In his new book Aligning Training for Results, Ron Drew Stone says, “It is vital that training professionals understand performance in order to identify needs and design, develop and deliver training solutions. …Training professionals should adopt a different thought pattern and a different performance framework that will allow us to see and communicate training and performance in a more results-centered way.”

As a training professional, what are you doing to ensure that your training leads directly to performance improvement on the job and that this improvement leads to tangible business results? In today’s budget-conscious, turbulent business environment it is vital that every dollar spent on training leads to some form of improvement in the following:

• The cost of doing business
• The profitability of the business
• The quality (effectiveness) of the organisation’s business products, processes and services
• The output (quantity) of products and services
• The time (efficiency) it takes to complete tasks and business processes, address and correct problem areas, and service the customer

It’s time for change.

Time to move on from a focus on learning requirements and participant evaluations, to a focus on execution. Do you have plans in place to identify the specific business results you want to achieve, the performance gap between where you are and where you want to be, and the execution needed to close that gap?

Have you identified all the various internal factors that need to be addressed to ensure that you are doing whatever it takes to achieve execution after the training is over?

It’s no good gaining knowledge, understanding, skills and a positive attitude if there is no execution, because this is the only thing that will lead to performance improvement and business results. If you can achieve all this, then you deserve to be sitting at the top table.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore