As the year comes to an end, I always start thinking about where I am with my current goals, and what goals I will set for the upcoming year. This is always a good time for you and your company to look at their training and performance goals and make sure they are properly aligned. So, in that spirit, over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some customer examples of training and performance goals.
When I was working on an assessment project for a large aerospace company, I started off with what seemed like a simple question to the Director of Training, “What is your group’s primary mission?” To which I got a quick and definitive answer, “To deliver 834,000 hours of training.” After digging some more, I was relieved to find out that there were secondary goals that defined the quality of training and satisfaction of the learners, which was good. When interviewing other people in the Training department, they were all able to immediately repeat their mission exactly, “To deliver 834,000 hours of training.”
So, what’s wrong with that you say? Well, none of them could provide me with specific information on how deliverying 834,000 hours of training would improve the performance of the company. To make things even better, when I suggested that by using a combination of blended learning, competency development, and targeted performance goals and measurement, they could deliver the same effective amount training in less than 600,000 hours, they were very concerned. “But we won’t deliver 834,000 hours of training, we won’t get our bonuses!” was the loud response. The core problem was that the training department was measured and compensated soley on their ability to deliver hours of “butts-in-seats,” with no measurement or tracking of the impact that had on the company.
So, before you get all excited that your department has solid, well-defined training goals for the next year, make sure you can also explain how those goals will drive the performance of the company. If you can’t explain it, and have no process to measure that impact, your goal setting is not done.
[…] I’ve had direct experience with this as I mentioned before in my post “When Training Goals are a Bad Thing”, and I can attest to the fact that it is hard for a training department to give up on it’s activity based goals (especially when they are compensated on them) and focus on results based goals. […]
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