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Best Practices in Training and Development. Dr. John Dzimba. Structure of the paper. Challenges faced by Today’s complex organisations Importance of Organization’s specialized value chain to training and development
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Best Practices in Training and Development Dr. John Dzimba
Structure of the paper • Challenges faced by Today’s complex organisations • Importance of Organization’s specialized value chain to training and development • Training and Development’s Value Chain that lead employment and extend beyond termination • Best Practices in Employee Development • Elements of Best Practices for Effective Training and Development Programs • Required Principles and Best Practices in Training and development
To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan, believe and act!
Challenges faced by Today’s complex organisations • To address the increasing shortage of skilled workforce • traditional training and development methods • not adequately producing employees with the complex skills needed to thrive in today’s knowledge economy • The complexity of organisations today reflects • the inter-connectedness of systems, processes and people • we need to develop leaders who embrace • vision over motion, • change management over meaningless action and • issue resolution over fire-fighting
Success is not tied to the latest technology or business model • In the way our leaders see the organisation’s future, • create a path to realize it, and • resolve the issues that impede the way • “vision without action is a daydream and action without vision is a nightmare.” • Best practice in training and development must focus at developing and creating new leaders; • can create a vision, • manage change and resolve issues as leaders, and • can build the workable strength for tomorrow’s success.
Importance of Organization’s specialized value chain to training &development • Every organisation’s value chain consist of unique activities that make products and services beneficial to customers • Knowledge of the value chain and its accompanying strengths and deficits is essential to training and development • The process of gaining such knowledge is known as value chain analysis, • Value chain analysis is a powerful tool for business leaders, particularly those who oversee training and development • Best-practice training and development, along with other human resource (HR) functions, supports the primary activities of the business
Top training and development professionals first seek to understand how value is created by the business they support • Then translate the understanding of the value chain into the knowledge, skills and abilities of the people involved in mission-critical activities. • Next step is to organize these key capabilities into competency models for each level of the organization • Competency models define successful behaviors that ultimately make the products and services of the business valuable to customers • Competency models drive not only training and development activities, but also other HR activities
Manage Knowledge and Keep It • High-performing organizations create a culture that facilitates the retention and sharing of organizational knowledge • Harnessing and sharing the knowledge of workers is also critical to the long-term success of operations • Knowledge management encompasses two areas: • the sharing of knowledge within the organization to identify best practices and find synergies among operating departments and business units • the retention of organizational knowledge, which is increasingly important in the face of impending retirements.
To avoid common training pitfalls training and development professionals must build their programs around the business value chain • Training programs must offer the fundamental activities that lead to value creation in the business
Training and Development’s Value Chain that lead employment and extend beyond termination • Pre-employment: • Community, governmental and educational outreach programs • Sourcing and recruitment activities • Employer-of-choice branding and realistic job-preview activities • Pre-employment assessments and interviews • During employment: • On-boarding activities • Enculturation, reinforcement of values and basic operational training • Career guidance and management activities • Functional, professional, management and leadership training • Mentoring and coaching –genuine feedback on performance • Assessment for promotion or individual insight and development • Safety, compliance and regulatory training • Post-employment: • Exit interviews and surveys • Outplacement support • Employee alumni groups and networks
Best Practices in Employee Development • Competency models • defines desired skills and abilities required by individual business units for the employee to be trained and developed • It allows the business unit to determine which critical skills are needed to meet business goals. • Leverage Online Systems • can enable the deployment of common training needs to a wider audience. • training via an intranet or Internet connection helps reduce overall costs, improves access to learning resources, and improve consistency of messaging. • Formalized Leadership Development Program • prepares the next generation of leaders – succession planning • helps to ensure that all business units are following common strategic objectives and leads to the sharing of best practices • Identification of high-potential employees- nomination process, a 360- degree process or other purposeful method to ensure that the best and brightest are given an opportunity to participate.
Augment & Adjust: • No business is static. • It must respond to market forces, adjust and change—or be left dead in the water. • Training and development programs must be augmented, adjusted and changed • Keep looking for something new or different out there that is right for your latest challenges • Skills-based training • builds on awareness training by adding a behavioural aspect • equips employees with the skills they need to manage themselves and others in a diverse working environment. • It has a genuine impact on the behaviours of employees and the culture of your organisation. • Comprehensive Career Development: • Important to provide a comprehensive career development services to employees, integrating the process into the overall performance management system • Work with employees to develop individual career development plans that provide opportunities for professional advancement. • A clear plan for employees’ long-term development helps to ensure that personnel remain at your company rather than look for other job opportunities • It helps to define career paths within the organization
Elements of Best Practices for Effective Training and Development Programs • Strategy driven • All training and development programs must cascade down from the overall strategic goals. • No programs are developed and implemented unless they produce results that are identified as critical to the strategy or business initiatives. • There should be explicit alignment between programs, learning objectives, and business objectives. • Positive cost/benefit ratio • Training today is not only strategically linked, but is also subject to the same measurements as every other business activity. • It must show a return on the investment, either in the long term or the short term. • Best companies now realize that many training and development initiatives take years to fully achieve their goals.
Supported by key strategies, systems, structures, policies, and practices: • Organizations that receive a true return on their learning investments ensure that learning is aligned with and directly supported by key areas such as organizational structures, lines of authority, decision making, values, planning, budgeting, career development, information sharing, compensation, performance management, rewards and recognition, staffing, recruiting, and succession planning. • These direct links help to both set boundaries and reinforce desired results. • Driven through many channels • Utilization of multiple modalities such as the classroom, workplace, blended learning, eLearning, technology support tools, and • co-workers to ensure that people get the right skills at the right time, in the right way, and at the right cost to succeed. • Modalities are selected to match specific learning styles, business issues, budgets, and cultures. • Maximize employee ability and potential through shared accountability • Best organisations tape the ability and potential of their employees through self-directed training and development. • Employees identify their own needs, create individual learning plans, and seek learning opportunities. • Training strategies are aimed at knowledge retention and transfer to the workplace, enabling employees to be more effective and to acquire more skills
Work-related training • Knowledge and skills that are acquired through training and development programs must be relevant and useful, to both the organization and the individual's work requirements. • Employees can only participate in programs that will add value to their current and future work effectiveness and will contribute to organizational success. • Learning by doing • training employees by making them perform "real" tasks and projects in a training environment and on-the-job in important . Rather than teaching theory and expecting employees to apply it to their own work. • Transferability of knowledge and skills back to the job • most important elements of best practice training and development is that it is easily transferred back to the workplace. • It is achieved through the timing of the training, the quality of the content, and the quality and appropriateness of the delivery method. • the maintenance of the new skill or knowledge once training has been completed is crucial • Linked to other people-related programs and departments • Best organisations do not train their employees in a vacuum. • In many instances, training is now conducted by line managers, who also perform evaluations, set performance objectives, and draft compensation and promotion systems for the same employees
Continuous learning process • To drive lasting change in behaviors and habits, best companies ensure that learning occurs before, during, and after scheduled learning events. • The process of doing, reflecting, learning, and doing again never ceases.
Required Principles and Best Practices • Best practice requires that there be: • Regular learning needs assessment • Broad range of learning opportunities, both formal and informal; • formal offerings in a choice of formats, • designed to meet identified needs, • in modules structured to cover topics from introductory through advanced. • Organizational commitment and leadership from staff development • Continuing Education (CE) activities design that includes learning objectives aligned with identified needs; • follows principles of instructional design and learning theory; selects course instructors on the basis of both subject knowledge and teaching ability; • attends to transfer of training and feedback; • Consistent documentation of individuals' participation in learning and recognition of continuing learning in hiring and promotion decisions;
Evaluation of continuing education and staff development offerings and programs; • the main objectives of evaluations are to improve decision-making, resource allocation and accountability. • A evaluations must be part of a wider performance management framework. • The key value of evaluation is that it allows for in-depth study of performance and independent assessment of effectiveness of other performance management instruments. • Evaluation encourages innovation and adaptation to a changing environment and this helps an organisation to stay relevant, continues to learn from feedback about results. • Research that assesses the state of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) • examines the efficacy and outcomes of continuing education and staff development programs • Best practice calls for regular, performance-related learning needs assessment • that involves individual employees and management, in concert with organizational goals and objectives.. • Best practice requires that those responsible for providing CE programs or in-service training and development create and/or make available a wide range of activities and products designed to meet identified learning needs.
Best practice requires administrative commitment; formal policies • that spell out what is expected of both staff and the organization in regard to staff development coordinators who have the support of the administration and the expertise to plan and implement programs. • Best practice requires that formal CE offerings be presented by experts • in the topic who are also good instructors. Systems of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) should provide train-the-trainer opportunities. • Employers should strive to create a supportive environment in which staff is encouraged to apply what they have learned. • Employers should take employees’ efforts to develop skills and knowledge into account when making personnel decisions. • Best practice requires that an adequate percentage of an institution’s personnel budget be allocated to staff development. • Best practice requires that employers give staff paid time off to attend conferences and workshops relevant to their jobs, and also allow for part of their work time to be spent on learning. • Best practice requires that CE providers gather feedback from their learners not only at the conclusion of CE events, • but also conduct at least periodic follow-up evaluations to determine what effect the CE has had on practice. • The results of evaluation should be used to improve future CE offerings and should also be factored into needs assessments. • Best practice requires that there be regular benchmarking studies of best practices in staff development, • matched with quality assessment of the participating institutions. • Such studies should advance understanding of and implementation of effective CPD and would justify resources expended on it. • The conduct of such studies must have cooperation and support from a cross-section of international institutions, and the results have to be broadly shared.
