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How To Make Your Training Stick Whether It Is Machinery Operators, Technical People Or Managers, Training Is More Than A One-Time Event. By Steve Schumacher Through my travels around North America, working with various com‐ panies, one distressing thing I have noticed is the lack of knowledge about how to make training last over time. That includes both soft skills and hard skills required to get jobs done in plants, quarries and offices. had not kept up with making sure the employee was continually on track with his knowledge of the job. Rather than letting the em‐ ployee go, the manager gave him some remedial training and com‐ mitted to following‐up with him on a regular basis. Too often, training is seen as the re‐ sponsibility for the Human Re‐ sources or Training departments. Would you say that safety is the re‐ sponsibility of the Safety Coordina‐ tor? Of course not. When looking at an employee's performance, there is no way you can hold that employee account‐ able for being successful until you have given them the tools to be suc‐ cessful. That does not mean you train them when they first join the company and then let them go off on their own. You want everyone responsible for safety. It is the same with training. In order to be most effective, all of your employees must see them‐ selves as responsible for getting the necessary skills and abilities to be excellent at their jobs. A few years ago, I was working with a manager who confided in me that one of his veteran employees just was not cutting it and he was consid‐ ering letting him go. The employee had been with the company for more than 15 years and had never had a poor performance review. When I talked to him, he seemed to have a good attitude and was posi‐ tive about his career with the com‐ pany. The manager just did not feel that the employee was doing what he was trained to do. I had the manager list the top 10 things the employee was supposed to do, and had the employee do the same thing. We then compared lists. The lists were not even close! At that point the manager realized that he 34 ROCKproducts • JULY 2013 Learning and long‐term success on the job takes a focused effort on your part, as a manager, to make sure the learning sticks. Get involved in building training programs. If you have a vendor that supplies training to your employees, go through it yourself before rolling it out. See if the vendor can customize it specifically for your situation. If it is training on machinery, make sure every aspect of it fits your needs. If it is soft skills, work with the vendor as a subject matter expert. Do not assume that an off‐the‐shelf training program will get you the results you want. Make the training rigorous. A lot of training programs teach peo‐ ple the basics of what to do. An ef‐ fective curriculum will also teach them how to handle any and all problem scenarios. Steve Schumacher is a management consultant, trainer and public speaker with more than 25 years of experience in numerous industries throughout North America, including aggregates operations. He can be reached at sschuma@gmail.com. Trainees should be well aware of what to do when unexpected things arise in the plant, in quarries, and on the road. There should be plenty of testing, role‐plays and monitoring of the skills in training, prior to going out on the job. Training is not a one-time event. Equipment is becoming more com‐ plex and the skills someone learned five years ago may not be applicable today. Set up remedial training programs, even for the most veteran employ‐ ees. Do not let your workers get comfortable with how they do their jobs. Set up systematic, continuous refreshers. Use adult learning theory in your training. Get a professional training designer to work with you. They know how to www.rockproducts.com