Training Gap Analysis 101

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Purdal Mya

Training new hires in the tech industry has become a challenging pursuit among training and development professionals. As technology endlessly evolves, training objectives have to follow suit. This can cause large gaps in your training program if they are not addressed early and often. Conducting a Training Gap Analysis is a great way to stay on top of the dynamic beast that is your tech organization.

What is a Training Gap Analysis?

Essentially, a Training Gap Analysis describes the difference between the job skills that your people are currently gaining or improving through training and the skills that they will need in the immediate future to keep your company competitive.

The idea behind any Gap Analysis is to create a bridge between where your organization is and where it needs to be. In training, it is about making what we train as close to what actually happens on the job.

Who do you conduct Training Gap Analysis with?

Use a pool of diverse employees from all walks of your company. This will improve the results of your analysis, extract vital insight from your workforce, and allow you to see how training impacts everyone in the company. Look to all employees, regardless of seniority, including:

Experienced Employees: Employees who have been around your company for a long period of time have seen both your training programs and your company at large evolve and can hopefully help make suggestions based on their experience.
Managers/Supervisors: Employees who have direct reports are great to leverage, they see the benefits and obstacles of the current program in their own employees.
Newer Employees: Employees who have started in the last six months are my favourite to work with – they have recently gone through your onboarding program and have had a chance to get comfortable in their job. Ask them what they liked, what they found redundant, what they would like to see in the future.

Why conduct Training Gap Analysis?

Carrying out a Training Gap Analysis will help your organization from many different angles, including:

Sending the Same Message: Too often do new employees come out of training where they are being told one thing and told another once they get on the job. This will help all parties promote the same message.
Identifying Trends: If those you converse with during your analysis are all saying the same thing, it can help prioritize transformations moving forward.
Strengthening Relationships: Everyone wants to feel like they are cared for and considered, this is an easy way to build a strong relationship with the rest of the company. Let them be heard, and deliver on what they ask for.

Now there are many ways to go about completing a Training Gap Analysis but the most important message I am trying to push is for your organization to comprehend the significance of completing these analysis. The accuracy and efficiency of your Training Program weighs heavily on the success of your employees.

Purdal Mya is a Corporate Trainer in Intelex Technologies’ Professional Development Office (PDO). Reach him at purdal.mya@intelex.com or use the comments section below.

True competence starts with strategy

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

We’ve discussed how training is not competence and how compromised employee competence can hurt all aspects of business performance. So, what do you do about it? Today I’d like to discuss a very simple approach to developing effective training and cultivating workplace competence.

While a high level of employee competence makes the difference between a simply serviceable workforce and one that truly excels, many might contest that achieving competence is easier said than done. This is true; properly training staff can be a significant burden on any organization. Simply providing training, tracking training, and measuring competence post-training involves substantial costs, multiple dedicated, full-time trainers, depending on the organization’s size – burdens that are significantly reduced if not entirely eliminated for organizations that use the right training tracking and management software. Coupling these software tools with a training strategy will generate results for any organization of any size, under any budgetary constraints.

To that end, here are some essential tips for improving your workplace trainign programs and enhancing employee competence.

Start with a training strategy. Conduct a basic needs assessment to define what the requirements are for all employee groups and determine resource and content availability so you know who is available to provide training and what materials exist or need to be created. The results of these investigations will inform your implementation strategy. Plan to leverage training management software to execute your strategy, and ensure it is scalable software that can accompany corporate growth.
Evaluate your time constraints and resources. Do you need an employee up and running as soon as possible, or can your training resources take time to train the individual and gradually integrate him or her into the workforce? If you don’t want to hire and maintain a team of trainers to implement your training plan and conduct training and competency exercises as your organization grows, use a training software tool. Yes, training and competency-building is a significant investment, but it cannot be reiterated enough how time-consuming and resource-heavy thorough training can be without streamlined software. Even the simple act of tracking training manually – that is, without a training tracking tool – will eat up unnecessary resources on a daily basis and grind your training program down to a lumbering pace.
Define goals and track progress. While this may be one of the most crucial aspects in a successful training strategy, it is also one of the most overlooked. Business leaders often think that training is nebulous and too difficult to track, and this factor might be the greatest contributor to the gulf between training and competence described above. Yet it is quite simple to track the success of a training strategy.
Get a training software solution that can capture and streamline key performance indicators (KPI), such as dates and times for training, instructors, cost per delivery, attendance, and accountability. It is also ideal to have functionality to automatically assign courses (e.g. Brian is hired in the manufacturing department and automatically assigned a group of required courses), reminders and escalations, generate reports, and produce detailed analytics on training performance.
Build custom quizzes. Critically, you’ll want the capacity to generate customized quizzes to test employees on course content to ensure they have actually absorbed required information. This step is generally overlooked, yet is one of the most crucial aspects of building competency as opposed to having employees simply ‘sit in a classroom’. Notably, possessing all of these documented metrics will help you circumvent potential legal calamities by enabling you to easily prove all employees were thoroughly trained.
Calculate ROI and get buy-in. An underlying component to a successful training strategy is buy-in, and not just from senior management and those that hold the purse strings, but across the entire organization. As you prepare your training strategy, create case studies, define scenarios that illustrate the consequences of compromised training – as well as the costs, time and resources associated with a manual training management system as opposed to a software-based system – and calculate training ROI to build a convincing case for a streamlined, competency-focused training strategy.

Do you have ideas on how to better ensure training programs improve workforce competency? Write me or post your ideas in the comments section below.

Want to learn more about building effective training programs and generating true competency among your workforce? Check our white paper, Cultivating Competence: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results.

The organizational costs of incompetence

Posted on July 11, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

Yesterday we talked about how being trained doesn’t necessarily equate with competence. Today we’ll take a brief look at how that discrepancy can impact organizational performance.

To start, take a look at the picture to the right. Now, by no means are we casting aspersions on the capabilities of these two able-bodied young men by implying that they are incompetent, as the title above alludes. However, given the tremendous level of accuracy, acuity and precision required every day in their individual roles within their manufacturing setting, it’s a good entry point for this discussion to consider how one hole in their training could, at any point, on any day, engender compromised competence, thereby resulting in a possible environmental, health or safety-related disaster or impact product quality.

Training touches every part of your business

The benefits of a training program that cultivates actual competence are multifaceted and impact all aspects of corporate performance. Of course, on a day-to-day basis, competence reduces the probability of errors in all job functions, thereby boosting productivity and profitability. But above and beyond that, from a corporate perspective every organization has a moral, business and legal obligation to their employees in terms of education, and a good training strategy will address each facet in a comprehensive way.

For example, a business has a moral obligation to ensure employees are sufficiently trained in their job function so as not to suffer injuries or encounter preventable illnesses on the job. In business terms, should an employee get injured or become sick at work there is the potential of a variety of costs that may impact the organization’s bottom line, including claims, lost time, and fines associated with regulatory infractions. From a legal perspective, if an employee is injured in, let’s say a manufacturing setting, they could initiate a lawsuit against the organization and claim that they were insufficiently trained. In such a situation, if the business could not produce documented evidence to clearly prove the employee was provided with required training, it would be on the hook for substantial damages and other consequences, not to the always mention unavoidable legal fees.

Competence boosts retention

Beyond the business-critical advantages to a comprehensive training strategy outlined above, a powerful byproduct of such an approach is, quite simply, that a competent employee is a happy employee. By ensuring employees are fully prepared to appropriately fulfill all of their job requirements, they suffer less stress over the tactical elements of their job, and enjoy greater confidence and increased motivation to do their job better.

Further, organizations that take a holistic, continual approach to training and skill-building will ultimately cultivate the sentiment among its workforce that the employer genuinely cares for the employee. While this all leads a higher level of morale among staff and an enhanced focus on quality, the most notable benefit is that retention rates will be greatly improved, and attrition rates will fall. Happy, competent employees who feel they are adequately equipped to excel in their duties are less inclined to leave their organization and more inclined to contribute to their employer’s success.

So how do you do it? Well, you start with a training strategy, the subject of tomorrow’s post.

Is your trained employee competent?

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Paul Leavoy

It happens all the time. A worker makes a misstep in his or her day-to-day duties. The mistake leads to a serious injury, compromised product quality, negative environmental impacts, or even a fatality. “But they were trained,” the supervisor responsible for the employee in question objects. Trained, indeed – but were they competent in their job?

This situation is a regular occurrence in workplaces around the world and it speaks to a widespread and persistent discrepancy in many conventional approaches to training management: the gulf between simply delivering training and ensuring actual competency. Organizations that have achieved success know the value of a comprehensive, robust training program. Streamlined onboarding of new employees and ongoing training – and, critically, training tracking – throughout the course of their professional development can, if delivered effectively, lead to a more effective and responsible workforce, and greater retention rates. After all, while the costs associated with recruiting, training, support and professional development can be great, any seasoned business owner knows it is even more expensive to lose those employees.

A widespread problem, however, is that too often employers equate training with competency. They assume that since an employee has sat in a classroom and completed a course, that they are competent – a very inaccurate presumption. The following misconceptions contribute to some traditional views on corporate training:

Any and all training is good training, so we ought to train for the sake of training.
Simply having employees sit in a classroom means they are competent.
The availability of training material is sufficient enough to induce learning.
Subject-matter experts (SME) are able to train other staff based on tenure (that is, the notion that longer-serving employees are more capable of delivering training).
That robust training is not necessarily worth the investment and ROI is too difficult to capture.

As with the mistaken belief that training is tantamount to competence, all these assumptions lead to false conclusions. But above and beyond how these misconceptions are engendered it is important to clarify what is actually meant by competence in an organizational context. Essentially, ‘competence’ refers to an employee’s ability to do their job properly. But establishing competency within an organization is not something that just happens, nor is it something that will be necessarily produced by the provision of an otherwise robust and seemingly comprehensive training program. Instead, a systematic approach featuring a nuanced training strategy is an essential prerequisite for employee competence.

Competency certainly sounds like something that would be an advantageous element to cultivate within a corporate culture, if not an essential element of doing business. However, the intrinsic value of a training program that engenders competency is not always immediately apparent to upper management whose buy-in is critical to the success of any training strategy.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss how training impacts different areas of business performance, and on Thursday we’ll talk Training and Competency Strategy.

In the heat of the moment

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Maxim Ivlev

‘Water, rest and shade’ are the three key components U.S Secretary of Labor, Hilda L. Solis, will be focusing on promoting to outdoor workers in the upcoming summer of 2012. It’s all part of OSHA’s recently launched national outreach initiative to raise awareness over the dangers of working outside in hot weather.

Every year, heat exhaustion reaches thousands of outdoor workers in industries such as roofing, construction, transportation, utilities, and landscaping, to name a few. While onsite, what employees may initially discover with simple heat rashes and cramps can often result in severe heat stroke or even fatality.

Dr. David Michaels, assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, says these are workplace hazards that can be easily avoided with simple precautions. “Anyone who works outside is at risk”, adds Michaels, “Drinking plenty of water and taking frequent breaks in cool, shaded areas are incredibly important in the hot summer months.” To add to this awareness, OSHA has developed heat illness educational materials in English and Spanish, as well as a curriculum to be used for workplace training to provide more knowledge to employees who are at risk.

Top 10 essential tips to ensure top-notch training tracking

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Kristy Sadler

Gone are the days that monitoring and tracking employee training is a nice to have. Maintaining this information plays a big part in both having visibility into the competency of your employees and in mitigating the corporate risk that can devastate a company if it’s not in place.

And organizations use this information in multiple ways. If you have had any exposure to the ISO set of standards, you’ll know that pretty much every standard outlined by ISO (be it 14001, 9001, 26000, 50001 etc.) includes training as an essential component. So if you want to be certified or just conform to the standard, you better make sure that your training tracking house is in order.

But it doesn’t stop at ISO standards, look at the regulatory bodies around occupational health and safety, specifically OSHA in the US and WSIB and other agencies in Canada and around the world; not adhering to training requirements with relation to workplace safety can result in significant injury, possible fatalities and significant fines and loss of reputation.

If you aren’t sure where to start or maybe you just want to streamline your existing processes, this top 10 list can help ensure you are have a firm handle on tracking training in your organization:

Plan for it at the outset. Locking employees into their required training courses as part of their induction process is essential in making sure that training is ingrained within your organization.
Incorporate it into your processes. Ensure when you are promoting individuals or moving them within your organization that their new contract comes with a section that details the required training for their new role .
Reward it. Offer incentives for employees who score well on their training or complete it before their required time frame. Have a {insert role} leader board that highlights top performers. Even consider allowing those employees a role i n training others.
Test for it. Don’t assume that because you’ve trained someone that they’ve actually learned. You have to test and track competency to ensure that it has all sunk in.
Track it. As your workforce grows or people come and go it can be difficult work to keep track of who has taken which course, how they have scored and what gaps exist in training. A spreadsheet can get unruly quickly and is prone to error while a training tracking software system like Intelex works perfectly for this purpose (*bonus – it also allows you to schedule all of your employee training – see point #1).
Repeat it. Your long-term employees can easily forget the training that they went through years ago; designing and scheduling refresher courses for these individuals can help keep their skills up to date and ensure they are passing on correct processes and procedures to newer employees.
Set it and forget it. Having a system in place that ensures an employee in a particular role has a series of training courses assigned to them and if they don’t take the training required, their boss is notified, then their boss’s boss, helps to make sure that things don’t slip through the cracks.
Consolidate it. If you don’t already, consider having one person hold overall accountability for the training program. You’ll likely need departmental champions to manage the specific training needs for their functions but having one person that works with those champions to ensure you’re following these 10 steps can be a big help.
Communicate it. This might seem pretty straight forward but if employees don’t understand exactly what they are responsible for and why it is important with regards to training, the likelihood that they’ll take it seriously will be diminished.
Make visibility easy. If you have to look in multiple places or consulting multiple people to get a full picture of how your training program is running, you are making it too difficult and opening up the opportunity for error.

More than likely you already have several of these points in place, particularly if you are in one of the industries that are prone to workplace accidents and injuries. But if you need help streamlining your training, our Training Management software system can help manage at least 8 of these 10 steps. To learn more visit our Training Management product page or request a demonstration of the solution.

The pros of bottom-up training methodologies

Posted on August 31, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

As opposed to a top-down training methodology discussed last week, a bottom-up approach to training management relies on creativity, collaboration and communication, as well as a degree of organizational flexibility and agility. Essentially, under this approach, executive management defines high-level corporate and training goals. Smaller teams are responsible for defining targets that contribute to these goals and configuring training regimens accordingly. Team leads and managers are accountable to their supervisors, but teams themselves are graced with the flexibility to adjust training and procedural approaches on the basis of both their ‘up-close-and-personal’ knowledge of the processes they are exposed to most intimately and regularly, and the fresh insights that accompany new additions to the team who are recently trained or in the midst of training. The net result is teams, departments and the organization at large is able to achieve defined targets and goals more effectively and expeditiously.

In spite of the apparent benefits, bottom-up approaches can be difficult to adopt. Firstly, while in effect bottom-up approaches do not necessarily relinquish senior management of actual control, they often generate the perception of requiring managers, directors and executive staff to cede control. Also, the migration to a bottom-up approach from an entrenched, top-down approach will often generate an amount of institutional friction as it represents a degree of cultural change. In some cases, it can be difficult to convince established management/executives that a bottom-up approach ought to be tried.

That stated, the benefits of bottom-up training approaches are vast and include:

Common Goals: Since trainees and trainers are, by the nature of bottom-up training, driven by targets that contribute to organization-wide goals, they are more inclined to appreciate their role within the organization and understand how training relates to the accomplishment of organizational objectives.
Enhanced Communication: Bottom-up approaches thrive on communication. With top-down training approaches, trainers and trainees are handed sets and subsets of tasks that, in isolation, don’t engender a coherent sense of where a department or organization is headed and why. However, when those tasks are framed by targets, which in turn are framed by goals, employees are encouraged to go out of their comfort zone, interact with individuals from other teams and departments within the context of common goals, adopting more effective and holistic approaches as a result. This dynamic bleeds into training as trainers and teams craft more focused, nuanced training programs that are driven by big-picture thinking.
Continuous Improvement: Bottom-up methodologies invite all affected parties to provide feedback and proposed improvements on training programs to ensure they are as effective and efficient as possible. This include not only feedback from existing employees who may have informed perspectives and thoughtful suggestions; it also includes fresh insights from those who are new to the organization and have recently completed training or, in some cases, are in the midst of training. While obviously all suggestions from a new hire would not be immediately incorporated into an established program, the potential value of an outside perspective, unencumbered of the ‘corporate myopia’ that tends to afflict individuals and teams that have worked within an organization for protracted durations, and this is accomplished by leveraging individual talent more effectively.
Improved Morale: No successful business leader should need to be convinced of the virtue of a high level of employee morale. It boosts productivity, efficiency, retention, innovation and, ultimately, the bottom line. Bottom-up training approaches engender improved morale in three critical ways: Employees realize their insights and suggestions will be heard and valued; they will make the effort to communicate suggestions since they won’t see a futility in attempting to foster change; and they will have a greater level of job satisfaction by understanding how their work contributes to the whole.

While the benefits of a bottom-up training approach are clear, recall that the virtue of a top-down approach is simplicity. Bottom-up approaches can be more difficult to implement and manage, given they feature an array of insights, suggestions, proposed changes and approvals. However, training management software tools exist to streamline and prioritize information and also minimize the financial burden of any approach to training management.

For more on how to adopt an effective bottom-up training methodology, check out Cultivating Competence: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results, an Intelex white paper.

The cons of top-down training

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

A training program’s effectiveness is determined by an organization’s chosen methodology for training new and existing employees. The most common and traditional approach to training management is also, on the surface, the most logical: In the traditional “Top-Down” approach, HR representatives, executives and other senior parties within an organization define the content, structure and objectives of training programs while managers and supervisors ensure new and existing employees complete requisite courses and fulfill training requirements.

This approach is, for many reasons, the most immediately appealing to senior management and human resources. Quite sensibly, it allows executive teams to structure the training regimens that, in principle, will endow employees with the skills and knowledge they need to perform their jobs to the best of their ability. In actuality, while this approach enables an organization to confidently meet regulatory, corporate, or standards-driven (e.g. ISO 9001) training requirements, it does not necessarily improve performance and cultivate employee competence.

While an appreciable measure of simplicity is inherent in the top-down approach, it is accompanied by a number of potential and business-critical weaknesses:

Lack of Cross-Team Communication: Just as quality management pioneer W. Edward Deming argued that thorough quality management is cultivated when all contributors have a sense of how their actions play into the bigger picture, organizations are best equipped to achieve high-level business goals when all individuals and teams have an understanding of how individual and team efforts contribute to the organization’s success. Isolated perspectives don’t give employees a sense of meaning in their jobs, and fail to motivate individuals to incorporate a sense of their organization’s mission into their day-to-day responsibilities. Cultivating a sense of purpose begins with training, and when training programs are dictated from the top, limited to narrowly defined tasks, and insensitive to how teams work together and how an operation functions as a whole, cross-team communication is inhibited and employees aren’t as motivated to work together to achieve organizational goals.
Protracted Management of Change: Any growing or established organization will have to handle change as departments expand or are restructured, as employees and senior staff come and go, and as improvements to existing structures are identified and implemented. Top-down training approaches ill-equip businesses to handle changes, especially in large organizations where a series of hierarchical tiers must be surmounted before essential training modifications are implemented.
Stagnation of Creativity: Employees directly exposed to the processes they execute day after day are the most likely to devise more creative ways to improve and streamline the systems they interact with, since they interact with those systems more closely than others in the organization. And in most cases, lessons learned and identified process improvements can be mapped directly back to training and leveraged to better prepare incoming personnel to do their jobs more effectively. Yet with top-down training approaches, new, useful ideas face an array of organizational hurdles that must be overcome before they can be institutionalized and rolled into new training. Not only does this inhibit the pace – or even existence – of continuous improvement in training management, it stifles the cultivation of creativity as employees are dissuaded from proposing new ideas because they expect they will be met with ‘business-as-usual’ resistance.

In addition to the above-mentioned disadvantages, a top-down training methodology also tends to stagnate the pool of talent an organization can draw on to improve training. And critically, top-down approaches often lack built-in mechanisms to ensure employees are both trained and competent in their job functions. In essence, it is the difference between employees being taught how to push a button and actually applying valuable lessons in their day-to-day responsibilities in order to fulfill an organizational goal.

With the right metrics, evaluation tools and feedback mechanisms, either approach can be used to positive effect. But in the 21st century’s economic climate of increasing innovation, creativity and competition, the top-down approach is beginning to show its age.

For more on how to adopt an effective training methodology, check out Cultivating Competence: Leveraging Training Tools for Measurable Results, an Intelex white paper.

Training and quality: peas in a pod

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

According to experts, though the connection can seem distant or indirect, proper training has a clear impact on quality, just as it has a clear impact on every aspect of business.

As business process design and ISO 9001 expert Chris Anderson noted in a blog post on the top ten root causes of business problems, poor training is the number one source of business issues. Two decades of business management led Anderson to place poor training ahead of poor methods, poor employee placement and poor engineering and design on the list.

“People don’t make mistakes,” Anderson insists in the post. “Systems make mistakes.”

And just as product and service quality issues arise from systemic deficiencies, employee performance — and its impact on quality — is correlative to the integrity of training management systems.

Training and quality are best thought of as peas in a pod — inseparable elements that should always be mentioned in the same sentence. Even if an organization feels it is 100 per cent where it needs to be from a quality perspective, training is essentially what got it there.

Best-in-class companies have thorough, streamlined training management programs (most often leveraged by software) that deliver measurable results. For those that overlook thorough training, it might be due to lack of time and other resources. However, such an oversight often leads to harsh ramifications: product recalls, brand damage, injuries, fatalities and bankruptcy.

Prevention, training central to Ontario OHS reforms

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Paul Leavoy

Ontario is poised to dramatically rework how it manages occupational health and safety.

Earlier this month Bill 160 was amended by the province’s standing committee on social policy and is now headed to the provincial legislature for a third reading and vote, meaning it could be law by as early as June. The proposed bill flows from the work of an expert panel formed in the wake of a string of workplace-related deaths across the province.

Focused on training and prevention, some of the bill’s key elements are as follows:

Training standards: The bill would call upon the Minister of Labour to set training program standards and ‘approve’ compliant organizations accordingly.
Training provider: In addition to minimum standards for training programs, those who administer training would also be required to achieve “approved training provider” status, though those certified under the Workplace Safety and Insurance Act would be automatically approved.
Prevention: Quite notably, the bill would establish both a Prevention Council and a Chief Prevention Officer (CPO). It would also take the responsibility of workplace safety away from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) and hand it to the newly created CPO, who would report to the Minister of Labour and also be charged with the development of a provincial health and safety strategy. The Prevention Council, composed of provincial health and safety organizations, trade union representatives, employers, and other experts in the field, would provide advice to the CPO as he or she develops an province-wide strategy and prepares an annual report for the Minister.

Additional changes include adjustments to the number of trained health and safety personnel required for small businesses, altering how reprisals are referred to the labour relations board, and more.

According to convention, businesses across Ontario could be given up to 12 months to comply with the new rules, though the Ministry of Labour may ask employers to adhere to the act’s requirements on an expedited basis. Proactive businesses ought to begin determining how they will address the coming changes. For up-to-date news on Bill 160 developments, check out OHS Insider’s excellent blog on Ontario health and safety reform.