For training to be effective, organisations need to ensure that the above influences are working towards integrating the training with the workplace. Employee behaviour following training is a complex interplay of a variety of forces within an organisation. How often, though, is the training "event" seen divorced from the organisational setting in which it takes place? Systems thinking arose after the Second World War and became especially prominent in the 1970's, yet how many organisations are still thinking with one-dimensional linear models of causation? Some of the literature on measuring Return on Investment (ROI) of training programmes does not help here either. A number of published case studies give the impression that the training programme was the sole causal determinant of the organisational improvement.
It is this myth, that training is the "silver bullet" that will improve organisational outcomes without the need to attend to the workplace environment of trainees, that we need to dispel. The illusion here is that somehow once we get staff into a training room and they return to work that the organisation will change for the better – defect rates will fall, more product will be sold, managers will be more empathetic, discrimination will cease in the workplace, or whatever was the purpose behind the training will eventuate magically without further work required.
Even the term "training intervention" lulls us into a false sense of surety that all that is required to "fix" the problem or bring about change is a time boxed and isolated training "event". The upshot of this is that much of what goes by way of training in organisations today is akin to a fish cleaning exercise. We take the fish out of the bowl, very carefully clean each one and then put them back in the bowl from whence they came.
To move organisations forward, a greater emphasis now needs to be placed on linking training to workplace behaviour. Currently, advertising the effectiveness of training is mostly done through publishing the post-course recommendations of participants. This is seen in internal marketing and external vendor advertising blurbs recounting glowing testimonials from participants that sometimes border on religious fervour. My experience with surveys that I have conducted is that the initial enthusiasm quickly wanes once the trainees return to the reality of their workplace. In the future, internal trainers and external consultants will promote their programmes using hard data showing how the training improved the client organisation's outcomes. I suspect that this will not eventuate until organisations themselves take more of a systems approach to training.
This situation has not been helped by the training industry itself, with outlandish claims designed to attract clients. For example, an advertisement in a recent national computing magazine proclaimed boldly, "Learn to Repair and Upgrade Personal Computers – Plus full theory of operation". No prerequisites are required and all it takes is thirteen hours of tuition over four weeks. The learning of this complex practical skill is also available by correspondence, with the student being awarded an accredited certificate on passing one assignment!
I now want to introduce a practical model that will assist managers and trainers in integrating the training with the workplace for effective behaviour change. It is named the PRACTICE model in order to emphasise the central theme here of applying the learning to workplace practice for the benefit of the organisation.
Each element of the model captures an essential workplace factor for the effective transfer of learning. The elements are as follows.