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Malcolm works for one of the UK’s leading service organisations. He and all the other highly paid consultants receive a significant allocation of funds to support their training. “It’s one of the so called perks of the job,” he explains.

Yet Malcolm, a long-serving member of a specialist service team, reports that in his experience every year the same predictable pattern of behaviour emerges. Towards the end of the financial year he says,” the company realises that the training allocations are heading for a seriously large under spend.” 

“There is consequently a rush to get people to fully use their personal allocation. Naturally many of us end up choosing programmes which may interest us personally yet which in practice may make little or no noticeable difference to the company or its bottom line results.”

Such a scenario of wasted training resources might easily be dismissed as an aberration of say one particular company. Unfortunately whole swathes of training and development budgets in the UK are similarly wasted.

Many employees return to work after a development experience without anybody really knowing if the investment has been worthwhile, or even what the original objectives were.

Much of the sort of training Malcolm refers to though has become a “cultural norm." Nobody is willing to challenge it and if they do so they risk being regarded as without a sufficient understanding of how the system has always worked.

Yet it will often be perfectly possible to virtually halve the so-called training and investment budget of many companies, while still doubling the impact of their remaining expenditure. (If you have any doubts, call me!)

DOWN WITH MENUS!

First, the menus approach of what development is on offer in Malcom’s firm must be dumped in favour of starting with the company’s business plan. Rather than providing Malcolm with a list of a hundred or more available or accredited development events, the message to him must be: every development investment must first have a demonstrable –ie credible business case.

This applies as much to learning the soft skills as the many hard skills that are usually supported as a matter of course.

With skills training there is a regrettable tendency to allow people to attend learning events “in case they might need a particular skill in the future.” This may sound like foresight. In practice it often turns out to be a dubious gamble on future needs, unsupported by any strong business case.

DEVELOP DEVELOPMENT PLANS

Secondly, as happens in some astute companies, it must be made an unavoidable line responsibility of Malcolm’s line or project manager to meet frequently—not just annually–with all his or her direct reports to arrive at an agreed picture of their development needs. These are not needs in abstract.

They must be drawn both from the individual’s foreseeable needs and from the company’s business goals. They must then be credibly linked to each other to make a convincing case for the investment

FOLLOW THROUGH WITH FOLLOW THROUGH

Thirdly, no one should be able to attend a learning event without a clear strategy for ensuring sustained follow through.

When Malcolm returns from his learning event it should be nearly impossible to arrive back to work on Monday morning and “wonder how can I put my new learning into effect?”

BOLSTER THE BENEFITS

Fourthly, more effort needs to go into discovering what specific business benefits the wide-ranging programmes on offer to Malcolm actually deliver. This is not about getting lost in the complexity of training evaluation and ROI.

It is about acquiring simple and. practical information about what if anything Malcolm has done as a result of his time spent on a training or development course.

A system such as Progressit for instance attempts to extract from the individual not only their goals as the result of a learning event, but monitor to what extent they actually achieve them

Time is surely running out for vast, ill-directed development budgets that offer no certainty about their impact on business goals.

TAME PROCUREMENT

Just as the government’s current bonfire of red tape is saving British firms around £3bn a year[1] so many learning and development programmes such as Malcolm participates in need to be simplified as to how they are purchased and evaluated.

For instance, almost certainly in Malcolm’s otherwise well-managed organisation, no external development contract worth more than a few thousand pounds can be approved without the scrutiny and often inappropriate intervention of a procurement service.

The latter tends to be focused almost entirely on cost savings rather than quality or the real value of the proposed deliverables.  

MASTER THE "SELLING IN"

It is understandable that in the present economic climate the L&D department of Malcolm’s firm is highly protective of its budgets. Yet too often this merely reflects a failure to “sell in” the value of the proposed development in the first place.

Take for example engagement. How many CEO’s would really want to cut a budget that could demonstrably increase their bottom line by a known amount, or reduce their recruitment costs by another reputable figure? See for example Talent Engagement, the Facts—Quantified benefits

Making the case for any aspect of development is therefore an area where many L&D professional could often do with some help to improve their skills.

TRACK THE TRACK RECORDS

Finally, since many of the learning and development tasks in Malcolm’s firm are now outsourced to external suppliers, it is important to ensure these suppliers really can deliver what they promise.

Too many L&D investments seem wasted on poor quality delivery that some months after the investment the latter has literally vanished into a black hole.

Reviewing what kind of track record the external supplier has is important and particularly what their clients think of their delivery. (see for example What Our Clients Say)

TO SUM UP

To make better use of the L&D budget

• Menus: reduce vague, wide-ranging menu offerings
• Development:  ensure each person has an updated development plan
• Follow through: insist on adequate follow through on the deliverables
• Benefits: Make benefits more tangible for senior decision makers
• Procurement: Avoid an over rigid procurement process
• Selling in: Improve L&D skills at selling in specific developments
• Track records: take a harder look at the track records of external suppliers

 www.maynardleigh.co.uk