Hands-on experience is the goal

“One of the keys to allowing people to learn quicker and better benefit from the training is allowing them to try out what they learned during the training at least once or twice so they can feel secure when they do it at work.”
By : Roseanne Gerin

   The age-old lecture method simply won't do. That's the message corporations have been sending to training companies as they demand more specialized workshops to teach their employees skills in everything from labor law to negotiating to sales management.

   They are emphasizing workshops where their employees are active participants so they can immediately implement the skills they've learned upon the completion of the session. Corporate clients also want follow-up sessions where participants meet with training company instructors to discuss their successes and failures in putting what they've learned into practice.

   "The key with training is not the training itself, but your ability to make people implement your training," said Lukasz Fijalkowski, general director of Mercuri International Poland, a training company that conducts sales workshops.

   "With general lectures, people will get bored in 45 minutes. You need to make people do it so they'll remember it."

   Mercuri's workshop is conducted by sales management professionals who lead teams of three to four sales managers through a computer exercise to build a strategy that will increase their companies' sales by 50% over a five-year period. After the strategies are collected and summarized, the instructors teach sales planning techniques while referring to the strategic plans devised by the participants. At the end of the workshop, the sales managers perform the same exercise, but apply the techniques they just learned. They must then take their new strategic plans and apply them to their businesses. Several weeks later the group meets again to discuss the pitfalls and successes they experienced while implementing their plans. "It's quite a tumultuous process," Fijalkowski said.

   Compared to past years, training company professionals also report that there has been a growing demand for workshops for high-level employees. Jaroslaw Chabros, the president of Kalkstein Corporate Training, said that training workshops for sales managers have increased. Five years ago, companies enrolled employees in basic sales courses because "they were at the threshold of a new era ... learning about merchandising and sales," he said. When the salesmen became supervisors or managers, they needed basic management-skills training. Now training for high-level management is in vogue.

   "One of the keys to allowing people to learn quicker and better benefit from the training is allowing them to try out what they learned during the training at least once or twice so they can feel secure when they do it at work," said Chabros, whose workshops include questionnaires, simulations, role playing with video recordings and playback, and tests.

   But the demand for upper-level sales management courses has not diminished the need for workshops in other fields, especially when the training is required by law. Malgorzata Kulasinska, director of the training division at Seka, a Warsaw training company that provides instruction in human resource management, labor and social insurance law, vocational training and industrial safety, said that companies in Poland must provide obligatory industrial-safety training for their employees. At Seka, official government inspectors teach workshops using video clips illustrating on-the-job safety measures. During their initial round, new managers must complete 40 hours of training, while new blue-collar and white-collar workers must complete 20 and 18 hours, respectively. Industrial-safety training must be repeated after six years, she said.

   Kulasinska also pointed out that every autumn many companies need expert instruction to help them assess their capital for future contributions to the Social Insurance Agency (ZUS). In conjunction with professionals from ZUS, Seka conducts workshops in companies to help them calculate their capital levels.

   Even though corporations are demanding more for their money from training companies, they want the instruction delivered in less time. Chabros said his firm was recently approached by companies to condense a three-day program into one day. With the shortened program, however, participants had to perform some work on their own in advance so they were ready for the one-day session. They also were given homework to reinforce the skills they learned by implementing them on the job. He said his company's one-day sessions cost £1,200 per person for a group of up to 10 people.

   Training company professionals also report human resource employees at corporations are getting more involved in training areas that fall outside their traditional duties of hiring and firing. Fijalkowski of Mercuri said that the biggest change within the business over the past year was that more human resources directors were buying training services for all corporate departments. He attributes the trend to companies placing a higher value on their employees. "You can copy products, but not people," he said. "It's like in sports. If you run a 100-meter dash, one second won't matter because it comes down to one one-thousandth of a second. It's the same in human resources. You have to employ better and better people. They are the most important asset of the company."