Trainings are a popular form of improving the work of your employees. For many years training companies have been competing in offering new training topics carried out in new ways. Sending employees on training is supposed to result in more effective work or finding ways to everyday problems at work.
The concept of training is defined in many ways. One of the definitions says that a training is an organized learning process that aims at enhancing the way you do your job and, in the case of preparation for new tasks, at acquiring skills necessary for their effective implementation (Methods of personnel management. Human Factor, Kraków 1998).
In terms of the activities training projects can be divided into 4 main stages:
- Identification of training needs,
- Planning and organizing training,
- Training,
- Assessment of the trainings’ effectiveness.
Among the practitioners a carousel model, which introduces a link between the assessment phase of the past trainings with the step of identifying the future training needs, is popular. This model was presented in the figure below and is called a systematic training model (M. Sloman: A Handbook for Training Strategy. Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 42).
In 1987, a training model developed for the National Awards for Training was formulated in the United States (M. Sloman: A Handbook for Training Strategy. Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 46). It allows to understand better what trainings are for employees. His outline is illustrated in the figure below.
Everything starts from the needs of the participants. Of course, sometimes it happens that the reason for organizing the training is completely different – an additional budget of HR department, signed contract with a training company, the opportunity to acquire financing from the EU funds, etc. – however, essentially it is the needs of the participants that are usually in the first place.
Research of the training needs is extremely complicated, but you can say, that when you know what the participants need, you can set goals that this training is to help to achieve. It is worth remembering: training is to enable or help you achieve certain goals, it is not a goal itself. As you can see in the figure above, the determination of the purpose of the training should be done always after the study of the participants' needs.
After determining the training objectives you can begin to develop a project – or, in other words, a plan, schedule, agenda – of the training. The less time we have for training and the less participants, the less extensive the program will be. However, the extensity of the training programme should not be associated with the facility to prepare this programme. Sometimes, an insufficient length of the training or too large training group causes a lot of stretch to the trainer who has to bend to arrange a meaningful and goal-oriented training programme.
When the program is approved by the customer of the training company, which usually means a specialist from HR department, the company's director, HR manager, or participants’ immediate supervisor, the training session can be conducted. How, where, what and when? These are the issues related to the planning and organization of the whole training project.
Each training session has some results – good or bad, planned or entirely unexpected. Usually, the training results are associated with the objectives of the training and on this stage a simple confrontation of the planned objectives and the achieved ones happens. This is not an easy task, because the objectives are often very unrealistic. It's also often just a text created to sell a training, and then ... achieving these goals, it is not always so.
At the end it is worth considering what benefits (purely physical, such as an increase in the sales, or assets – increase of the employee loyalty, a better rapport with one another) has a company that pays for a training. There are several methods of measuring the effectiveness of a training, but none is neither easy nor 100 percent accurate.
However, the benefits for the company determine the existence of further training projects in the future.