Dust off the training manuals, warm up the projector and get the coffee and cookies ordered for the back of the room. It’s training time! According to Bersin & Associates Research released in January 2012, US Learning and Development Organizations increased their budget by 9.5% to an average of $800 per person for training. Does that mean we jump right into training? It depends, does jamming a square peg in a round hole work for you?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying don’t do training. I’m saying, do the right training. There are many different options to meet your training needs. A little creative thinking can go a long way to implement a training program that can be flexible enough to meet both the learner and the company’s needs.

When you first think of training, what comes to mind? Most people still answer with a vision of participants sitting in a training room while following a PowerPoint. This is one form of training and of course has been delivered in many different formats: from the interactive role playing to the monotone lecture burning deep into our brains. I’m still all for classroom training if it meets your productivity needs and if it is delivered with the learner’s best approach in mind. But as we know, there are other options for training delivery and those delivery needs are changing just as fast as the needs are changing in the economy.

E-learning took the training industry by storm. Companies were looking for cost effective methods to deliver a consistent message to large number of people or to locations that are geographically spread out across the country or located in different countries. But look how e-learning solutions have shifted over a year. Companies were looking for on-line solutions and on-line solutions they got. The internet popped up with an incredibly diverse number of e-learning programs. So now participants could watch a training program with a coffee from the comfort of their own chair. So what shifted? Customers got what they wanted. What shifted were time constraints. People could not afford to give up 2 – 3 hours per day. Our survey to clients said that the training needs were still there, the time cycles weren’t. They needed more flexibility with their time. That’s why we created 30 minute learning. All courses are delivered in 30 minute segments.

A shift in the focus of the delivery creates new opportunities for hybrid training solutions. Maybe a combination of classroom training and e-learning support modules delivered over a period time. But even this is shifting to support the social on-line interactions that happen on a daily basis. This now means finding ways to incorporate social learning into improving performance. Is it possible to increase performance through social learning? You bet it is. Think about a combination of short bursts of specific knowledge around a real laser focus social learning approach! Participants will start with a short learning burst (5 – 7 minutes) and then incorporate this into their daily activities. Then accountability is increased by supporting each other through forums or blogs and then reconvening a week later on-line or through teleconference to discuss real time results.

Think of the possibilities! Learning can be internal or remote and can even be open to others not part of your organization to learn from other like minded professionals in similar role functions. The possibilities truly are endless.

We are in a knowledge based economy, where information changes over night. Social communicating through social media like Facebook and Twitter has become an integral part of people’s lives. Combining these two factors for other optional approaches to training just makes sense.

If you are interested in discussing unique approaches to increasing performance for your organization, contact me at ggzik@bizxcel.com or (613) 342-2200 ext 108.