Effective training and development programs are essential for companies to remain competitive and retain good employees. They make a significant contribution to individual and collective success.
But evidence suggests that training and development can and should make a much greater contribution than they do today. We have asked hundreds of learning professionals and business managers the following question: “After a typical corporate training program, what percentage of learners apply what they learned well enough and long enough to improve their performance?”
Most estimates fall between 15 and 25%. In other words, learning professionals and business managers know that a great deal of training fails to achieve its raison d’etre—improved performance. It’s the elephant in the room, the biggest dirty little non-secret in talent development.
It’s not really a failure of training, of course (although management views it that way). It is a failure of learning transfer—the critical process of putting learning to work. And that’s not news either; the transfer problem has been well-known for at least 50 years.
So why haven’t we done more about it?
In the second edition of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning, we posit that the two reasons we haven’t tackled the “elephant in the room” problem of learning transfer are: 1) No one “owns” the problem—it falls in a no-man’s-land between training and management; and 2) until recently, there was no practical system or process for post-training follow-through that could be applied efficiently to large numbers of learners.
We are convinced that improving learning transfer is the single greatest opportunity to improve the value delivered by training and development programs and that learning professionals need to take the lead in addressing the issue—for their own survival and that of their companies.
Dr. Roy Pollock is the Chief Learning Officer for the Fort Hill Company and co-author of The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning; How to Turn Training and Development into Business Results; and the recently-published Getting Your Money’s Worth from Training and Development. Dr. Pollock has extensive experience in education, line management, and strategy development. He received his B.A. from Williams College, his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree with highest honors and his Ph.D. degree from Cornell University.
Photo credit: Brian Snelson
In assessing what we desire from training & development (t&d) it might be helpful to keep in mind Malcolm Gladwell's (Outliers) discussion of the 10,000 hour rule. If we want high levels of performance and expertise, we need to think about what it really takes to achieve this in anyone person or groups of people. My experience is most t&d is focused on an "intervention" or "event" not a process. My observation in working with technical people is that the experience required attribute is implicitly acknowledged in their development into world class technical leaders. I am disappointed that I have not come across any helpful discussion about this "what it takes" to how "we provide it" for leadership roles.
Yes, there seems to be an abundance of training meetings, activities, and other programs but there really isn't much follow-through. If there was, there wouldn't be so much money and time wasted.
The gambling experience you have at this casinò online is usually going to be what you make of it by how smart you wager.