External training providers are individual trainers or specialist training companies that are not connected to your organisation. These trainers are invited in to educate and develop your staff and impart new skills.

External training providers are individual trainers or specialist training companies that are not connected to your organisation. These trainers are invited in to educate and develop your staff and impart new skills.

In contrast, in-house trainers take the form of individuals, or groups of individuals, who seek to pass on their expertise.

When seeking to enhance a workforce, most companies are faced with the same decision: do we provide training in-house, or do we use an external training company?

How To Improve Your Training Provider

If you’re a training manager, then this guide is your helpful assistant to minimise the risk of outsourcing your training. So, read on and discover how to source the most suitable training provider for your organisation.

The seven parts to finding a training company are:

1. Define your training needs
2. Search for training providers
3. Solicit training strategies
4. Evaluate training proposals
5. Explore proposed solutions
6. Launch your training program
7. Evaluate your training company

Once you’ve identified a number of potential training providers to contact, you can now start to collect proposals from them.

“training providers will have a clear idea of what is needed”

But before you contact them, be sure that you have a good, consistent brief that outlines in detail all of the management training needs that you want the provider to meet; this way, training providers will have a clear idea of what is needed from them and will be able to propose training interventions that should have a tangible impact upon how your organisation operates.

Comparing Proposals from Training Providers

Furthermore, having a detailed brief will reduce the amount of dialogue needed between you and any potential provider as they will have a clear idea of what’s required straight away. This should cut down on the amount of follow-up questions they need to ask in order to craft their proposal. Plus, giving a clear and consistent brief to each potential provider allows for you to make comparisons between competitive proposals much more easily.

This has been Part three of how to improve your training provider. Part Four will continue to advise to to select an appropriate training provider.

While a consistent brief should ensure that proposals are comparable between different providers, you may find that in reality prices vary greatly between different companies. The temptation here is to just selected the least expensive option, but don’t be fooled – effective
training managers look at the expected return on their training investment.

Seek Best-Value Training Programs

What this means in practice is that instead of just looking at the costs of a particular training proposal, you need to consider the value that you will receive from the investment. With this aim, be sure to discuss proposals further with potential providers in order to clarify details and get a better sense of the facts and figures involved: you don’t need vague statements such as “our training should improve staff productivity”, you need hard facts like “on average our training improves staff productivity by 6% year on year”. Once you have tangible information such as this, you will be able to look at your own financial accounts and projections and work out the annual cost savings and revenue increases that you can look forward to receiving.

Don’t forget to factor in additional costs such as your staff’s time attending training sessions, travel expenses, accommodation etc. Once you have an idea of all the costs involved in a proposal, you’ll have a clear understanding of what returns you can expert, and over how long
you can expect them. This will enable you to use metrics, such as a break even analysis, to determine which is the most cost effective training proposal.

Be sure to also factor in timing issues: if one option promises a 50% return on investment over 5 years, and another promises 50% over 18 months, it’s clear which option you should select.

With all of this data your choices should narrow down quickly, leaving you with a reasonably clear indication of which proposal is most suitable.

Whilst your ROI evaluation may give you a clear idea of which proposal to choose, the reality is that all of your potential providers will be eager to do business with you, thus enabling you to use your comparative data as leverage in further negotiations. Just because one provider seems to offer the best ROI doesn’t mean the other “nearly perfect” providers should be dismissed: you now have the opportunity to reach out to them and explore the possibility of making some alterations to their proposal to create a winning solution for both parties.

Customised Training Programs

Enter into discussion with training providers to better understand what the elements of their proposed programme are, and explore the extent to which these could be customised to provide you with more suitable training. Look at the tools that are utilised in each proposal – how suitable are they for your company? Do they need to be changed? If so, how will that impact the costs of the training? Just remember: not all customisations may be possible, so be willing to compromise. And make sure that you think carefully beforehand about defining the acceptable margin in which you’re willing to do so.

In addition to these negotiations surrounding the content of training proposals, this is also the ideal juncture to negotiate the cost of the proposed training interventions. Armed with your data on ROI, you should have a clear idea of what it is that you need and how much you’re willing to pay for it. But remember: throughout all these negotiations, keep things amicable. Ultimately, you will want to work with the chosen provider and they want to work with you. Even if you don’t come to an agreement this time, be sure to part on good terms as this is a connection that could lead to future dealings and training programmes.

After completing this exploration stage with your range of potential training providers, you should have a clear idea of which provider is the most suitable one for your needs and your budget. You now need to make a final choice about which training provider is the one that you are going to use.

Once you have chosen a training provider, it’s important to make this decision known to your colleagues and launch the training scheme to your staff. It’s worth recognising at this point that your choice of training provider may not be universally accepted by all of your colleagues; for example, some may question why you didn’t go with the your existing training provider, whilst others may wonder why you didn’t go with a big name firm that is well-known in your industry. If you’re on the receiving end of these kinds of questions: don’t worry, remember that you’ve done calculations and engaged in negotiations with potential providers to ensure that this is indeed the best provider for your needs. You can even justify your choice by showing your colleagues the comprehensive needs analysis you undertook at the start of this process, the multiple proposals you have solicited, and your ROI calculations. As a result, your colleagues cannot fail to see the wisdom of your choice.

Selling Your Training Program To Employees

Even so, as a training manager it may still be necessary for you to “sell” this training to your organisation: it’s important to bear in mind that when all is said and done, you are deliberately upsetting the apple cart and shaking up the status quo in order to bring about tangible change through learning and development. While the facts and figures may make total sense, people are naturally resistant to change; you may therefore have to employ a number of the strategies detailed below in order get your staff on side. Things to consider include:

• The ways in which you’re going to communicate this training choice to your staff. You could use different forms of publicity, including presentations, newsletters, or brochures from your training company. Just make sure you back everything up with positive testimonials from people who have used your chosen training provider previously.
• Focus on the training needs in your organisation that need to be met, rather than getting bogged down always discussing the tools that will be employed to meet those needs.
• Make sure you spell out the disadvantages with your company’s current way of doing things and how the training you have sourced will greatly improve things.
• Throughout all these conversations, remember that everyone you speak to will be thinking “what’s it to me?” Make sure you spell out the benefits of training in a personable and relevant way. For example: “you and your colleagues will enjoy a day out of the office to learn new skills and provide an opportunity for team building”.

With the training programme “launched” internally, and with staff and colleagues on board, it’s now up to your chosen training provider to deliver the agreed upon training.

As a training manager, your role does not end as soon as your external provider begins to deliver the agreed upon training; rather you need to maintain an involvement in the process and, most crucially, take responsibility for coordinating an evaluation of the training once it has been delivered. Many training managers fall into the trap of using ineffective methods to evaluate training that do not necessarily give an accurate measure of success. For example, many employ feedback questionnaires upon the completion of training; while these may be good at assessing delegates’ feelings towards the training and the trainer who delivered it, it’s unlikely that these measures will give a reliable insight into the effectiveness of the training at plugging skills gaps within your organisation. For example, the trainer may have delivered a fun and enjoyable training session, which would be indicated by delegates on feedback questionnaires, yet there is always the possibility that in reality delegates just had a good time but didn’t learn anything actionable.

Similarly, getting delegates to self-assess after a training course can be inaccurate, as delegates have a tendency to overestimate how much they have learned in response to being exposed to new information.

Performance Management of Training Provider

How then, should you as a training manager evaluate the progress that your staff have made? How can you determine whether the training your provider delivered was of high quality and will yield its anticipated ROI?

The answer is that you must rely upon tangible performance measures.
By all means, use questionnaires to evaluate delegates’ attitudes towards the training; if nothing else this will at least give you an idea of whether or not you should request the same trainer again if you use this provider in future. But you must also identify key performance indicators (KPIs)
prior to beginning the training programme: hopefully you will have done this as part of stages 1 and 3 above. You then need to compare these indicators in the aftermath of training, and continue to compare them over time: that way you will not only have an idea of whether the training has yielded tangible results, but you’ll also be able to see if staff are retaining their new knowledge, or whether they are slipping back into old habits.

Examples of metrics that you could employ to evaluate the effectiveness of training include:

• Productivity: has it improved?
• Number of accidents at work: have these reduced?
• Workplace morale: has this changed for the better?
• Number of sales: has they risen?
• Absenteeism: are staff having fewer sick days?
• Customer satisfaction: are you receiving fewer complaints?

Of course, not all of these indicators may be relevant to your business, but there will certainly be some here that you can use. Ultimately, these changes should then lead to positive changes in your bottom line that should be in line with your initial ROI calculations.

Conclusion

It sounds obvious, but so many training managers forget that training must lead to tangible, measurable, empirical results in your organisation. By following the stages outlined in this document, you will be able to identify important skills gaps, thus empowering you to make better informed decisions when searching for a training provider. By paying close attention to KPIs indicators, you can then evaluate the effectiveness of your training provider’s offerings in a suitable amount of detail, allowing you to see clearly how successful the learning has been.

Whilst it may seem like more work initially, following the advice above will ultimately enable yo

Management Training Providers: How They Compare

Any training manager looking for a management training company is spoilt for choice. A Google search for management training alone throws back 667,000,000 million results. Of course, that’s the number of pages mentioning the topic but it is clear that there are many companies delivering such courses.

This brief article will attempt to narrow down your options when choosing a management training provider.

Notable Management Training Companies

Ask a training manager and a number of companies will trip off their tongue without any hesitation. The most notable of these being the CIPD or Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development

Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development

The CIPD is the world’s “largest Chartered HR and development professional body”. They boast over 135,000 members, mostly committed people engaged in building a career in human resources. In recent times they have branched out into training courses, as part of their learning and development remit, but haven’t quite mastered this area of working life. Other training institutions which focus solely on learning and development do that.

Their training section boasts an impressive portfolio of courses ranging from HR, to management training to employment law. Additionally, of course, they deliver the accredited CIPD qualifications in HR.

A glimpse at their management section boasts an impressive line of courses including Facilitation Skills, Coaching Skills, Introduction to Management, Motivating Employees and Managing Across Cultures.

Their Prices? Ouch! Advanced Facilitation Skills for 1 day? That will be £510 + VAT please. Workplace Motivation? That will be £650 + VAT please.

Clearly, the CIPD have an excellent reputation. And a thoroughly wide range of training courses on offer. On the other side you are asked to invest a substantial amount of money for 6 hours training input. With a small amount of searching you could probably find a decent management coach to give you one-to-one input for a similar price. If you are a large-sized established business with a decent training budget then CIPD could be a sound choice for you. If you are a smaller business and training resources are limited, you may want to seek further options.

Reed Learning

As a commercial training provider, Reed are firmly focused on management training for business and non-profits alike.

There wide range of courses cover both 1 day, residential courses, and in-house training alike. Their topics include management, leadership and personal development. They boast a large number of in-house training clients and over 250 scheduled courses.

If you are looking to place a new manager on a management training course then Reed Learning could be a viable option for you. So how do they compare for prices?

Here are some examples: Introduction to Management for 2 days at £970; Effective Delegation 1 day @ £540 + VAT; Motivating for Success 1 day @ £510 + VAT

Again, this is a substantial investment if you are a small or even medium sized business looking for a 1 day management course, for instance.

So are there alternatives?

Train In A Day Training

Traininaday offer 1-day training courses in management, leadership, marketing and social media. Their range of management courses includes Management Essentials, Team-building, Motivating Employees and other core management skills training.

The range is narrower than the providers above yet covers the majority of disciplines that learners seek when becoming a new manager or looking to improve their existing management skills.

Although they don’t offer public courses, they do deliver in-house training courses on your premises.

The good news is that an in-house management course, for example, starts at only £997. That is a great return on investment for a training manager. For instance, the cost of two learners attending a Reed Learning scheduled course would be greater than training a whole team of learners on your premises.

Management Training and Development Options

So the training manager looking to invest in management skills for their employees has a number of options. Ultimately, it will be down to the mix of benefits they are seeking and the size of their training budget which will determine their choice of management training provider.

by Carl Duncker

ur choices to make a tangible difference in your organisation by helping you to choose the training provider that is right for your company.