Planning training events normally forms part of the trainers brief. It is a cyclical process which begins with establishing the training need within the organisation and ends with monitoring and evaluating the learning event or events. Improve your training planning on our Train the Trainer training course.
Training needs analysis
To ensure your training is as cost-effective as possible, you must firstly be clear about the training needs of each member of staff.
This will involve you assessing their current (or potential, if they are new) performance and your department’s or team’s future needs. You must also make the distinction between issues that require training and those needing management solutions. For example, customer care staff may need to learn the skills of managing stress. But perhaps they are expected to answer too many calls, too speedily without adequate back up and this is contributing significantly to their stress at work! So there is also an organisational issue here.
Training needs analysis can be carried out by:
- Questionnaire
- Focus group with target population
- Individual interviews
- Discussions with managers
or a combination of all these methods.
Training plan
Once you know what the training needs of each of your staff are, you are ready to draw up a training plan. This should be undertaken for every new member of staff and annually for existing staff as part of the appraisal procedure. This plan will include:
- Learning objectives
- Learning methods
- Projected cost
- Method of evaluation
Learning objectives
Your training programs should be designed to achieve certain overall goals for the individual concerned as well as various learning objectives that when attained will see the staff member achieving the overall goals of the training program.
Your learning objectives should be as SMART as possible. Unless you have clearly defined objectives you will stand no chance of carrying out any effective evaluation at all!
Evaluation
Plan beforehand, how you will evaluate the training experience.
This will include your perception and measurement of new skills learnt, new methods adopted and so on but should also involve input from the learner too. This often takes the form of an evaluation questionnaire at the end of the event and should ideally also involve the manager’s impression as to improvement when the person is back in the workplace.
By far the best way is to also include a follow-up with the trainee after three months back at work to see what they have retained of the training provided.
