Skills   Training and Coaching

Training? What is that good for?

Let us assume the employee is now able to do what he is supposed to do. He has learnt it – however he has done that. And the implementation: now he has to.

It would be better if he wanted to. Because he does not have to run without knowing the destination. Because the atmosphere is right: confidence, appreciation – and money. (But he mainly needs that for living. It is not enough to work well and with pleasure.)

What is training good for? It helps to experience increasing demands as a stimulus and not only as a burden. It creates new abilities and – almost more important – new willingness. Our trainings – whether leadership, communication, or method trainings – convince, get people in the right mood to put obligingness onto a better basis than just discipline.

How do we want the success of our trainings to be measured then?
Donald Kirkpatrick differentiates between four levels in the evaluation of qualification measures:
1) Reactions: What is the participant saying
about the event? Good?
A positive assessment might be a good but is
certainly not a sufficient condition for ...
2) Learning: Have knowledge, skills, attitudes
developed? Yes?
A positive assessment is a necessary, not
sufficient condition for ...
3) Implementation: Has the participant at least
partially put into action what he has learnt?
That is a requisite, unfortunately not
necessarily sufficient condition for ...
4) Results: measurable in business indices – or
in a positive feedback towards his changed
behaviour.
Is the latter asking too much? Or everything else too little? Successful implementation in practice – that’s what counts!

Because it’s only then that the investment also pays off for your organisation – and not only for the participant whose increase in skills is an investment in his personal future, of course. Fun in a seminar will contribute to the pleasure to apply the things learnt as well. There can also be a transfer of esprit!

And Coaching?

12 or more people in an event – the efficiency of the training is obvious.
More and more organisations more and more often – also – put their money on another kind of efficiency: the efficiency of the best-possible support of an executive or an especially important employee in learning and implementing – right up to success (see above)!
Of course, coaching can help to master difficult stretches of way, forks, fog, adverse winds, knees turned to jelly, … However, it can also make the decisive difference whether things learnt a long time ago or only recently are successfully implemented – to complete a training, to increase its effectiveness.