How to win training awards

Over the years we have helped many customers to win or achieve finalist status at a range of award ceremonies including:

• Training Journal awards -  Finalist Coaching and Mentoring programme. (University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire)
• National Training awards - Best Leadership Programme (Monmouthshire Housing)
• CIPD Coaching awards - Finalist Coaching Programme (Whitefriars Housing)

The following 5 simple steps will put you in a great position to impress the judges and give you and your company some well deserved recognition for your hard work.

1. Business alignment - The Judges are looking for business alignment. You need to show how you increased behavioural change and Business impact against the original business and programme aims. According to The Association for Talent Development only 4% of companies achieve this, so you are in pole position when you can.
2. Return on Investment - Generate a Return on Investment that exceeds the original investment. Inform the learners that they have to generate savings or revenue that covers their fees for the training. Collect some useful metrics from the different business divisions and share this information with the learners and their line managers. This will help the learners to calculate the value of their actions when generating business improvements from applying new skills and knowledge.
     
3. It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it - Remember the classroom is peripheral to the learning journey and not the cornerstone. The good work is done before and after the learner enters the classroom in identifying clear success measures/learning transfer strategies and sharing these with the learners. The ROI expectations should be shared in advance of the classroom session/s.Learners need to understand that there are high expectations on them to improve after the training and to show how they are doing this. Pro active learning transfer strategies need to be in place to support learners and line managers to adopt and embed new enhanced approaches.
    
4. Increase Stakeholder engagement - All too often the pressure and accountability is placed only on the learner and the trainer. Executives need to be educated to ask for results against five levels of evaluation and not just happy sheet ratings and average days training per employee! Line managers need to be educated in learning transfer techniques and supported to apply them. If happy sheets are used (and we recommend they are not) it is worth using them to measure the success of the learners, Executives and Line managers contributions to success.
     
5. Train for a Cultural shift around the Learning and Development process - 
   Help people to unlearn today's flawed training models that lead to less than 80% of training being applied in the workplace. This leads to huge waste in the training budget and disillusioned learners who get frustrated at wasting time in classrooms that leads to limited long term personal and business improvements.

I hope you enjoyed this post and be sure to follow us on twitter (@Odissy10) for regular updates and advice!