I was recently in a situation where personnel were negotiating with their managers as to whether or not they had “put in enough training hours”. That raised a question in my mind: is training something that takes time away from the work you need to be doing, or something that makes you more effective at that work? Everyone wants it to be the latter, but too many have experienced it as the former. What is the difference?
It all has to do with the starting point. To gain effectiveness, you have to start by identifying the types of changes you believe will help increase effectiveness on a day-by-day basis. In other words, effective training is not just about learning something new, it is about improving what you do in your job.
So to truly be productive, training programs must be built around three concepts:
Perhaps that is the shift in mindset that could help those that were counting their training hours. Very few people would be resistant to using new and better tools to improve their effectiveness. Instead, they would learn the tool, apply the tool to their work, and incorporate it into their routines. Great training serves the same purpose through the same steps and very much to the same goal: greater effectiveness.