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The Training Sandwich

By Peter Lloyd

Forty-one percent of workers want to quit their jobs because they are dissatisfied with company training. So says Business Week/Up Front, "Why your workers might jump ship."

What's the principal reason for their dissatisfaction? More specifically, how do you make sure that when you train your people in creativity or innovation, they come back more creative and more innovative.

Think about the last time your company sent you to a seminar. If you're like most trainees, you found the training helpful. Most likely it taught you how to work better. It gave you practical procedures to follow and install back at the office. But when you got back to the office, everything you learned went out the window.

Effective training doesn't end with training. It doesn't even begin with training. Effective training is sandwiched between individual preparation and conscientious implementation.

Trainers should begin by asking pertinent questions, weeks before a workshop. Then they need to design the workshop to address the problems those questions uncover. In the workshop itself, trainees (not the trainers) should create their own solutions for their problems. But most important, after the training, the trainer needs to make sure the proposed solutions happen. In other words, the trainer’s job remains incomplete if the training doesn't translate into action.

For example, it's conceivable that someone invented a light bulb before Edison. Who knows? It doesn't matter. Thomas Edison secured his place in history not just by dreaming up inventions but by making them happen as well.

When our kids come home from school, we expect them to be able to apply what they've learned. If you were to discover that your child couldn't read at home, you wouldn't be satisfied if the teacher claimed, "But he reads fine in class."

Likewise, you shouldn't sign your people up for innovation training that gets everybody all revved up with no place to go. For lessons they'll forget. Or for innovation training they'll never be able to implement back at the office.

Implementation belongs in the hands of the trainer, if only because your people have enough work to do. None of them has time to lobby to use what they've learned at a seminar. Or to oversee its implementation.

Today, with email and interactive web sites everywhere, the savvy trainer should have no trouble setting up a process for following through. Otherwise, you're just not going to get your money's worth. If you think of your next training effort as a solution to a problem, make sure the problem get solved, not just talked about.

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.
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