With the economy in trouble, it can be easy to push off training initiatives. But that's exactly the wrong move, says Andrew Wolff of PricewaterhouseCoopers. Wolff spoke with Consulting magazine about training strategies and philosophies, and making sure firms are getting as much "bang for [their] training dollars" as possible.
Consulting: You recently gave a presentation during a Consulting magazine Webinar in which you talked about the importance of going past "awareness-level training." Can you explain what that is, and why firms need to go beyond it?
Wolff: Awareness-level training is where training organizations frequently spend a lot of their time. And typically the task is to tell someone about something that's happened. And in the grand scheme of things, that stuff's important. If you look at a sales organization or something like that, it can be really, really important because you can't sell a product if you don't know what the product is or why people want it. It's also something that you can do much more efficiently and sometimes more effectively other ways that are a lot simpler than training.
And part of what we think about, especially in a pressing economy like today, is where are going to get the most bang for our training dollars? Internally, we've opted to focus a lot more on behavioral change, business results, things like that versus helping understand what's changed at just an intellectual, cognitive level, only because we think there are other people who do that at least as well as us—our marketing, our communications function, things like that—and we can be redundant.
Consulting: What is the alternative?
Wolff: I think there are a couple things. One is just simply the communications and marketing functions in an organization or even the knowledge management function—if those things are healthy, then you probably shouldn't need a whole lot of awareness-level training. We try to strive toward application or synthesis or some higher things on whatever learning taxonomy is your favorite one, but once you're focused on application, you can backfill whatever awareness-level stuff has to happen.
In a lot of our courses, for example, we will [do] an activity-based design. These are activities that we think mimic performance in the real world. If it's product training, let's focus on a client call. Targeting the application level, or even one up from there helps to bring awareness along.
Consulting: According to Consulting's Best Firms to Work For survey, consultants at PwC receives about 57 hours of annual training. Would you say that number is on the mark?
Wolff: We are higher than that, internally. The right amount of training is what's going to change your performance levels from where it is today to where you need it tomorrow.
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