How to Identify High-Impact Development Opportunities
Nearly every organization provides its employees with some form of professional development, but employees’ responses to these opportunities can sometimes be underwhelming:
Employees may resist training and development opportunities because they don’t see it as a good use of their time, sometimes because those opportunities do not align with their own career goals. As a result, employees may not take the training seriously, ultimately wasting the organization’s learning and development budget.
Employees learn valuable concepts and information, but do not have an opportunity to develop concrete skills in light of that information. Therefore, upon returning to work, they often do not shift their behavior or operate differently as a result of the training.
Employees find that what’s taught in a training program does not align with their real-world experience at work. This may be because the content of the program simply isn’t relevant to their work. More often, it’s because the trainer does not effectively communicate how employees should change how they work to incorporate key concepts from what they've learned.
Fortunately, there is a solution to these issues: working with team members to identify the highest-impact development opportunities for them. Effective training can greatly affect an organization as a whole, and even play a role in addressing its most pressing issues. For example, providing opportunities for growth and development can support employee retention efforts, thus reducing the costs associated with employee turnover.
Effective training also results in improved performance—not only at the individual level, but also at the team, departmental, and organizational levels—ultimately leading to increased overall organizational effectiveness. When business leaders allocate resources to only the highest-potential training and development initiatives, they can move the organization forward rapidly.
What Makes a High-Impact Development Opportunity
In developing and implementing high-impact training programs for more than 150 organizations—including Fortune 500 companies—we’ve identified three important considerations when evaluating the effectiveness of a training program:
It aligns with individual, departmental, and organizational goals
It has a clear and measurable outcome to gauge its effectiveness.
It helps professionals develop concrete skills.
Alignment with Individual, Departmental, and Organizational Goals
A high-impact training program must align with the objectives of every level of the organization. First, it must align with an individual’s own career goals—employees must be able to see how a training opportunity helps them make progress toward their short- and long-term career objectives. Therefore, managers must understand their team members’ career goals—and take a coaching-based approach to management to help their team members work towards those goals.
Second, an effective training program also supports team and departmental objectives. More specifically, it should improve team performance in a way that moves the team toward its goals. This is generally a matter of reviewing the team’s key performance indicators (KPIs) and identifying opportunities for improvement.
Finally, it must align with organizational objectives, supporting the big-picture vision established by its leadership. This is an excellent time to revisit your team and departmental objectives to ensure that those objectives align with the organization's goals. If you’ve found a training program that supports your department’s goals—and you’re clear that your department’s goals are helping to drive the entire organization forward—then that training is much more likely to propel both your department and organization forward.
A Clear and Measurable Outcome
Training opportunities must have clear and measurable outcomes. Too often, training programs indicate that participants will “learn how to do something,” but that’s generally not really what you want training to do. Rather, you want training to ensure that participants behave differently or do something differently, both right away and in the long term.
It’s worth asking yourself what concrete behaviors you want training to shift. Here are some examples of what we mean by concrete behaviors:
Managers are communicating more directly with their direct reports.
Managers are more effectively managing their teams’ performance.
Employees are taking more initiative with problem solving.
Employees are writing more clearly and concisely in a way that reduces risk.
Employees are thinking more strategically and solving more complex issues.
A Focus on Developing Concrete Skills
Finally, training must incorporate effective methodology. A lot goes into a training methodology that produces lasting results, but one of the biggest pieces is practice.
First, an effective training program that creates lasting results helps participants develop and implement concrete skills rather than only teaching concepts and theory. The biggest indicator of whether a program focuses on skill building is whether it incorporates practice into the learning experience. We’ve found that a significant amount of practice goes into building permanent skills and creating sustainable change. In fact, one of the reasons our programs get such great results is that learners spend about two-thirds of their time with us actively practicing the skills they’re developing with us.
Practice alone isn’t quite enough, though—too often, training programs include generic, off-the-shelf practice scenarios and exercises that aren’t directly relevant to your organization. Instead, effective practice should include real-life scenarios based on actual situations in your organization. When a training program effectively incorporates practice into the learning process, it puts the content and skills directly into the context of employees’ daily work.
One key part of learning through practicing real-life situations is getting focused feedback from peers and skilled facilitators. That feedback is critical, but we’ve found that results increase significantly when participants also have the opportunity to see themselves in action. Using our proprietary Video Labs methodology that we’ve used to train thousands of professionals, we’ve found time and again that when employees see how they come across in a difficult conversation, they have the immediate reaction and perspective shift necessary for creating lasting behavioral change.
Where to Find High-Impact Opportunities
Finally, it’s important to know where to find the highest-potential opportunities for your team. There are three places to look. First, explore what your organization’s learning and development department offers in-house. This is often a great place to look for training opportunities that cover some of the foundational principles necessary for employees to succeed within the organization.
For more complex issues and objectives—such as strategic conversation, performance management, strategic thinking, and influence—consider researching options outside the organization. Effective third-party learning and development firms are often better able to identify the root cause of an issue or situation. This is because they are often able to approach an organization’s issues and goals objectively and to draw on their experience from working with organizations similar to yours.
Finally, ask employees to research and identify opportunities that excite them. As we mentioned earlier, learning and development opportunities must align with employees’ own career goals—so what better way to do that than to involve them in the process?
Choosing how to allocate resources to learning and development initiatives can seem daunting, but if you look for high-impact opportunities that align with goals at every level, have clear and measurable outcomes, and take an effective approach to developing concrete skills, you and your organization will see a much higher return on investment.
