Training proposal requests – Every Learning and Development consultant's nightmare.

Every day in our work, we receive requests for proposals for various trainings from organisations who think they need to skill their employees. The norm has always been, you get a training title, you put aside all the other things you could have done at that time , so that you focus on delivering the training proposal.

You put in hard thinking work or you copy and paste from the last client who had a similar request (Depending on your school of thought).Once you submit the proposal, the waiting starts, maybe you hear from the organisation about the proposal or as happens many times, you never hear from the company again till the next time they require another training proposal.

This year, I have done a number of proposals, many of which I have not heard feedback about, is that how training proposals are supposed to work? HR or the one in charge has an urgent need for a proposal, they reach out to training companies, get proposals and once the proposals are in, their work is done. Collecting training proposals seems like a checkbox item, an activity based performance indicator?

This got me thinking, do I need to respond to every request for training proposal from companies? The core driver for this thinking being the none response post-delivery of the proposal. I am sure the companies are just not interested in having papers with iPerformance Africa name and logo.

A catch twenty-two kind of thing

Training is the lifeline of a learning and development consultant. Not responding to training proposals lowers the possibilities of doing business, the main purpose of the consultant. The rush to respond to the training proposals, with limited information on what the organisation needs to achieve through the learning program ,serves no benefit to either party.The ease of getting training proposals from consultants has undermined the value of training proposals. Any learning and development consultant can put one together, anyways what is difficult about putting together a document with a company profile, wild learning objectives that you have no basis to believe will give the organisation value since the need and purpose of the learning program is not even clear, slap a price to the training and voila, you have a proposal. In the same breath don’t forget to slap in a number of logos of the company’s you have served before. The bigger the profile of the client you have served previously, the better your chances of being selected for an assignment you have no idea what it will serve the organisation with.

I highly suspect, all training proposals or any proposal involving learning development is evaluated purely on the basis of cost. I have come across many proposal evaluators who say, "This cost is high", I normally silently ask myself, what they are comparing the cost to? All learning programs are not created equally, many of the learning proposal evaluators, evaluate price only and never the Instruction design and instructionmethodology. Learning development professionals are supposed to be magicians, they will come, speak all day through a two-day training or two days on a Virtual instructor lead session and the employees are expected to absorb skills that will enable them to perform better at their work. Leave alone the fact that the Leaning and development professional has no idea of the tasks involved in the employee's daily work nor the competency level required for the role. All these don’t matter, you just need to teach them the entire Encyclopedia Britannica of their work. Somewhere and somehow in learning delivery, skills will improve and their competency level moves up a notch. You as the learning professional will never be able to prove the value of the learning, who cares about that anyway. The KPI after all was the number of training the employees attend in the period; work has been done.

A new way to look at training requests.

As I mulled over this dilemma of training proposal request from companies, that are never responded to. I conclude that the ease of getting proposals and the lack of skills to evaluate learning proposals form a big part of the vicious cycle. All training proposals are treated equally even though all training proposals are not created equally. Adding a step that makes the entity requesting for the proposal put in some thinking to the request and be fully able to articulate what outcome they desire and why they desire that outcome would be a step in the right direction. The direction being evaluators able to assess training proposals for value derived from the instruction design and instruction methods and not just price. If the evaluator can not articulate how the training methodology embodied in the learning program builds the capability of employees enabling the organisation to achieve its strategy, then the entire activity is a check box item on a list. Get into this as a learning and development consultant and be sure it was a good waste of your cognitive resources.

A training request form sent to the company requesting for a proposal would help a learning consultant sieve the true learning organisations from a wannabe learning organisations. The form would focus the attention on the learning outcomes the organisation desires, focus on the skills and competency they want to build in the learners. Best of all, if they are too busy to fill out the form, they never took the training seriously and your proposal would just be another email they received and a check box ticked. There is a need to decide if you want to be a check box item as you send that proposal or you want to share a proposal that will serve the true purpose of learning and development- Impacting the bottom line of the business.

Martin Wanjohi

The author is the Chief Learning Officer at iPerformance Africa, a learning and development firm, focusing on developing professionals charged with the responsibility of developing others in their organisations and for the purpose of successful strategy execution.