Ads are generated to get your attention and make you remember something so you will act on it.  At least that’s what they are supposed to do.  Companies pay millions of dollars every year to attract your attention.  They do it with humor, action, guilt, envy, shock, and the list goes on.  Companies hire other companies to find the right target market, develop the right message, shape it into something desirable, and then blast it into your subconscious with repetition.  And what do you as the consumer think about all this?  Not much, unless you want to buy their product.  But awareness is just the beginning of what company wants. What they are really looking for is action.  And theoretically, advertisement is meant to produce action.

Training works the same way.  Only we expect so much more out of a training class, but aren’t willing to put nearly as much in.  We want great presentations, stellar material, instant recall, and lasting effects.  And what are we willing to put into it?  Maybe a 2 to 4 hour session with some dry slides and a couple of doughnuts with bad coffee.  And then we wonder why training gets such a bad rap.  If the marketing department was run like the training department, and the marketing budget was squeezed like the training budget, we’d get the same results in marketing we get in training.  Sobering thought, isn’t it?

But the BIG difference is Marketing generates revenue and Training doesn’t.  At least, we act like that’s true.  Marketing is directed at the customer who spends money for the product, and puts the cash in ‘cash flow’.  Training is for people who don’t spend the money.  But who does the customer go to when they want to spend the money (because of the advertising)?  To a non-revenue generating, under trained sales person who can’t answer the customer’s questions and loses the sale.  So the marketing worked, but the process failed in the end because there was no supporting training.  This is not a rare incident.  It is rarely identified, but one ‘customers’ run into on a daily basis.

But many think we only need to train the people who interact with customers, right?  That depends on if the other people have a useful job or not.  If they don’t, why are they working there, and if they do, how could having them trained help the bottom line?  Whether its process improvement, better utilization of functional software, phone training for more efficient use, or time management, all employees can improve their performance with training.  The training needs to be targeted, specific, and timely.  But as Zig Ziglar so profoundly stated, “The only thing worse than training someone and having them leave is not training them and having them stay”.  Productivity is why people are hired.  Increase the productivity and you increase the bottom line.  They may never see a real live customer, and they can still make or save the company lots of money!

But training isn’t a quick fix for whatever ails the company.  It should be a methodical process to increase productivity and morale.  Training should make the employee perform better and feel better.  That’s what advertising aims at.  Ads make you think you will perform better and/or feel better if you have whatever is being advertised.  Training should be able to give the same promises, and deliver on them.

Well thought out training has objectives, methods, and measuring of results, just like advertising.  So why do we allow training to miss the mark so often when we wouldn’t dream of putting money into advertising that didn’t have some research behind it?  It’s because we don’t value what training can do for the company.  We see it as a legal necessity, a necessary evil, or a perk or luxury.  But we rarely see it as an investment in the company’s profits.  When we start treating training like we do advertising, we’ll find there is considerable value in improving the people who ‘don’t spend the money’.

by Ron Mohr / Compute Made Easy