The Field Guide to the 6Ds: How to Use the Six Disciplines to Transform Learning into Business Results

H2 D1.2

How to Decide Whether Training Is Necessary

Introduction

In Transfer of Training, Broad and Newstrom wrote: “Training is expensive to design and deliver; it should be the last, not the first, intervention the HRD professional and the organization should consider in order to improve employee performance” (1992, p. 5).

Unfortunately, many business managers try to use training as the first response to a host of performance issues for which it was neither designed nor can succeed.

But how do you differentiate between performance issues in which training is an essential part of the solution (it is never the whole solution) and performance issues ...