Training projects can be essential to your business’s bottom line. Which is why these projects need to go well without a major mistake! With properly trained employees, your business runs smoothly, your profits go up, your employees are happy and turnover is low. All wins for your company.
So how do you make sure a project is a success? By avoiding common mistakes. We have some great tips from AXIOM partner Linda Wade who has offered up her Top 10 Training Project Mistakes as a series and we think these ideas can really save you a lot of time, money and stress. Linda has an extensive background in helping Fortune 500/1000 companies build global strategies to roll out Siebel CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. She’s no stranger to large scale training projects!
Getting your project on track from the very beginning is essential to its success. In case you missed them, here are the first six problems that many people run into and great ways to avoid them:
Tip 1: Failing to Obtain Executive Support
Tip 2: No User Involvement
Tips 3 & 4: Failure to Quantify Objectives and Lack of a Training Plan
Tips 5 & 6: Testing, and Forgetting to Train your Management Team
Tips 7 & 8 get into why the details are so important in avoiding a mistake. Winging it on a training project is never a good idea! Make sure you have a great plan.
- Forgetting the Value of Time
A good training plan will take time out of territory into consideration. Proper planning can guarantee that the training is delivered with a minimum negative impact on the end user or your customers. There is no one size fits all solution for determining the timing of the roll-out or the training strategy. You have to have an experienced training team that can objectively evaluate your business needs and your training options to provide the best solution.
- Sweat the Small Stuff
A training roll-out lives and dies by the details and it’s always the small stuff that comes back to haunt you in the end. On our projects, we use training coordinators that help ensure smooth transition inside and outside the training classroom. They develop training checklists, training room requirements schemas, travel logistics plans, and manage the logistics of the roll-out so that the training team can focus on, well, training.
Many companies think that their meeting planner alone can handle the details of organizing a training session. However, without an eye for the training details, critical logistical elements can be left out and your training will likely be an unorganized mess (at best) and a disaster (at worst). You will need to consider more than the numbers of students and trainers for a training session to be successful.
-L&D thoughts
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