Will Kenny

BTP Home

"Think Pieces"
(free articles)

The Training Tipsheet
(biweekly e-zine)

Tipsheet Reprints

Case Studies
(specific client projects)

Will in 100 Words

7 Reasons NOT
to hire me

Best Training Practices
Will Kenny
3927 York Ave N
Robbinsdale, MN 55422
612-978-3050

Change Drivers and
the Training Function

an exercise for you and your staff to jumpstart strategic planning

Major change drivers in the external environment affect the needs of your internal customers, with powerful impacts on how you can serve the rest of the organization with training and employee communication. But it can be hard to pull back from hectic everyday demands to take a strategic view of how to respond to change. This discussion starter, used with individuals who develop and implement training in your organization, is a quick way to connect broad, external change drivers to the specific internal context they create, and to start talking about ways to respond to these forces for change.

Terms of Use

You can use this activity, and the downloadable forms that support it, internally in your organization for no fee, providing that the forms are not modified or edited, nor are they to be re-sold in any form.

Objectives

This is more of an awareness tool than anything else. Some good outcomes from this activity might include:

Anticipation of major real-world trends that can have significant impact on the company's fortunes, and on the health, and true usefulness, of the corporate university or training function.
Better listening for concerns, and support, from the rest of the company, outside of the training function.
Awareness of differences of opinion and urgency between training and non-training units.
Detection of habits and biases, in the sense that some training functions never consider cutting programs, or always assume that additional resources will appear when additional content/programs/courses are being developed.
Enhanced understanding of the context in which options for responding must be considered, including support from other units, and financial resources.

Appropriate Participants

Many departments will want to do this as part of a staff meeting, with their training staff. If you regularly use outside contractors to handle your training activities, include them in the discussion.

Note that participants do not necessarily have to have "training" in their job titles. Much corporate training is conducted by supervisors and managers, and the heads of specific functions also wrestle with training needs as they make plans for their units. Consider including some of these individuals in your discussion of appropriate training responses to broad change drivers in your environment.

How To . . .

This activity can be completed in 15 - 30 minutes, depending on how much discussion you allow. Very simply:

Determine what change drivers you want to discuss (suggestions below). If you have several drivers to consider, you may want to repeat the exercise several times with the same people (serial approach), or divide your group into subgroups that work side by side on different change drivers (parallel approach).
Assign change driver(s) to groups, and explain that everyone is going to provide quick reactions to the driver in terms of:

Anticipation: predicting the impact of this driver on the training function and on the company, as well as identifying "symptoms" (vocabulary) of its impact
Preparation: broadly considering whether the training function will expand or shrink offerings in response to the change, tweak content or delivery methods, or respond in other ways
Context: consider the support of the surrounding company that is available to the training function -- both "moral support" and resources -- as you choose the best of the options you have prepared

Have each individual complete his or her own Participant Form . They shouldn't try to overthink this, just go with their most immediate responses. This should take less than ten minutes.
Have individuals report out. If needed, you can use a Scribe Form to summarize responses.
If working with more than one subgroup, or more than one change driver, report the summarized responses to the group at large.

Key Discussion Points

What they know about life outside the training function or corporate university is important in itself. Did they have a harder time coming up with vocabulary, or choosing survey responses, when the questions pertained to other operating units rather than the training function?
"Don't Know" responses are important, but are probably underreported, with many participants rather reluctant to admit what they don't know about the rest of the company.
Differences between the level of concern, and the vocabulary, associated with the change driver in the training function versus the rest of the company are always interesting. You have to decide who is right, when the responses are different. Sometimes the corporate university and related departments (e.g., HR in general) pick up on certain trends before the rest of the company recognizes the problem. Other times, the training area is the last to realize that there is a significant threat, or even opportunity, out in the real world.
If the corporate university staff are confident of executive support, but not so confident, or frankly ignorant, of the degree of lower management support, that can be an extremely risky situation. Particularly in tight economic times, when all departments are struggling to find resources, the training function needs to be valued by the units who are closest to the front lines.

Change Drivers to Consider

We are generally after broad trends occurring in the "outside world" that will have an impact on the company's fortunes, or on the operation of the training function, or both. Here are a few to consider:

Demographics: Massive retirements of an aging population; shifts in skills and cultural orientation with an increasingly immigrant workforce.
Economic Cycles: right now, recession; special problems related to "bursting the bubble," whether dot-com or housing related industries; credit crunch; energy costs; food costs.
Going Green: environmental concerns, global warming.
New Sources of Competition: when Wal-Mart enters banking; when computer or telecommunications companies sell entertainment.
Regulation, Public Relations: does your industry face strong reactions, or significant interventions, from the public, the media, or the government?
Technology: could a major change in the use of technology radically transform the way your company operates?
Mergers & Acquisitions: is substantial consolidation likely in your industry? Mergers and acquisitions often run into trouble on corporate culture issues.