Define your Real Goal. You must make sure that you're training with the end goal in mind. If you do not, you will end up spending training dollars on activities that do not produce the results that you truly want to achieve.

Many corporate managers contact us and say things like, "I want to have a Spanish class at our facilities every Tuesday and Thursday evenings for an hour and a half. We want to do this for 12 weeks."

With all due respect, that is not a goal. That is a task. That is an activity. It is also an activity that very seldom leads to your real goal.

The first question is, "What is your real goal?"

Do you want your staff to:

You should be thinking strategically at this point in the process. Again, you must train with the end goal in view.

The question is, "What exactly do you want and need your people to do?" The answer to that question will dictate the solution. You may even find out that you have different goals for different people and departments within your organization.

This is why it is so important that you don't "cookie cutter" your training by simply placing everyone into a classroom training process somewhere and expect to get strong results. It won't happen.

What will work is a solution that is designed to meet YOUR needs and the needs of the individual learners. That may involve some classroom training, it may not. We don't know yet. There are other solutions. That's the whole point of this exercise…keeping an open mind until we can figure out what you really need and how to best achieve that goal.

To help you define your real goals we are providing an interactive "Goal Definition Worksheet" for you. Completing this worksheet will be the first step to help you implement a training program that achieves your real goals and allows you to benchmark exactly what you really need to accomplish!

You can download the "Goal Definition Worksheet" in the "Quick Links" box in the right hand column of this page.