Realities of Corporate Training Institutes in Mumbai

There are many Corporate Training Institutes in Mumbai. Some are large and have a large sales force and in-house training delivery team, while others are individual trainers who operate from their homes, what we call one man armies!  There are also many aspiring trainers in the market, some of whom have elementary knowledge and no formal experience. All three are constantly competing with each other to grab their share of the training pie.

Apart from these three categories, their is a fourth category that we most certainly cannot leave out. It's the training managers, learning officers and process trainers that form the in-house functional and behavioural trainers teams who conduct programs for their respective organisations.

Each of these categories have their own specialities, strengths, lacunas and challenges that they face while trying to accomplish the required outcomes.

Although the training industry in India is a multi billion rupee industry, yet it is rather unregulated and there are no set standards that everyone follows. On one hand this leaves room for a lot of creativity at work, while on the other it gives rise to glaring gaps in the quality of training delivered.

If training is to be successful in fulfilling the required outcomes, it has to follow some standardised methods and processes. Let's have a look at some of these:

1. The first and foremost area to explore is whether training is the solution to the issue being faced. I know you are surprised to read this as my first point but I think it the first question that needs to be asked!

On many occasions I see leaders looking at training as a solution to everything. However they forget that the issue might be due to other reasons and training might just provide a temporary solution. Training employees cannot solve all your system, process and leadership issues.

2. Now if we have identified that it is a training issue then we need to identify exactly where the training is required. Very often leaders think that if they train their employees then everything will change. They however often forget that change has to be driven top-down. It's first the leaders that need to change and this wave of change needs to then percolate to the rest of the organisation. We sometimes forget that actions are louder than words and if we change first the rest of our team will automatically follow.

So the question is that what can help us decide whether the issue at hand is a training issue or not and if it is one, then how do we make a program that is effective enough to produce the desired change in the organisation?

My experience of having trained for the past 11 years tells me that to decide if this is a behavioral training need is possible only when you do a thorough Training needs analysis and identification. This means you need to talk to various different people in the organization to get an idea of the situation and the need in its totality and understand the commonalities as well as the outliers. Trainers need to learn to probe neutrally to avoid bringing in personal biases and that is where i find Edgar Schein’s human process consulting techniques very helpful.

These techniques help us in identifying the common factors and also the not so common ones! Once these factors are identified, we can then present the findings to the concerned stakeholders, the top executives to be ideally involved in the process.

By effective probing we can successfully make them share what they think about the same and then help them zero in on developmental areas, some of which they need to work upon internally and some which can be addressed by hard skills or soft skills training.

Hmmm...Got you thinking? Well I'm going to leave you with these thoughts right now and will catch up with you soon to share some more thoughts on what can take Corporate Training Institutes in Mumbai to the next level. In the meantime I'd love to hear your views on the same. Do get in touch with us by visiting our website http://www.theyellowspot.com/ See you soon:)