Coming to a Corporate Trainer Near You - No More Orders!

As I've been evangelizing to my clients lately, the role of the corporate "trainer" is evolving away from an order taker to that of a performance consultant.

“There is a very strong trend in the best-practice organizations to move away from being an order taker,” Marcia Dresner, senior researcher and consultant with Corporate University Xchange, said. “To move away from somebody who responds to ‘We need a course. Go and produce a course,’ to a much broader role as a performance consultant. Determine if learning is an issue and provide the appropriate kind of intervention rather than just throwing courses at a business problem.”

Sue Todd, President of Corporate University Xchange, said this move to the performance consultant role is indicative of a macro-level trend similar to the one the IT industry experienced a few years ago. “IT was really considered an order taker. People would ask for new technologies and new systems. IT would come in and put them up, and they would be there and nobody would use them. The company would get no benefit, and there’d be a lot of money wasted on a solution that didn’t contribute to improved performance. Training has followed that exact path in terms of their maturity levels and is coming to that point now where they’re really starting to get some credibility in organizations that they really can have a significant impact on performance.”

“That goes along with an increase in accountability,” Dresner explained. “People need to be accountable. Business leaders are insisting that learning be accountable for results. Leaders do not want to hear learning professionals tell them how many courses they taught. They want to hear how sales are improving or how profits are improved as a result of learning. Many organizations are doing this by sitting down with their business leaders beforehand. That’s the other really important trend. The one that says ‘We are going to decide what the purpose of this intervention is before we do it. We need to agree on the metrics that will measure our success.’”

Hallelujah and Amen! Metrics, anyone?

Click here to read full article.

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Source: Chief Learning Officer Magazine, June 2006.