Into the Future: Are corporate training programs really doing what they’re supposed to?

For a dozen years, I served as the chief learning officer and subsequently chief human resources officer at Telus. One of the largest roadblocks I faced during this part of my career was the limited impact of corporate training programs. Delivering great learning experiences was relatively easy, but enabling a sustainable improvement in individual and corporate performance was the opposite. This is a known challenge in the corporate learning realm, and I believe the inability to translate training into performance often boils down to two key factors: first, adults struggle to develop new or evolved habits and, second, many corporate training programs aren’t linked to business results in a measurable manner.

New habits are very hard for adults to develop

Because delivering those experiences is relatively easy, some learning and HR professionals put too much weight on the positive early ratings their programs earn upon their immediate conclusion. While it is meaningful to deliver great training experiences, I would argue that the importance of this pales in comparison to that of helping individual employees and overall teams (or organizations) elevate their performance on a sustainable basis. That is harder to achieve because, as adults, our habits can become hardwired in our brains. When we learn new theories and tools, we might be excited about them initially, but can often find ourselves too busy or efficient in our workflow to actually apply them through the formation of new or evolved habits.

At my current startup, we studied this dilemma extensively and adopted a three-step process that helps learners develop new or evolved habits. First, open the learner to a new mindset; second, get them to try out some new behaviours at work; and third, get them to repeat successful new behaviours until they become habits. These learning programs also have applied elements to them that are measurable, such as simulations, projects, practicums, micro-coaching, and so on.

Linking learning programs to the achievement of business results

The U.S.-based Association for Talent Development (ATD) is a global leader in encouraging and enabling organizations to link their learning programs to the realization of elevated business results. Every year the association announces its BEST Awards, which recognize the organizations across the world that are leading the way when it comes to driving enterprise success through employee development.

If you want to learn about the innovative ways organizations are levelling up, I recommend that you read about the practices of ATD’s Best of the BEST Award honorees—organizations that have won the BEST Award 10 or more times. The Texas-based public health system University Health, for example, worked with a nonprofit to create a tailored training program to certify professional health billing coders in-house, a role they typically found challenging to recruit. The newly qualified coders became able to code 2,500 more accounts per week, which enabled University Health to replace its former vendors, saving the company an estimated $10,000 per month.

Corporate learning needs to be a business imperative

To enable the hard work of linking corporate training programs to business results and helping adults develop new work habits that elevate their individual performance, C-suite business leaders must become actively involved in supporting their learning and HR teams. When this happens, training programs can evolve from delivering great learning experiences to also delivering measurable ROI for the organization. As summed up by ATD president and CEO Tony Bingham when announcing this year’s BEST winners, “Senior leaders in these organizations understand the critical strategic role learning has, and they are committed to investing in the growth and development of their people.”