in the design stage also helps stakeholders feel more inclined to get involved in deliver training. Overall, stakeholders are actively learning from design through to on-the-job application - a win-win for the team and the individual.

Remember the first time you learned to cook a complex dish, drive a car, bake a cake? How did you know you did it well? You probably received real-time feedback! Stakeholders can collaborate and speed up learning by sharing feedback as they learn. Someone hated your cake? That's too bad, but it's not the end of the world. A skill to practice in this case is framing feedback in the context of continuous improvement, as opposed to a personal attack. Someone hates your driving? That can be a tough one. Practice asking questions each time to learn their perspective and use every new opportunity to get fresh feedback, so you know how you're improving over time. Finally, the practice of giving feedback also reinforces personal learning.

Some of us love to learn because the experience of learning is enjoyable. For others learning is critical to their jobs. In both cases, monitoring training transfer can serve as an extension of learning. Ask the learner: - what part of your job has this training improved? - what lessons are you struggling to apply after completing the training? Ask their peers: - what do you notice x is doing differently on the job? - have you recently learned a new way of doing a common task from x? Ask their manager: - how has x shifted their internal measures (eg. key performance indicators)? - what new behaviours have you observed x demonstrating? We're more likely to see higher transfer of learning when we can see evidence of our learning.