Save by Growing Your Own Trainers

he Federal Aviation Administration faced a serious, potentially disastrous problem. The agency discovered in the late 1990s that unscrupulous suppliers of aviation parts were selling unapproved and sometimes faulty components that didn’t meet government standards for aircraft manufacturers. Incredibly, some offshore suppliers were even repackaging parts taken from crash sites and reselling them as new.

    The crisis reached national proportions when CBS television’s 60 Minutes news magazine broadcast a story on the issue. Clearly, the FAA needed to quickly train its personnel to spot suspected unapproved parts. The department had traditionally relied on outside vendors to create and deliver training. But this time it had insufficient funds. To further complicate matters, the organization didn’t have internal trainers to deliver material that an outside vendor might create.

    The FAA’s situation is one that often occurs during difficult economic times: How do companies continue to train their employees when they can no longer afford the services of professional training organizations? During economic downturns, training resources are usually among the first casualties, leaving internal groups scrambling to provide training in critical areas.

    FAA officials knew that using contract vendors gave them more flexibility. Now, without the budget to hire outside trainers exclusively, the group needed another solution.

Certifying internal trainers
    The agency chose to do what many government and corporate training organizations have done for years: combine the training and instructional design expertise of an outside organization with internal experts prepped to teach the material.

    Brattle Systems, a company based in Arlington, Massachusetts, that creates custom training programs for both the classroom and the Web, consulted with internal experts to design a course that could be delivered all over the country, something they’d done many times for the agency. What was different in this case was that Brattle personnel showed FAA employees how to train, gave them an opportunity to practice their skills, and then certified them. To ensure success, Brattle staff members went on the road with novice FAA trainers for the first 17 weeks of the course, observed them in the classroom, and provided coaching.

    While train-the-trainer programs are certainly not new, some organizations ignore one serious challenge that they present. Designing a curriculum constitutes an essential element in any education initiative, but it’s equally important to ensure that those delivering the material can do so competently. Some managers, reluctant to part with their most valued employees, respond to a call for internal trainers by deploying either a very inexperienced person, such as a new hire, or a problem employee, choices that can damage the program’s credibility.

    “You get some people in the group who just shouldn’t be teaching,” says Jim Hassett, Brattle president. “They don’t know how to communicate and in some cases don’t care to learn. One thing that separates projects that work well and those that haven’t is the client’s willingness to fail some people. In some organizations, with all the politics involved, they won’t do that.”

    He has learned from experience that any certification process must be rigorous. “It is important to develop a really good certification process so that you don’t just give people a train-the-trainer session,” Hassett says. “You force them to pass something before you let them out into the real world. In that way, these new teachers prove that they know the content and that they can teach it effectively.”

    Brant Slade, a consultant with Oliver Wight Americas, a New London, New Hampshire-based company, would go even further. His company provides high-level consulting and training services to major manufacturing companies to help them radically improve their processes. Recently, the company developed a license and certification program that offers customers significant cost-savings along with the ability to develop internal expertise.

    “Some companies take people who are simply available,” Slade says. “But you need someone with leadership skills, good communication ability, who’s fairly aggressive and who can work well with various levels of management. They need to be willing to invest the time to study, practice, and take feedback. I always tell senior people, ‘Pick your stars for these programs.’ ”

Creating internal expertise
    While cost is usually the top reason that companies shift to train-the-trainer options, developing internal expertise is a close second. In fact, when companies can build a cadre of internal experts, they can reduce their dependency on outside consultants and, ultimately, lower costs.

    Solutia, a specialty chemicals company in St. Louis with $3 billion in annual sales and more than 10,000 employees, engaged Oliver Wight consultants to help the company lower its inventories, improve customer service, increase productivity, and gain better overall control of its operations. The consultants typically use a combination of training and on-site coaching to help companies achieve these goals.

    After implementing SAP software, Solutia discovered that when the consultants who had installed the system left, they took their expertise with them. As a result, users weren’t getting the full benefit of this complex ERP program. To diminish their future dependence on outside consultants, managers at Solutia decided to purchase a license from Oliver Wight that would enable the company to develop certified instructors, coaches, and assessors internally instead of depending on outside consultants.

    “We felt we could leverage a one-shot expense with Oliver Wight and create their expertise in our own people,” says Bob Howard, Solutia’s director of supply chain optimization. “Those people then would provide the sustainability within the organization and within our financial means.”

    Oliver Wight board chairman Jim Correll says that the company sets a high bar for certification, since the people they train will become internal versions of their own consultants. The process for training trainers resembles Brattle Systems’. First, an Oliver Wight consultant conducts a class with the prospective instructors, arming them with materials such as PowerPoint programs with the notes included. Then, they review the information in greater detail, highlighting the key points and reviewing the instructor notes. Finally, each new instructor presents the material and is critiqued.

    Slade says the critique can be pretty rough, but it’s always constructive. “We try to help them learn to be good presenters, as well as being able to understand and teach our material.”

    The method for choosing instructors is another critical factor in the success of the program. “We not only looked at their functional background, but also tried to choose people who were recognized by others within the company as being established experts with professional credibility,” Howard says.

    Achieving certification represented an attractive perk for company managers at Solutia. They saw it as an opportunity to develop professionally and appreciated the prestige of gaining it.

Training master trainers
    Another approach to maximizing training dollars involves creating complete internal expertise. Tenet Healthcare Corporation, a nationwide provider of health-care services, owns or operates 116 acute-care hospitals and related businesses, and employs about 113,000 people in 17 states. The Santa Barbara, California-based company engaged Development Dimensions International to provide supervisory and leadership training to improve employee retention.

    “The number-one reason people leave an organization is dissatisfaction with their supervisor,” says Jim Concelman, DDI’s manager of leadership development. “Tenet recognized that they didn’t have consistent quality frontline, first-level, and second-level leadership for people in the organization. We worked with them to put together a curriculum tailored to their particular needs. They are now in the process of training 10,000 supervisors.”

    Tenet says that the cost of using an outside vendor to provide such training to each of its facilities was prohibitive. The company opted to have DDI not only instruct trainers but also certify master facilitators who could pass along their skills. Tenet’s vice president of learning services, Norma Resneder, describes this as a waterfall approach, with training trickling down throughout the organization. “We actually trained four or five master facilitators who could train within,” she says.

    Resneder feels that their approach not only saved the company money but also helped individual trainers take ownership of the training. It became their product. DDI is now helping Tenet set up a mentoring program called Tenet Leaders who will serve as an internal resource for advice or counseling.

Companies save money
    The bottom line here is, well, the bottom line. Approaches such as train-the-trainer or certification clearly save companies money. Large corporations such as Solutia, for example, saved millions of dollars.

    But when calculating whether using internal trainers pays off or not, organizations must consider all costs and not just those of hiring an outside vendor. They should account for the time lost when managers or supervisors teach a class instead of doing their regular work. They might also have to hire more employees. Some companies add teaching to regular work, which can result in lower productivity and morale problems.

    Concelman says the real question is this: “Does an organization want to pull somebody whose primary job is, for example, clinical education, away from clinical education part-time to do leadership training, or does it want to take highly skilled people who are dedicated to doing nothing but training and development and specialize in leadership development and have them training employees?”

    It’s a valuable question that each organization must answer. In tougher economic times, however, some organizations have very little choice.