Copyright © 1998, Nanette Miner
Permission is granted to reproduce or excerpt this article if proper credit is given in this format:
Reprinted/excerpted with permission. The Training Doctor. Author: Nanette Miner. www.trainingdr.com

How to Provide Training Without Having a Training Department

By Nanette Miner, EdD

Let's face it. Training is viewed as an overhead expense. It shouldn't be, but it is. When a company considers the idea of starting a training department in order to keep their employee's skills up - they realize that they'll need a training manager, perhaps a training coordinator or assistant, a training room, and all sorts of record keeping. When they consider that starting a training department is easily a $60,000 endeavor, or more, keeping their employees un-skilled doesn't seem like such a bad option. Unfortunately it's not a compelling argument to tell a company that the mistakes made by untrained workers can easily cost more than $60,000 per year. It's true, but it's hard to make this argument when the costs of the mistakes come in dribs and drabs.

A friend of mine recently hired an assistant at $8.00/hour to do basic administrative duties. One of these duties included creating a mailing list of customers using a word processing program with a mailing list function. The creation of the mailing list took three hours. For some inexplicable reason, the list was irretrievable. Rather than 'wasting' the three hours of work that were already put into it, a consultant was called in to see if the file could be salvaged somehow. The consultant spent an hour, at $50/hour, and concluded that the file wasn't salvageable and the work would need to be re-done. The work was re-done - at the cost of another three hours. The result? Same problem. The cause? The assistant didn't know how to create a data file that was retrievable by the mailing list function. Total cost? Nearly $100 in labor and loads and loads of wasted mailing labels. While wasting a hundred dollars is frustrating, it doesn't balance out against a $60,000 training department. But what if every assistant in your company were making a $100 mistake this day? This week?

Employers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, poorly trained workers are costing the company money each and every day. On the other hand, starting a training department is a costly endeavor and a large up-front cash outlay that may not have truly visible results. I'm pleased to tell you that there are solutions to this dilemma, and they exist all around us. Below is a list of resources for providing training to your employees without having to start a training function within your company.

Public seminar companies

These companies provide all sorts of topics and courses for differing levels of proficiency. You can find everything from how to use a software package, to how to design training, to how to manage a project. Seminar companies hold one or two day courses in hotels in your area. They provide the instructor and the training materials. These courses are open to the public so you will be mixed with participants from other companies in your area. Check your mail. You probably receive these flyers all the time.

Local colleges

Many colleges are realizing that there is an untapped market in the individual that needs to gain a skill - not earn a degree. Community colleges are especially adept at working with local businesses to provide timely and necessary courses. Many colleges will also send instructors out to your site to conduct the classes, if you have a big enough group. If there are just one or two employees that need training, check the non-credit or continuing education catalog of your local college.

Videos

Watching "experts" perform and modeling their behaviors and techniques is one of the fastest ways to learn a new skill. Especially an interpersonal skill. There's a vast difference between reading about how to close a sale and watching an expert close a sale, then dissecting what they did at each step along the way. Videos also provide the luxury of just-in-time training and are always available for review when a trainee may have forgotten a particular point. Videos can be purchases from a training supply house, or you can create your own. You don't need expensive equipment or professional actors. Simply video tape the best people, doing the job the right way, explaining it step by step a they complete the process, and voila!, you have a training program.

The web

A few well organized on-line learning sites have sprung up that offer courses when you want to take them. Sign-up, sign-on and learn what you want, when you want to learn it. No need to leave the building. Heck, no need to leave your desk. Many of the self-paced courses allow you to stop and start again at any point you wish. If you grasp the information quickly, you progress through the class more quickly. No waiting for the laggards to catch up.

On-the-job training

Chances are, there is someone within your company that already knows what other people need to know. If the skill is specific to a certain job or function, it's wise to have the incumbent provide mentoring or on-the-job training. If it's a more "general" skill you're looking to train for, consider a brown bag lunch seminar conducted by your in-house expert. Or, ask your expert to disseminate the information in short 5-10 sentence e-mail messages over the course of a month. The learning will be slower, but the benefits are that "trainees" will be able to learn the information in manageable chunks and they'll be able to save the e-mail messages for future reference.

Vendors

Vendors are a great source of information as well as resources (samples, brochures, "hot-to" information). Many of your vendors already have training programs in place to train their own people - ask if you can borrow them or pay a fee to use them. Or, have your vendors/salespeople conduct the training for you. I know of restaurants that have had the wine salesman conduct a course on the different types of wines, how to present and uncork a bottle, how to pour correctly, etc. I also know of a shoe retailer who had all their athletic footwear vendors hand over every bit of literature and any videos the vendor had. From this data, an informative course on the basics of athletic shoe construction was created for the retailer's salespeople.

Consultants

There are two very good reasons to use consultants. The first is that you utilize them on an ad-hoc basis. This means no long-term commitment. Use them when you need them and "dismiss" them when you are through. No worries about taxes, unemployment compensation, salary, benefits, etc. The second reason is that you are hiring expertise exactly where you need it. You're not assigning your best manager the task of training and hoping that s/he can figure out how to do it. There is no learning curve to accommodate. When you hire a consultant, they hit the ground running.

While the thought of establishing a training function within your company is daunting, there are numerous ways to accomplish training without adding the function to your organization. The mistake would be to not provide training at all. There's a well-known saying in the field of training and employee development, "What's worse than training your employees and losing them? Not training them and keeping them."