Changing Times

In this week's reading, the Molenda article pointed out that for businesses to be successful, training must affect the bottom line. Training is no longer seen as a support or staff function. It also pointed out that training is no longer performed for "activities" but for "impact." When I graduated from college in Organizational Behavior and began work as a training designer, I know that a lot of the training that I designed and delivered was done for the sake of activity. It almost seemed that the "soft skills" training that I was delivering was a little break from the day to day production demands of the employees. That is not to say that the training wasn't beneficial for the individual. I believe it was. It was a lot of fuzzy stuff like communication skills and supervisory skills. I recall that many of our discussions in class around the application of what they were learning was often times related to their relationships outside of work. The communication skills training was helping them talk to their teenagers at home more than each other.
The training was well received by the employees but noticably absent was upper management. It was difficult to expect employees to model behavior that their bosses had no knowledge of. While a few employees probably used their training to confront difficult people or "be a better boss", there was no assessment of skills learned or follow-up of any kind. I think it was more of an opportunity to get off the production line and have a free lunch.