Ten Reasons Why Training Fails!
Ravinder Bhan
![Ravinder Bhan]()
Ravinder Bhan
Management Consultant | 35 Yrs Corporate | Across 6 countries | CEO Turned Farmer | Curating Memorable Experiences| Building Your Life Style Assets | Pro bono advisor to the needy employees and entrepreneurs|
Here are the ten quick reasons why a lot of corporate Training fails – based on my 25+ years training experience and inputs from an article by JACK J. PHILLIPS and PATRICIA P. PHILLIPS of the ROI Institute, USA.
- Course List Training : You selected training from a list of courses cataloged by a big training provider, with little or no relevance to your business.
- Solving the Wrong Problem: A number of Training Needs reported to me were actually ‘discipline’ or ‘policy’ issues. No wonder, I convert these from 'training of delegates' to 'coaching their managers.'
- Single Course Training: Training has to improve business results or create specific behavior changes via phased exposure; a single event training can rarely achieve this. Courses done merely to complete a check list from year’s training calendar are invariably a total waste.
- Disconnect With Results: A lot of training is actually thrust on the targeted recipients that have little clue as to why they are here. Obviously they can’t be accountable for what is required to be achieved as a result of the training.
- Good Slides, Great Games – lot of fun and laughter, but no linkage to ground business. One of the most common tools used by run of the mill trainers is to pickle a lot of fun and games into the sessions to secure audience claps. I know it’s important to use “ice breakers†but if laugher is all you need – why not send your folks to a comedy show. Training is serious business, must impart skills and provide proven tools to improve the reality of business numbers – whatever be the type of numbers they need to deliver.
- Train them and they will Deliver: Many managers think having sent the “boys for a course†is all that will secure results. No, training will be a waste if the manager doesn’t integrate, reinforce and support what is expected in tangible results from training.
- Wrong Expectations: There are times when anything that goes wrong after the training is seen as a failure of training. Don’t ignore the number of other things that can cause a failure – a wrong boss being just one example.
- Failure to provide honest and forthright Feedback: Not all delegates take the course and its learning with same seriousness. A good trainer must not be shy of giving honest feedback to those who may need more training or to be more serious. Many delegates just leave the class the same as they entered. Identify them, tell them and coach them – don’t let the training dollars go waste.
- Stand Alone Training: I really don’t have to explain this. You all know what happens in, and after, those special invitee training sessions during usual internal business conferences.
- The last but the most important is the Hopeless Trainer – and you have so many of them around, the worst being the one you hired at a high fee thinking they must be good at that fee level. Remember Bad Trainers don’t always come cheap just like great trainers don’t always cost a bomb. The Right Trainer needs to be knowledgeable and passionate about the Business – not just the training course. S/he should be a mentor not an outright instructor or just another story teller who makes you laugh and clap.
Make sure your Training doesn't fail any of the 10 above.
Feel free to add me or write to me <ravinder dot bhan @ tpsworld dot com>
NB: The image above is nothing but purely illustrative
Art & Science of Change Management India Ops at SageIT
8 å¹´Interesting summation of issues. Most training are designed intelligently to give an "emotional" high to trainee such that he/she goes back with a feel good factor. This feel good doesn't translate into effectiveness.
Principal Grid connection, Alternative Energy
8 å¹´Because the human resources development team are more interested in achieving their own KPIS instead of real business perspective. It's a part of individual development programme not the development of individual.
CROCHETER
8 å¹´Ravinder Bhan thanks a lot for analyzing failures of training .Adding to your writing, the trainer must have an overview of the last or past done trainings in that S/he can give a brief background of where/what mistakes bound to have been thus train basing on anew revised way. 2ndly the trainees must have a need as per Y there undertaking such trainings and at the end they can merge the training and their targets. It's the way it will make training effective.
Senior Marketing & Business development professional in Electrical & Automation business
8 å¹´success of training depends largely on trainer. I have noted that if topic is of interest of participants and trainer is able to explain effectively, the session is good.
Director
8 å¹´Other root causes are poorly defined objectives and metrics for the outcome. If you do not define the objectives and the metrics carefully with a follow-up plan, then the training is bound to fail.