The Role of Trainers

By giving employees the power and support to pursue learning and linking learning to the business vision, you will transform the training department from a peripheral, nonessential unit to a key contributor to the success of the company. Training's job in a learning organization is to offer instructionally sound, performance-based, quality training that supports the needs of the organization ”not to provide random training events to solve problems that are not related to skill or knowledge gaps.

You will no longer measure training's effectiveness through seat time and classes delivered, because you will be focused on the front end of the process. You will have processes in place to determine whether training is necessary and linked to defined business requirements, and the training you offer will be based on instructional-system-design principles.

As a result of this transformation, learning will finally be recognized as an essential part of the process and the learning team will garner new levels of respect and power within the organization.

Accomplishing this shift is a monumental goal for trainers on their own because they rarely hold the positions of power necessary to create cultural upheaval , and that's what it takes to achieve this meta-morphosis. This process will be far more successful if the training department has the support and voice of organizational leaders who have the authority to cause profound change and the desire to make sure their most valuable assets, their employees, are competent and skilled to meet the demands of present and future business objectives.

To achieve the organizational change necessary to become a learning organization, you need an all-encompassing strategic plan that defines where the company is today, where it needs to be in the future, and how you are going to get there. By following our method for becoming a learning organization, you will learn how to build a strategic plan that will win the active support of management.

By following our ten-step process you will create within your organization a new learning environment that will tie every learning opportunity to the business goals of the company. It will reduce your costs, improve your training quality, change end users' attitude toward training, and win you the respect and admiration of your management team.

At first it might be a bitter battle to convince skeptical executives, many of whom will have been burned before by training propositions . However, this proposition will succeed because this time you will have a fail-proof plan ”the one laid out in this book.