I was discussing with a friend of mine - who happened to be a business owner - some HR related matters. He said that sometimes his employees’ performance do not improve as expected after the training. The first thing that came to my mind is to ask him whether they get post-training follow-up and to his surprise he answered that they don’t.

Most companies fail to cultivate training benefits because of poor follow-up and not because of lack of planning and implementation. Training follow up is a critical element to reinforce the new introduced KAS (Knowledge, Abitlity, Skills) for the following reasons:

1. People resist change naturally
2. Any new KAS needs reinforcing support
3. The risk of drifting back
4. Any KAS change need on-going follow-up to encourage it

For this, letting employees walk free after training without any sort of follow-up is a wasted resource that makes of them a liability to the company instead of an asset. So to eliminate such negative impact, we should keep in mind that follow-up is a vital element for any training. For an effective post training follow-up approach, I will share with you the following, as a result of my personal experience:

1. Pre-training: Ask for the employees’ expectations out of the course
2. Ask the facilitator to write his expectations before starting the course
3. Ask the facilitator to give you a feedback of the participants, during and at the end of the training
4. Ask the participants to highlight 3 new skills they learned from the training and follow up on their implementation
5. Send out a quiz to refresh the participants’ memory
6. After 2 weeks, ask the participants to list the new skills they are using at the workplace
7. Scheduled follow-up on a continuous basis.
8. Run post training assignment
9. Managers should brush up on their coaching skills to engage with the participants after training
10. Review training material
11. Managers’ involvement should be more than “how was the training”?
12. Explain what is the next training intervention

The above approach increases the probability of positive transfer and reinforces the use of new KAS.

Hope the above is useful.

Nizar Baidoun
Trainer & Consultant