How to Waste Money on Training

If you're going to spend on training, it's important to do it wisely. A week of training, including travel and people's time can easily represent the investment of $7000+ per employee. For this post, I'm talking about the training that occurs during a major software transition. You've purchased, perhaps after a long process, some brand new software. Now, you're off to learn about it. This training will probably be useless. There are three reasons for this, each of which I'll discuss in depth over the next few posts:

1. A thousand and one options
2. No habla Espanol
3. Wile E. Coyote and the ACME widget company

Let me start with the first issue, a thousand and one options. There are different kinds of investments you make for a company. Some obviously require a lot of work before they become useful. For example, when you buy a plot of land to build a factory, you know you've started down a long road. Other times, as with trucks and automobiles, you can buy and drive.

Large software is different. Nominally, it's fully functional as soon as it's installed on your server. After all, other businesses are using the same exact code. In reality, as anyone who's been through the process knows, after it's installed, it's still absolutely useless. It needs to be setup and configured. You've got to choose from what seems like a thousand and one options to get it to work properly.

That's where most software training starts—with those options—and that's the problem. Because, in day to day life, even people with software experience never deal with those thousand and one options. They don't care about corporate structures, flex field setups, process levels, attributes, sets of books, etc. etc. They want to process invoices, orders and requisitions. They want to run payroll. Instead, they get to know all about the thousands of options.

As a result, if the training class is five days, they may spend four days on those options and only one day actually doing something they understand like entering an invoice. They'll come back to the office knowing something about the software but nine times out of ten will pretty much be entirely dependent on their consultants to do anything with it. Let's hope that they at least had fun in the hotel pool.

Next time: No habla Espanol.

December 4, 2008 | Email Us

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