Top Training Tips

Mike McIntyre is the founder and President of MindCrossings, a learning innovation company offering custom learning solutions, outsourcing and consulting services. He focuses primarily on MindCrossings’ strategic direction, partnerships, customer relations and business development. Mike has more than 30 years’ experience in providing outsourced learning and administrative services to Fortune 1000 corporations and leading not-for-profit organizations. Here he speaks to NGP to give some advice on how to nurture and develop your most precious resource: your people.

NGP. Pharma companies must respond to competitive challenges by reducing costs and shortening development time. How can a training strategy help pharma companies achieve this?

MM. The simple answer is by aligning their training strategy with their business goals. Often training is seen as a cost-based business activity, versus a strategic effort aimed at reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. In order to drive measurable gains such as reductions in time-to-market and development costs, training programs must be highly focused on the specific learning needs of the people involved in these areas. Short-cutting this effort by limiting training to ‘basic requirements’ is not going to drive innovation and efficiencies.

Good training design requires good analysis, which means developing a finely tuned understanding of the training needs. This analysis, when done well, will often uncover unknown issues, process inconsistencies and communications gaps. So, while a thorough approach is not always cheapest when measured as a cost, it usually results in the bigger ROI.

NGP. In what ways can better training lead to improvements in sales force effectiveness? What challenges are present in training a geographically dispersed sales force?

MM. Improving sales force effectiveness is obviously a fairly broad goal. An ongoing challenge for most organizations has been delivering training to a mobile sales force, and mobile learning technology is now ready. While some learning systems providers are struggling to get their systems caught up, we have a platform that leverages new technologies to deliver m-learning to laptops, tablet PCs and PDAs, and the ability track user status, scores and compliance.

Aside from leveraging new technology, better training might mean delivering training via short, self-paced e-learning modules. We’ve found that salespeople will take more training if it is broken into smaller or shorter pieces so they can take a short course when they have 15 or 20 minutes of downtime.

Finally, better training may just mean ‘better training’. Many organizations have moved a portion of their training to the web via self-paced e-learning; however, it may fall into the category of ‘e-reading’ as opposed to e-learning. Good classroom training is usually considered good because the instructor drives a high-level of engagement and interaction to the class and allows for a significant amount of Q&A time that provides students with real-world examples. In order for e-learning to be nearly as effective as classroom training, it must be designed to be engaging and interactive, and provide the students with real-world examples.

Today’s young workers are highly computer literate. They have a lot of experience with instant messaging, online forums and interactive gaming. If organizations expect to engage these employees via e-learning, they will need to design it accordingly.

NGP. According to recent reports, the pharma industry is currently experiencing a shortage of staff with certain key skills in research, development and production. How is MindCrossings helping bridge this ‘skills gap’?

MM. Bridging a skills gap is simple: people can learn. The real challenge for most organizations is shortening the skills gap rapidly and minimizing the time-to-proficiency to maintain a competitive edge. This is an area where we have particular expertise in merging key knowledge management and adult learning principles with just-in-time learning. The premise is to provide staff with easy access to key information and knowledge and allow them to ‘learn as they go’.

By providing employees, especially new ones, with enough information for them to more quickly engage in the work effort, you are giving them a higher emotional return, faster, and you are leveraging their capabilities faster. You can’t make someone an expert overnight, but you can enable expert performance by making expertise available when it’s needed.

NGP. The pharma industry requires very specific scientific knowledge. How would you respond to the concern that an outsourced training development vendor can’t produce effective learning for highly specialized content?

MM. Well, first of all I don’t think that you can lump all vendors in the same category. Some vendors, such as MindCrossings, have a wealth of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. In fact a portion of our team has actually worked within pharmaceutical firms prior to joining our company.

When we don’t have specific expertise on a certain topic – for example, on a new drug and its interactions – we work closely with our client’s subject matter experts to transfer their expertise into the learning program. We also have relationships with industry experts in various areas such as compliance and clinical research, which we can add to project teams.

NGP. There seems to be an increasing interest regarding training outsourcing in the pharma field. What are the key drivers for these types of engagements?

MM. Our team has years of expertise in training outsourcing and have found that the key drivers are not necessarily unique to an industry. We’ve found that companies have similar goals, such as decreasing costs by leveraging learning technologies, shortening their time-to-market, and improving alignment of their training strategy with their business goals.

A good training outsourcing company brings a high-level of expertise to the partnership. This expertise can cover learning systems and technologies, development processes, program implementation and learning measurement. In addition to increased scalability, outsourcing training to the right partner will bring a highly focused effort on driving measurable gains from training initiatives.

Our experience has shown that organizations that are seriously considering outsourcing recognize that the training group does not fall within their core competencies, and that partnering with an outsourcing company where training is the core competency simply makes good business sense.

Tailored training

Figures show people participate less in training programs as they get older, yet over three quarters (77 percent) of individuals agree that training and career advice will be critical in ensuring older workers continue working effectively past retirement age.

Dianah Worman, CIPD Diversity Adviser says: “Research shows training can help motivate and retain staff, cutting recruitment costs and reducing sickness absence. But individuals have to want to learn and take part in the training if it is going to achieve organizational objectives.

“What works for one employee does not always work for another. Employers must avoid rolling out a training course to everyone just because it is a success for some employees. Older workers are a critical part of the labor force so it is important to identify individual learning needs and then target them with the appropriate training.

“Employers must invest enough time and money in order to get the training right. More emphasis needs to be placed on upskilling older workers in areas such as IT, and with IT skills being a requirement in many jobs in today’s knowledge-driven economy, it’s important that older workers maintain their skills in this area to add full value.”