Linking Business Objectives to Learning Outcomes

While the topic may seem not useful or too hard to some, I can assure you that this requires topic requires thought if you want your training to be of any use to your learners and your organization. Any training initiative would be useless and a waste of valuable resources if not properly considered in relation to business or organizational goals.

(To put it in an exaggerated sense, "What is the use of teaching a person how to use a stove if the company is selling laptops!?")

Why the Link?
Training is a process that facilitates learning. People want to learn for some particular reason. Organizations, too, want its people to learn for a reason--particularly, to enable the workers to do the tasks expected of them (and they are paid for). If an organization trains its people in skills that they will not use or make them work more efficiently, then the organization is wasting its training resources. As you know, training eats resources. If this function does not help the organization's bottom-line, then it should be scrapped.

But for the training function, how do we link our training objectives to business or organizational objectives?

This is where a learning needs assessment (or more popularly known as Training Needs Assessment, or TNA) comes in. A learning needs assessment identifies the current level of skill and the desired or needed level of skill or set of skills. This identifies also the gap of the two.

TNA, however, should not be conducted within the training context only. Training--as mentioned before--exists for a certain organizational interest. We do not train just so that we could train.

Learning needs assessment focuses on the needs of the learner to accomplish the tasks given by the organization, which is dictated by the organization's mission, values and goals. As I mentioned in my previous post, the design of the training program must be in light of the organization's reason of being. Otherwise, other business processes (or departments) would question why the training department exists when it does not allow the workers to work effectively.

Linking Business Objectives to Learning Outcomes: How
Now we go to the process.

Unfortunately, linking the business objectives to learning outcomes is not exactly a process that we can do one part and then just go on to the next part without regard to the outcome of the initial step. This process is very dynamic. That is not to say, however, that the trainer has to be very old in the training function to be able to do it. What I will discuss will be the basic concept of this process so as to allow you to identify your own style and technique in implementing this.

1. Identify your business or organizational objectives. This will help you identify what knowledge or attitudes you need to train your learner on. At th end, you also need to articulate or explicitly state the knowledge and attitudes the organization expects of its members.
2. You can do this before the following steps or after, but don't forget to identify current existing learning initiatives or training courses. Besides saving time and effort, you can also learn from the effect of previous learning initiatives which ones were effective and which ones were not, and why or how.
   
3. Identify your desired performance outputs (for that particular learner, of course). This will be the end result/s of whatever you want your learner-worker will do. This also means identifying criteria for evaluation--how will you or anyone be able to know that what the worker did was passing or failing based on this standard. Put this in a list as "performance outputs expected" or "performance criteria."
4. Identify at least one reason why that output is required in the course.
   
5. Based on the desired outputs, identify specific skills required to perform and accomplish the task. The previous step focuses on the output. This step focuses on the process or steps required to produce the output. Same as the second step, identify the criteria for evaluation so that the learner can easily identify with your or your organization's standard. Put this in a list as "expected task skills expected" or "task performance criteria."
6. Identify at least one reason why that skill is required in the course or for work.
   
7. State your objectives, performance outputs and specific skills in the language of your learner. Of course, language here means the level of technical complexity he or she can handle.
8. Communicate these things at the onset of your training delivery or during your training proposal so that people who would decide on the value of your training would know how related or valuable it is to them.

You would notice that I "inserted" the whys of identifying outputs and required skills. This is to help you explain to your learner the importance of being able to accomplish that task better. In this light, the reason should always be related to the overall picture of your organization's work. For example, if you tell someone that he needs to learn how to type 80 words per minute, and that person asks why, you can say that, besides efficiency, that is the expected speed so that that learner's output can come in time for other people whose job depends on his ability to perform it competently.

I hope this short post gives you an idea how to link business objectives to training initiatives. I look forward to getting your comments.

P.S. My next posts would be dealing with technology for teaching or training, particularly, opportunities that teachers still do not exploit. I hope this would help trainers and learners learn better!