The right time to think about your training is today
They say that housing is all about location, location, location. Well, it could be argued that training is all about timing, timing, timing.
20 September 2006
It is of course true that the learning content itself matters, just as it’s true that the quality of the bricks is important in a house. But timing remains one of the real critical factors in the success of training.
A good part of this is the ‘use it or lose it’ factor. There’s simply no point in learning something today that you won’t use for a year – you’ll have forgotten it. You can see this in action with experiential learning – where you learn by discovery. You need to learn something, you discover the answer, then you apply it immediately. The learning is rewarding, immediately useful and tends to stick. Were you to stumble on the same thing when you didn’t need it, you’d most likely not remember it – and then spend ages hunting for it, remembering that you’d found ‘it’ but not what ‘it’ was.
In the business world, this presents something of a challenge. Sure, learning as you go is ok for the odd topic, but it’s hardly efficient when you need to learn a complex product such as SQL Server or even Microsoft Office. For this, learning needs to be structured and is, understandably, going to take some time.
The problem is that if you wait until you find a topic which you need to learn – as you would with experiential learning – it’s too late. This is because you can’t jump onto a three-day or five-day course immediately – it takes planning. You have work commitments – and it’s unlikely that the training company will be able to accommodate you at the drop of a hat.
So how do you ensure that training takes place at just the right time?
For organisations, this chicken-and-egg situation is resolved pretty simply – by planning ahead. Training is most usually required when some change is involved – you might be migrating to a new product, you might have employed a new team member who isn’t fully up to speed with your current infrastructure, or you might be moving someone from supporting one product to supporting another.
While it’s clear that the need for learning can usually be predicted, it’s often the case that learning isn’t organised until after a technology implementation, once a new employee has joined or until someone switches products. The key word in that sentence is organised. In the first instance, when implementing a new technology, the skills will be needed in advance of the implementation, most likely to support the implementation itself – but it will need organising in advance to ensure that the implementation is handled correctly and that the right support is in place. In both other cases, it’s fine if the learning takes place when someone joins or changes product, but it still needs organising in advance.
To get learning to take place at the right time, it’s just a matter of adding it to your thinking when you are making changes to technology or the team. Exactly what the learning is and when it will take place is dependent on the product itself – there’s a world of difference between training a large workforce on how to use Office than training an IT team how to implement SQL Server. But the principle remains the same.
It also helps to avoid the trap which is spun by the PR of software companies – that the technology itself is the solution. You can see this in marketing everywhere, that it’s the new product which will deliver business efficiency, lower costs or whatever. Actually, without the skills in place, all of those benefits will remain largely untapped. Technology companies don’t necessarily like to tell you this because it forces you to think about additional implementation costs, therefore putting their product sale at risk, but it remains a fact. To make technology work, people need skills – and the sooner they have those skills, the more successful the implementation will be.
So, the right time to think about training is always – now. Whenever you’re making a change to people or technology, think about skills and people – and when they’ll need training. Because training success is all about timing, timing, timing.
