What Makes a Great Training Organization?

Systematically maximize the value of training in today’s radically transformed business environments

  • Achieve excellence in the 8 key process areas that matter most
  • Strengthen leadership, strategic alignment, content delivery, metrics, and more
  • Diagnose and overcome specific obstacles to learning in your organization
  • Leverage technology to promote independent learning, not distract from it

Learners have changed—radically. Businesses have changed—even more radically. If you’re a learning leader, you know your organization must change just as profoundly. You may already be working to lead that change. This best-practices book will help you focus your scarce resources on achieving excellence where it matters most today—and where it will matter most tomorrow.

Doug Harward and Ken Taylor have spent seven years identifying and validating the specific processes and practices associated with outstanding training organization performance. Building on this unprecedented research, they help you define priorities that tightly align with business goals and objectives, choose best practices you can realistically implement, and get results.

Reflecting comprehensive new research, this book identifies 8 sets of training processes proven to drive the greatest sustainable performance improvements. Drawing on their pioneering training industry experience, Doug Harward and Ken Taylor drill down into each set of capabilities, helping you build on what you’re already doing well, and achieve excellence on the business metrics that matter most.

This evidence-based best-practice guide helps you focus your efforts where they will deliver the greatest value, build implementation roadmaps based on the field’s hard-earned wisdom, and successfully execute. Reflecting profound insights into today’s learners and corporate goals, it will help you excel whether you deliver training internally, purchase services from suppliers, or supply training services to businesses.

Optimize the value of training by focusing on these 8 process areas:

  • Strategic Alignment: Design learning programs that align with business objectives
  • Content Development: Assess, design, manage, and maintain content
  • Delivery: Manage instructor networks and deliver via multiple modalities
  • Diagnostics: Identify causes of problems and recommend solutions
  • Reporting & Analysis: Define business metrics, report data, make improvements
  • Technology Integration: Integrate learning technologies with each other, and with enterprise systems
  • Administrative Services: Support learners via scheduling, registration, and more
  • Portfolio Management: Manage, rationalize, and maintain large program portfolios

If you’d like to participate in the ongoing efforts of this research, click here.

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Doug Harward
CEO and Founder of Training Industry, Inc.

Doug is internationally recognized as one of the leading strategists for training and outsourcing business models. He is respected as one of the industry’s leading authorities on competitive analysis for training services and works with international companies and new business start-ups in building training organizations.

As Director of Global Learning for an international telecommunications firm, he led the industry’s largest global training outsourcing engagement with PricewaterhouseCoopers, and received the Chairman’s Global Award for Community Service for his work in developing integrated learning organization strategies. He has worked in the training industry for more than 25 years.

Doug holds an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and a BSBA in Marketing from Appalachian State University.

 

 

Ken Taylor
Partner, President and Editor in Chief at Training Industry, Inc.

Ken is responsible for business operations for Training Industry’s Web Media, Publishing, and Marketing Services businesses focused on the corporate training marketplace.

Before joining Training Industry, Inc., he served as Managing Director of the Raleigh and Charlotte practices of Hudson Financial Solutions, managing and delivering financial solutions for complex financial problems for companies of all sizes and across all industries, and prior to that served as CFO of several large segments of a global telecommunication technology company.

Ken holds a BCOMM from McGill University, in Finance and International Business.