Corporate Training Tips & Tricks—Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth, Book Excerpt #3
NOTE: The following article is taken, with minor changes, from Corporate Training Tips & Tricks: Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth by Katrina Baker. It is one of three articles by Microassist Senior Learning Architect Kevin Gumienny. To hear more training tidbits from Kevin and other learning and development professionals, we encourage you to get your copy of the book from Amazon—and to stay tuned to this Learning Dispatch blog for additional excerpts!
Take Training Yourself: The Value of Formal Training in Today’s Workforce
Are you a training manager? Perhaps an instructional designer? Or maybe a learning management system administrator? Perhaps all of the above?
Get formal training yourself.
Yes, you can Google every problem and slowly educate yourself here and there with help columns, advice articles, and forum discussions. Such a piecemeal approach may help you solve individual, particular problems. But is it going to revolutionize your approach?
Elevate Both Yourself and Your Team with Leadership Training
Are you newly supervising a group of employees? Then your effectiveness for your company is no longer based on your individual contribution. Instead, it’s based on how effectively you can motivate your employees. How do you do this? You can replicate what your past bosses have done with you—but, like parenting, that often ends up in replicating old cycles. People have been investigating what makes for effective management for decades. Formal training can help give you the tools to leverage your employees so that you are all successful.
Document Your Effectiveness in a Meaningful Way
Are you an individual contributor? Have you considered a professional certification? This not only provides you with the tools to be effective yourself, but also helps give your approach weight with your stakeholders—when you can explain to your subject matter expert that reading the screen to someone has been demonstrated to reduce learning effectiveness, as measured by retention analysis, that might be the leverage you need to create buy-in for an effective learning approach. In addition, people attach meaning to certifications. A project manager with a PMP will often be regarded more highly than one without, regardless of practical effectiveness.
Weigh the Long-Term Benefits
And yet…you’re not getting enough money to design effective training for company employees. How are you going to get enough to go to training yourself? Many conference sites tackle this question head-on, and provide arguments that you can use to persuade your supervisor.
And, sometimes, there might be no alternative to footing the bill yourself, both in terms of money and time. That’s a call you have to make. One thing to bear in mind might be that certification won’t just help you in your current position, but may very well give you the needed edge when you go looking for that next, better position.
Additional Resources
- Book Excerpt #1—Corporate Training Development: Beware Sniper Stakeholders.
Unknown stakeholders can quash your elearning project right before launch. As featured in “Corporate Training Tips & Tricks,” here’s how to anticipate them. - Book Excerpt #2—Draw on Other Fields.
If you’re going to run an affordable, effective training department on little budget, you have to leverage excellence where you can find it. - Corporate Training Tips and Tricks contains the collective wisdom of over 200 L&D professionals and industry leaders. For more on the book, Katrina, and her company, ROFL (Resources of Fun Learning), catch Microassist CEO Sanjay Nasta’s interview with her during the January 2017 Elearning Council’s Leaders in Learning podcast.
Sure, we can develop curriculum and learning for your organization. But to nurture your own skill sets, consider one of our many technical and productivity skills training offerings. Check out our Classroom Training section to learn more.
Image credit: Gratisography
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