Putting a Wrong Conception about Training & Development

I've been in the industries for two and a half decades and I've evolved from a guy who works on the field to managing training programs. Before I got myself into the world of Training and Development, I often hear people looking at it as an opportunity to spend the department training budget to a week on a holiday escapade with a nice hotel, enjoying Per Diem and returning to work without additional new knowledge to contribute to the job floor.

Let me put it this way, if your department or staff has this mentality, then your company is putting it all wrong on how you see training - it's a waste of investment. Training is not a way to escape from your office work, nor should be a scapegoat to pursue with your holiday plans and the much worse, training is not a waste of time.

Training and developing people in the workplace should be taken very seriously. I don't really understand why during cost-cutting, the first to be hit is the training budget. I don't agree that the training budget must be totally cut off nor the training department must be abolished or reorganized during streamlining. The more an organization cut its fat, the more they need training department to stick around and enbsure that people are skillful on their trades. 

In a continuous changing work environment, there should be a strong training and development strategy backing up the organization and continuously catering the need of every business in terms of sustainable operations, people skills management, discovery of talents and acquisitions and improvement of organizational social and technical systems.

Empowering people in the organization connotes not only on giving them their salary but providing them with professional growth and recognition. Training is one way of telling to the employees that the company that they are working with has a "duty of care". 

As a matter of fact, John Newstrom and Keith Davis from their Book of Organizational Behavior (3rd edition) cited that, "One of the effective methods for changing organizational culture to its best form is the following:

1. Support from the top management
2. Train employees
3. Formulation of the value statements
4. Rewarding good employee behaviors

Going back to my second paragraph, "training should not be taken as a waste of time" seems to be up to now is the perception of many companies. Human Resources today has emerged into a bigger role of quantifying business and employee performance and has evolved into focusing most of the time on people behavior. The Human Resources of today believes that effective people management is the main key to business success, 

Equipping our workforce with effective training program does ensure the longevity of success to business organizations. Let's put it this way if you think training is just a -nice-to-have in the organization, I would probably suggest that you need to review your revenues and identify the root cause and weak points whether in the DMAIC, DMADV or LEAN perspective. I would be 100% sure that one of those is the lack of skills or poor work behavior from your employees and/or the reward system is not being taken care of.