Creating a Training Strategy

Why Do You Need a Training Strategy

Ready, Shoot, Aim.

How many times has it felt like your efforts seemed on target, only to find once you’ve finished, that the work wasn’t quite what was expected or isn’t aligned to the corporate priorities, and hence not appreciated. We’ve all found ourselves in this predicament.

By putting in just a little bit of planning time to organize our efforts, we can make sure the work our training team is doing will indeed be appreciated and create the impact we hope for. There are two primary philosophies I’ve seen teams use to accomplish most goals, and this applies to setting goals for a training organization as well.

1. JUST DO IT – Jump in feet first and just start doing,
2. PLAN AND PLAN SOME MORE – Plan everything before you start your work.

The two methods don’t work well in isolation and work best in unison. Over emphasizing one method over the other can have issues. If you start working without any planning, you might end up performing work that has to be re-done or tossed completely because it’s not aligned to broader goals or objectives. However, over planning could end up restricting your team from being successful by trying to direct too much of their effort, and remove any creativity or agility on their part. It’s also can be very time consuming if not managed well.

The best method I’ve found is a compromise between the two. Conducting a little planning, to help define direction and guide-rails for folks to use when doing their jobs, but not so much planning as to restrict your team from being successful. Then start the work, and adjust as needed as the work proceeds. This allows you to revisit and revise your planning & goals as you progress and adjust as needed. It also allows for the creativity and agility of individuals on your team to shine and improve the final result.

This can all be done by creating a Training Strategy based on a few common managerial conventions.

How to Create a Training Strategy

You can accomplish your goals & objectives in this unified manner by forming a Training Strategy. So what is a “Training Strategy“? As with any strategy, there are a few key elements:

• Vision
• Goals
• Objectives

Vision

A “Vision” is the broad direction provided by leaders and provides a clear direction for the team. Think of the Vision as the compass that guides the direction of everything else. The goals then become waypoints or destinations and the objectives become the actions taken to achieve each waypoint.

A Vision is not meant to be a series of directives or direct actions. Instead, the vision is used to provide direction when considering any goal or objective. When setting any Goal or Objective, it needs to be compared to the Vision to make sure your action will align to the overall Vision so as not to expend extraneous effort.

A vision should also be grand, and forward thinking, even a little bit of a stretch to motivate folks to go beyond just the norm and achieve something truly worth the effort.

Don’t have a vision to “Build a Tram Platform“, instead “Build a Tram Platform that is an Architectural Standout in the City and that People Will Enjoy Waiting On“

Some example training vision statements might look like:

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Maximize Training Revenue While Delivering World Class Instruction to Our Clients & Partners

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Provide Integrated Learning Directly in our Products to Accelerate Customer Success & Enable Customers Without Having to Leave the Product

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Provide the Highest Quality Remote Learning for our Customers & Partners via Modular Self-Guided Learning Objects, In-Person & Virtual Classes and Formal Certifications

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It’s also important to remember to align the training vision to any corporate vision or initiatives as well. If Customer Success is a corporate initiative then showing how the training vision will help enhance the customer success experience will make sure the priorities for training aligns to what’s been identified as important for the company as well.

Goals

Once you’ve set your compass or vision, it’s then time to establish a few key goals & objectives. So what’s the difference between a goal and objective? If you do a quick search on the difference between goals & objectives, you will find the following:

“Goals are the outcome you intend to achieve, whereas objectives are the actions that help you achieve a goal.“

So taking taking action (or setting objectives) without first establishing a few key goals might result in effort that isn’t aligned well. You might have a Vision to build a bridge, but without a proper set of Goals you might have work done but without any goal and end up with an incomplete bridge that isn’t of use to anyone.

Training Goals should also be guided by Corporate Goals. Once the corporate goals are understood, then training goals can be set to align to those goals. Are the corporate goals more aligned to customer on-boarding or customer retention? Do most of the support calls come from new customers or existing customers trying to expand their use of the product? Are there revenue targets for all training, or is training covered under a broader customer success initiative and not tied to revenue targets.

Think of goals as initiatives for the team that live and grow as you work towards them. The goals can be independent of each other, or interdependent. Normally you will have one Vision Statement with multiple goals aligned to that vision. But don’t try to establish too many goals at once.

So if we take the second Vision above “Provide Integrated Learning Directly in our Products…” we might define a few Goals to align to this Vision such as:

• Define a set of online, interactive User Guides aligned to different jobs being performed within your product
• Design a curriculum of video tutorials aligned to the product interface
• Work with the Product & User Experience teams to provide an integrated navigational menu to easily access all enablement content from anyplace in the product within 2-3 clicks
• Work with the Customer Success Team to integrate Community Blogs and Forums as a final method of enablement in the product if users still have questions after using online learning content

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When setting Goals, it’s important to make sure you can “Measure Your Progress“. Here’s a few strategic goals that I’ve seen technology companies set that training can use as a basis for their own goals. Each of these should have their own metrics that are tracked on a regular basis:

• Achieve 50% Annual Growth in Services Revenue
• Increase Customer Success as measured by…..
• Establish a Customer On Boarding Path for Each User Role Using our Product.
• Help Reduce Monthly Support Calls by 25%
• Help Reduce Annual Customer Churn by 25%

Often times the impact of training is more of a correlation than a direct causation and as a result difficult to measure any direct impact as stated in a goal. For example, if the monthly support calls have been reduced by 25%, how can we be sure it was caused solely by an improvement in user enablement. We can’t really, so the best way to measure this correlation will be with multiple metrics, such as comparing one customer’s increase in access to training content while also seeing a decrease in the same customer’s calls to support over the same period.

Objectives

After you have established your Vision & Goals, it will then be time to start defining the work to be done. This is done with a set of objectives. Objectives should be defined for each goal, in a way to make sure that goal can be achieved.

Objectives are action oriented, but not so detailed as to write a complete set of steps to be taken by an individual for each objective. So if we take one of the Goals above “Define a set of online, interactive User Guides aligned to different jobs being performed within your product“, we can then establish a clear list of guides as objectives to write, but the objectives don’t necessarily need to list every chapter that needs to be covered with each guide. We need to leave enough wiggle room for the person acting on the objective to be flexible enough to make their own choices as they explore the topics in depth.

It’s good to also establish a timeline for each objective. It’s amazing how a clear set of deadlines can help push a certain task over the finish line. Also, timelines are linear in nature, and depending on resourcing might be dependent on each other. If you have enough resources, you can work on multiple guides simultaneously, however if resources are limited, then the timelines for each guide will need to be spaced accordingly and priorities on which guides to work on first will need to be considered.

Once clear objectives and timelines are established, it’s then easy to keep track of their progress, both with your team as well as with management.

Objectives are also good to use in your regular one on one meetings with your team members. Discussing each objective the person is working on, along with their accomplishments and hurdles they may be encountering can be used to adjust timelines and goals accordingly.

Conclusion

Every Training team has it’s direction and set of items to work on, but taking the time to organize your thoughts and set a clear set of Vision, Goals & Objectives will help you better organize and manage the work being performed by the team. It also helps to align your efforts to the priorities of the company and establish clear metrics to measure your success as well as timelines to measure progress.

Everyone works on Goals & Objectives in some way, but taking the time to align them to a Vision and put them down on paper is a way to commit & measure your success and provide the confidence the team needs to know they are working on something larger than just their daily grind. It’s how you can be Ready with a Vision, take Aim with your Goals, and Shoot with your Objectives.

One last recommendation when working on a Training Strategy, don’t over think it. Start by creating a simple outline of your Vision, Goals and Objectives, then start to work with your team to review and revise as you all progress. We all learn new things each and every day, and trying to foresee each and every obstacle or item at the start, will quickly result in wasting time on things that end up not being important at all.