3 Responses

1. Fabulous question

   From a personal point of view, our role as trainers it to understand what we need our learners do when they get back to the work place, understand what they are doing at the moment and design and deliver learning experiences that help them to bridge that gap. The learning does not end there, they need to go & implement it and we need to make sure it has happened.

   So for me actual delivery, whilst amazingly satisfying, is actually a small fraction of what a great trainer does. That said, it is the part of our role that many of us are judged on.

   But consider this, how many Grand Prix would Lewis Hamilton win if he just turned up & drove a Ford Focus? How he performs in the race dictates how successful he is perceived to be. But he could not do that without a lot of help, support, planning and research to know exactly how to achieve the desired goal. And whatever the outcome, you can bet the entire team reviews everything that happened to make sure it is even better next time.

   How you split your time will depend on many things & part of the calculation will include what other people in your team do too. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as a profession, our goals were not just about scores on happy sheets, but about knowing what our learners have achieved following the training. Then we might just find out that the way we split our time naturally changes.

2. Especially re evaluation…

   I agree this is a fabulous question.  And I especially like FrancesMF’s point, "but wouldn’t it be wonderful if, as a profession, our goals were not just about scores on happy sheets, but about knowing what our learners have achieved following the training. Then we might just find out that the way we split our time naturally changes".

   At Airthrey, we offer clients a rule of thumb that 10% to 15% of their training budget (which goes for time as well as spend) should be committed to training evaluation. Clearly this will vary, depending on circumstances, but the problem is that many L&D professionals ignore evaluation to a large extent – see my recent blog post, Five Ostriches, http://learnforeverblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/five-ostriches.html

   If more people thought more about this question, I suspect more time would be spent on evaluation.

3. Percentage of time on the training cycle

   When I researched this in some depth last year for my Masters, the answer appears to be related to how much learning takes place from each stage of the cycle.  It would appear that about 50% of the learning takes place in relation to the effort put in to the pre- and post-stages.  So in preparing people for the intervention (this is what I think you should get out of it; what do you want to get out of it; how can we measure that afterwards; what objectives/goals can we set from the training) and then following up afterwards (what did you get out of it; how can you apply that; how can we measure it; how can I support you in this; who else might be able to support you in this).  So if you apply this to your preparation, you should be spending 50% of your time on making this happen with the relevant people in your organisation and about 50% of your time on design and delivery of the intervention.  My own experience (backed up by the research I did and the research I read) is that we spend 80% of our time on the design and delivery and keep our fingers crossed that it gets transferred back to the workplace in a meaningful way.  I suspect this is because the design and delivery is the "visible" element of what we do, and this is the part that is perceived to be the most effective and also that which is measured.  And as we all know, what gets measured, gets done.