You can’t have everything in life – especially when you’re playing with other people’s money, like humanitarian agencies are.
And that includes all the different kinds of experts you might want.
Due to some terrible career planning, I’ve ended up in a very specific niche – humanitarian learning & training.
That has the side effect of me knowing ALL the common mistakes, good ideas that go wrong and dead-ends for aid agencies, when it comes to training and learning.
So, what would I tell you, if I was your L&D advisor?
One – don’t decide what to do without an analysis.
(I’ll violate this rule in a moment, so do forgive me).
You need to know what you’re trying to change, and you can’t know that without an analysis.
Without the analysis, you don’t know where to focus your humanitarian learning programme. You don’t even know whether you should run a programme! Perhaps there’s a better way to change the situation that you want to change.
The analysis looks at what you want to change, what it should look like if you succeed, and what’s getting in the way of that change.
If skills are a big part of that, you run training. If they’re not, maybe you need a tip-sheet or poster to remind your team of something. Or you need to change the process to make it clearer and reduce the chance of making mistakes.
Two – make your analysis about a real performance problem that you have.
Don’t make it about topics and what people ought to know about them.
That will lead to training courses with tons of presentations that no-one remembers, where no-one practices anything and nothing changes with their jobs
When you choose a real problem, you immediately make the course more relevant. Learners can see a direct link to their work. It also makes it easier to make it practical – because you can find something that those learners practically have to do to fix that problem.
And if there isn’t something practical that learners have to do to fix that problem – it’s a big red warning light that training probably isn’t the answer.
Three – scrap your Training of Trainers.
This is where I start breaking rule one and giving advice without an analysis, but it’s based on years and years of experience. Your ToT won’t work. Sure, there are ToTs in the world that are pretty good – but they are very rare, and I am sure your ToT is not one of them.
Look, I’ve delivered ToTs. They are some of my favourite courses to run.
Here are two reasons (among many) they barely ever work. One is that there is no real plan or material support for the participants to deliver the training after. It’s supposed to happen organically – and it won’t.
A second is that ToTs as they exist in the sector are much more about communicating content to be presented.
They’re very rarely about subject experts becoming really proficient trainers. Instead they teach people to read out a set of PowerPoint slides, in the hope that their audience then knows that stuff. Why not just turn those slides into a pdf and mail it round?
Four – don’t have your technical experts train others.
Instead, try getting them to write down, step-by-step, how they do the different parts of their jobs. That will help them by giving them clarity on how they do things. And it can be a reference for new people, who can read it without sitting in a course.
Some people struggle with this one, because it’s what you’ve been doing, and it seems to work well enough. I’m sure some people have learned some things this way. But really – are you so happy with the impact of the training your team does?
Part of the reason you’re not getting that much impact is that the training is not designed the way it needs to be to change how people work.
Five – you need both more and less training.
Less, because training is often not the most efficient way to learn – especially when the training is about frameworks and information, not practicing job tasks.
More, because basic skills are missing in your team – how to run a meeting well, how to create (and then manage) a budget, how to engage respectfully with community members, how to write a logframe, how to get good results from coordination meetings and many, many more.
You’ve got some stars who are great at these, I know. But we’re not born knowing how to do them, and there are others who need to be trained.
Six – don’t rely on your organisation’s e-learning to do the job.
Apologies to those who create it, but the average quality is so low that it is irresponsible to work on the basis that it helps.
There are many, many ways in which the e-learning is bad and won’t work, but you don’t have time for me to get into it. Assume that it does nothing, and might make things worse. If you think yours is the exception, that’s great.
But if you can’t specify why it is better than the rest, based on principles of e-learning design, Mayer’s principles or something similar, I’ve got bad news for you – it’s not .
Follow those, and that’s a big part of what you’d get, all for free! Drop me an email (info@gregorjack.com) or book a call if you’re wondering what the rest would look like.
