Align Job Training with Business Goals
If you’re working in corporate training, job training, or whatever you want to call it, you’re working for the company that pays your paycheck. This is true if you’re an employee or an outside consultant.
What kind of goals? Well, there can be several, and this is where doing an HPI-styled organizational analysis and/or a Needs Assessment comes into play. But in general, the goals will be the kind of big ones you’d expect:
- Creating a better product
- Reducing costs and wastes
- Increasing revenue and profits
- Decreasing liabilities and risk
- Increasing opportunities and capacities
As an instructional designer, it’s easy to get hyper-focused on whether or not people learned, if they developed skills, if they retained information, or even if they transferred information and skills to the job.
But what’s most essential is if the work you did helped the organization make progress toward one of those goals. Learning, retention, skill development, and learner engagement may be means to that end, but they’re not the desired end themselves.
And you’ll also want to be able to evaluate the learning solutions you create to demonstrate to business owners that your solution did have a desired positive effect.
In future articles, we’ll extend this conversation further. We’ll talk about how you can learn what the organization’s goals are (hint: ask business owners and managers). We’ll talk about how, once you’ve identified those goals, you can function as a performance consultant to help the organization reach the goals (another hint: sometimes training is the right answer, but sometimes it’s not and there are better solutions). And we’ll talk about how you can evaluate learning solutions to demonstrate the positive effect they had in helping the organization reach its goals.
For now, keep in mind that the organization you work for is paying you to help them reach their goals (or they should be). So your first task is to gain a better understanding of those goals, both now and in general and in the future, when you receive particular training or performance improvement requests.