Performance Consulting For Learning and Development Professionals

Organisations are making significant financial investments in training. Those investments need to contribute to achieving an organisation’s strategy, and enhance individual and organisational performance. When training aligns with the business, employees at all levels understand expectations and recognise what is required to succeed.  It’s not difficult to align training and development to business needs, but it does take effective performance consulting from learning and development professionals.

Our performance consulting for learning and development professionals workshop focuses on linking business needs with learning solutions.  You will learn how to provide people with a connection from what they learn to how it can improve their performance at work.

Recession has forced many to think strategically, budgets are approved based on projections of how business activity will return performance payback.

In the UK L&D report findcourses.co.uk surveyed over 180 L&D departments. The findings give cause for concern:

We know that training and development activity adds value, but knowing isn’t enough we need to demonstrate measurable business value. The survey indicates that this challenge and its consequence impacts many L&D departments:

The performance consulting course for learning and development professionals will enable you to quantify strategic performance gaps

The event is designed to enable practice and application of the performance consulting techniques and will benefit internal consultants working in central and decentralised learning and development functions and external learning and development consultants.

58% of learners who attend Spectrain’s Training Coordinators Programme go on to book our Performance Consulting Training Course to further develop their skills.

Duration: 2 days

 Performance Consulting Objectives

• To demonstrate that you can operate successfully within a 7 step consulting framework
• To provide a structure for identifying performance gaps
• To influence when “training is the solution”.
• To identify the barriers to performance in the environment
• To suggest strategies for change when training isn’t the solution
• To develop performance consulting competencies required to identify measurable training outcomes
• To link learning solutions to business performance
• To provide flexible approaches to learning that address performance gaps
• To enable constructive conversations with purchasers of training and gain their respect as a trusted client adviser
• To understand why order takers loose respect of corporate training purchasers. To become more than an order taker
• To be aware of, and, avoid the critical mistakes that many training professionals make that consistently lose them business from training managers
• To identify evaluation criteria and recognise the return on investment calculations that your clients perform for training courses
• To demonstrate to clients who engage your services that these services will deliver more benefit to the business than they cost.
• To utilise the SPIN model to during the proposal stage to demonstrate measurable development solutions that address business issues
• To enable you to provide consultants and learning designers who operate on your behalf with clarity of information to enable them to build strategic solutions
• To identify the components required to design competency based learning and development materials

Performance Consulting Content

Why do training consultants (internal or external) act like order takers?

• The benefits of order taker behaviour to managers and why you should avoid this approach
• How your customers mirror your behaviour
• Getting to outcomes – A framework for structuring strategic learning and performance discussions – activity
• The multiple role of business consultants and the competencies required of each role
• Managing conversations and avoiding being taken into solution mode without adequate needs analysis – case study
• The competencies required to perform training needs analysis and avoid “solutioneering” – self assessment
• Identifying common goals of department managers and HR representatives

The training cycle and where development needs occur

• Avoiding fragmented approaches to addressing organisation performance gaps
• Clarifying needs and outcomes for training at
  • The Organisation level
  • Occupational Levels
  • Individual Level
• Avoidance training – Addressing compliance training needs and making the case for ROI from compliance training
• Quality questions activity – identifying corporate training needs can you see the woods for the trees?
• Practice and the seven step consulting process

Gap analysis – The problem specification

• What is the problem? Who has it? Who is involved? What’s happening now? What do they want to happen?
• Identifying the key players who affect the gap
• Is the gap really related to performance?
• Identifying the performance gap and the cost of the gap
• Overcoming the difficulties in quantifying the performance gap

Outcomes and Evaluation

• Establishing criteria for evaluation
• Linking learning to key performance indicators
• ROI and Return on objectives – demonstrating the business case for learning
• The end in mind – when does establishing evaluation criteria commence?
• Brinkerhoff and Kirkpatrick – supporting your business case through approaches to evaluation

Working with the seven step consultative sales process

• Presenting a value proposition –
• Articulate your value proposition in ways that would make sense to the manager.
• Responding to objections
• Understanding and overcoming buyer bias
• Increased business different ways to grow customer accounts
• Using the SPIN model to write proposals