Pushing Rewind: Identifying 'Bad' Training and Tips to Make It Better

Experts admit that only around 10% of corporate training is effective due to inadequate planning and preparation and because most training initiatives and programs lack the proper context.

When training programs are ineffective, they yield a low return on investment, waste an organization’s resources, have the potential to further disengage or confuse employees, and can even make employees more unproductive or quit altogether. And as an L&D professional, when you discover that one of your organization’s training programs was poorly developed and implemented, you’ll want to know what to do.
Here are more details on how you can undo the bad effects of a bad training program.

First Identify the Telltale Signs that Your Training Is Bad

Before you delete or overhaul an entire training program and are convinced that it’s terrible, make 100% sure that it is indeed a bad training program. Here are some telltale signs that your training is bad.

• Employees consistently receive low scores on training assessments.
• Employees quit the training program halfway through and regularly don’t complete it in its entirety or consistently skip steps.
• Over time, fewer employees sign up for the training if it’s optional.
• The training negatively affects an employee’s day-to-day performance at work or has no effect on it at all.
• There is no evidence that employees implement what they should have learned in your training while they’re on the job.
• Employees continue to make mistakes or errors that your training was intended to rectify.
• It starts to cost a lot more time and money to create materials for your training program and to promote it, while registration and attendance rates and assessment scores continue to decrease.
• Employees constantly complain about the training program and never seem to enjoy it.

If your training program is exhibiting more than three of the telltale signs above, it’s probably time to scrap the program altogether and develop a new one. Below are some tips for developing new and more effective training programs to reverse the bad effects of the bad training programs your employees are experiencing.
Unfortunately, sometimes the only way to reverse the negative effects of a bad training program is to develop an entirely new and more effective training program, along with some other best practices. Continue reading to learn more.

Tips for Creating New and More Effective Training Programs

Determine training needs by linking programs to organizational goals. If you want to give your training programs the right context for your learners and your organization, you’ll need to link them to larger organizational goals.
For instance, sales training programs should be linked to your organization’s goals to increase revenue with a certain product or service, and your customer service training should be tied to your organization’s goal to increase overall rates of customer satisfaction, and so on.
Assign KPIs and trackable metrics to each training program. When developing or revamping a bad training program, assign key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that indicate it’s performing well or better than it was before, and constantly make sure it’s accomplishing its organizational goals.
For example, track things like how many employees sign up for the training after a month, how many employees improve their sales performance ratings after they complete a new sales training, the increase in revenue your sales department experiences, etc. Tracking such metrics and indicators will let you know if your training program is truly effective or not.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post for more tips on how to create new and more effective training programs.