Article | A Through Analysis of Training for Immediate, Marked Improvement

In this exclusive interview, Nizar Baidoun, Training Manager at the Commercial Bank of Kuwait, shares the bank's training initiatives used to achieve desired organizational objectives.

What are some core strategies in place at your organization for implementing an effective training and development framework?
At our company, we use training initiatives to strengthen our operational capacity and to achieve desired objectives. And to serve such purpose, we use a proactive training strategy by maintaining a staff that is always ready to handle any challenge. In terms of developing employees’ behavioral and technical perspectives and tackling operational deficiencies, we use continuous environmental assessment and future reading where possible.

Our proactive and future-oriented training strategy utilizes the following methodologies:
• In-house training, to capitalize on our in-house expertise, and to ensure training adaptability to satisfy our operational needs.
• External training, to obtain unique technical training, which requires expertise that we may not have.
• Career planning, to motivate employees by seeing company’s investment in their capabilities to grow and handle future planned tasks and positions.
• E-learning, used for pre and post training to boost intended training effect, and to act as a refresher for newly obtained KAS – knowledge, attitude, and skills.
• Certified training, to obtain internationally recognized expertise in technical domain and ensuring minimum needed expertise.
• Self-directed learning, by encouraging staff to take personal initiatives to develop their KAS at a personal level and reward them for doing so.

Can you share some approaches for developing high quality, in-house training programs?
Developing high quality in-house training requires serious efforts and field expertise in order to deliver expected results. In this regard, I can share some approaches that were effective, based on my professional experience:
• Critical approach – analyze a deficiency’s root cause, then design needed training intervention around such deficiencies.
• Proactive approach – customize training intervention to satisfy and serve specific strategic business initiatives that are yet to be implemented.
• Reactive approach – apply training as “firefighting” orientation to handle existing challenges/needs urgently.
• Developmental approach – utilize training as a development ladder for internal employee development (career development) to satisfy future-oriented objectives.

How do you recognize weak spots in your business?
Business weaknesses can be recognized through analysis of operational rations and details such as high customer dissatisfaction rates, high damage rates, declined sales, high employee turnover, etc.
An employee’s KAS proficiency level could be recognized in terms of lacking technical expertise to operate, motivation to perform, self-initiative, or hostile working environment, etc.

How do you overcome and/or strengthen these potential faults?
First, we need to do proper root-cause analysis to identify what caused such weaknesses to happen.
For example, high employee absenteeism (a symptom) is contributed to low employee motivation (a root cause) at work. By defining such root cause, we will come to know if training is the remedy to said weakness or not.

Research says that 80 percent of business operational challenges are NOT trainable, and only 20 percent are. This should be held in regard when applying the root-cause analysis. If the defined root cause is trainable, training should be deployed in order to tackle such identified weaknesses, whether being operational or employee related. If it is found to be from the 80 percent category, training will be a waste of efforts, and other managerial interventions will be needed.

Finally, how do you gain leadership buy-in to finance these programs and initiatives?
Convincing senior management to sponsor training interventions in general (and financially, in particular) requires rock-solid arguments. Leaders tend to be results-oriented. Use the following approach to gain buy-in:
• In your presentation requesting financial support for training, make a short and quick reference to previous trainable deficiency, and note how training helped tackle it effectively. This could be served by presenting pre and post training comparative results. Stress how training helped facilitate reaching a positive result. This will help assuage the senior management’s financial concerns.
• Finally, indicate which specific deficiency your proposed training will tackle and why you have chosen to use this training in particular. From experience, if you have the facts to support your presentation, buy-in will follow fairly effortlessly.

2012 April, 25 interview with Nizar Baidoun
A certified trainer & consultant, with more than 4000 training and consultation hours, in Human Resources, Training management, and related soft skills, for 11 years now. During such period, Nizar’s vast practical and first hand experience, has helped many reputable companies, operating in different industries, to achieve planned goals and objectives, by optimizing employees’ and operational efficiency and effectiveness.
In parallel, Nizar held different managerial positions, in several industries, such as (but not limited to) Commercial Manager in a reputable household company in Kuwait, where he managed a portfolio of 2 million USD annual turnovers; and Training Manager (still) for one of the largest bank in Kuwait (commercial Bank of Kuwait), where he manages the entire training operations, for 1100 employees.