"How do I know if my courses are really successful?" The question that is on all Training Manager’s lips. It is all about gaining good quality feedback and using it! This blog looks at tried and tested ways of gathering and utilising quality feedback as well as exploring the key differences between the traditional happy sheet and online surveys. 

How do you currently promote your courses?  Are they on your website?  Do you target previous delegates? Are you advertising?  I guess you probably do all of this and more, but do you blog?  If you do or if you are considering blogging around your course content, check out our 10 quick wins.

I recently stumbled upon an interesting piece of research from the online analysis firm Software Advice regarding help desk software. They quote a Gartner report which suggests that 89% of businesses plan to compete solely on customer service in 2015!So why do I find this interesting? I guess there are two main reasons: 1. From a training business perspective - using software to improve customer experience and gain a competitive advantage. And, 2. From a software supplier perspective - how important is it to offer the right level of customer support?

How many training companies currently engage in content marketing as part of their marketing strategy? This is information I don’t have, but my guess is probably more than I think, but fewer than could or should be!  The information I do have is taken from the third annual Content Marketing in the UK 2015: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends and produced from UK for-profit marketers.    

It’s that time of year again, time to review the previous six months: what went well and what can be done better for the next half?  For anyone working in education, this time of year may signify the time to wind down.  However, it also provides a great opportunity for reflection before the summer ends and the chaos of the new academic year begins.

TMS, LMS, CMS, CRM, ERP, SaaS, all these acronyms abound in modern software systems, but what do they all mean? There is much confusion surrounding software today and even more confusion as to identifying the right software solution for your business. Here is a general overview of some of the different types of software on the market and which one may be most suitable for your needs.

"Learning is great, but if you don’t do anything differently afterwards, you won’t get different results" - Alexis Kingsbury (Quote from the webinar on 25th June 2015 on the ‘3 Steps to Improve Training Attendance’ - watch the recording here: http://www.makinggreatness.com/recording-of-webinar-3-steps-to-improve-training-attendance/)

This article originally featured on TrainingZone.co.uk, where it received over 1,000 views. Return on Investment (ROI) is super important for businesses, and individuals too. It makes sense - we care whether the amount of value we receive for an investment of time and/or money is ‘worth it’. Following the recession, many organisations are now busier and more focused on ‘doing’ rather than developing. As a result, lots of recent articles on TrainingZone have commented on the perils L&D face when challenged on the ROI they provide to the business, and how we can measure this. Including: Practice makes perfect sense for training ROI (John Edmonds) Measuring the ROI of corporate training (John O’Brien) The ROI of eLearning (Asha Pandy) These are excellent articles and all worth a read. However, in this article I want to highlight a single issue that has the potential to destroy more ROI for L&D than anything else. The issue is that of ‘utilisation of development resources’. Or more simply, ‘level of attendance on training’. This is essentially how much your development resources (including training courses, elearning, development programmes, coaches etc.) are used, vs. what is made available. Training attendance can quickly destroy L&D’s ROI as… Training attendance has a significant, measurable impact on ROI Whatever return your learning resources are expected to provide (for the cost of providing them), it can be drastically decreased if resources are not used by employees. Let’s say you expect a sales training program to help attendees to increase their sales over the course of the year (by up to £30k gross profit on average, per salesperson). You might expect 10 people to go through the program, and you’ll pay ~£50k for designing and delivering the program, and expect the cost per person who shows up is ~£1k each (time cost etc.). As a result, you’d expect a handsome ROI of 500% (£30k x 10 (attendees) / £60k). However, if only half the expected attendees show up, this reduces to 272%. And if only two people attend, you are practically breaking even. For other courses (such as time management), the ROI may be even tighter to start with! Poor attendance is very visible to managers and employees Some metrics in your organisation have low visibility - such as % of people planning to leave in the next year, or the total amount employees learn. However, poor training attendance is easy to see. Emails announcing a ‘course has been cancelled due to lack of interest’, half-empty rooms, and employees moaning that they don’t receive sufficient development, all paint a picture of an L&D department that is not delivering sufficient value. Attendance tends to go from bad to worse With this greater visibility comes another problem - when people see training isn’t being well attended, they will assume (rightly or wrongly) that the training being provided isn’t worth attending. Trainers will be frustrated or depressed by the lack of interest, feeling the effort they put in isn’t being valued… And so course quality drops too. As a result, attendance (and the role of L&D) spirals downward, until business teams start sourcing their own development resources and barely engage the L&D team at all. Conclusion So if ROI is a key concern for your L&D team, review the extent to which employees use your resources (including, but not limited to training attendance) and see if it’s undermining your efforts. Be aware that improving this area has the opposite impact - good attendance tends to spiral upward when courses are in demand, and so too the ROI (and importance) of L&D. You can learn how to improve training attendance by watching a recording of a webinar (co-hosted by Jon Kennard and me, Alexis Kingsbury), called the ‘3 Steps to Improve Training Attendance’. It covered practical steps, tips and examples to help you improve attendance on your programs. Click here to find out more.

In a previous post, I raised 6 big questions about Millennials for HR & L&D professionals and promised that I’ll be sharing answers to these based on conversations with HR and L&D, research, and my experience. In this post I’m going to share the experience of one of my clients, Prometric (with the kind permission of Leslie Allen, Manager of Professional Development at Prometric). Issue:  Staff retention was becoming a concern, particularly amongst their most talented Millennials (22-32 year olds). The cause of this was identified as lack of career development and profession opportunities due to a flat organisational structure and managers who weren’t planning on moving on. Talented Millennials were keen to progress within the organization but didn’t feel like their talents were recognised or that they were getting the opportunities for growth within their current role. If this had continued, this would be bad for business, as Prometric risked losing the most talented people; reducing business performance and making succession planning more difficult and external-reliant. Solution:  One solution Prometric implemented was the ‘Aspiring Leaders at Prometric’ group. Talented people who are keen to become Prometric’s future leaders are nominated to join the group. Nominations are reviewed (and approved if successful) by senior management. Being accepted into the group is significant, as not only does it acknowledge that the employee is recognised as being groomed for leadership, but also gives the employee access to some special events and development resources. These include: Attendance at panel discussions led by senior leaders Lunch & learns where attendees listen to a TED talk and then discuss their conclusions Courses and communities designed specifically for them e.g. ‘Improving Business writing’ The group is now 70-strong, and will be a huge asset for Prometric in future. This is a great initiative. Note particularly how it presses many of the right ‘buttons’ for Millennials (public recognition, learning and development, teams & communities). It also highlights that ‘top 100 potential talent’ lists are probably not best used as secret succession planning lists maintained by HR, and are instead made transparent (and more powerful as a result). I’ll be sharing more about what Prometric and other organizations do at a free webinar that I’m co-hosting with HR social media and engagement guru, Jo Dodds called ‘Engaging and Developing Millennial Talent’. Click here to find out more and register to attend. What do you think? Would an ‘Aspiring Leaders’ group work at your organization? What else do you do to solve the same problem? (Please comment below)

"If you’re a Baby Boomer or member of Gen X, take a moment to compare how different Millennials’ education was compared to yours […] while Boomers and Gen Xers needed to attend live classes, visit the library for research, and read all the required materials in order to succeed, huge number of Millennials have found more efficient ways of learning. Between Wikipedia, Kahn Academy, recorded lectures, mobile study apps and Google searching through books (why read and browse for data or quotes?), Millennials have learned that they will succeed by doing things their way. Thus, they’re deeply drawn to work that promises self-direction, work-life balance, fulfillment and other benefits and perks that come across as entitled to older generations." - Anthony Lye