Aligning Training and Strategy
in an Economic Downturn

In this economic unstable world, with the constant fear of recession looming and oil prices tumbling, it is vitally important that an organisation doesn’t lose sight of the fact that it’s most important asset is its people. It is well known and understood by leaders that it’s the people that can really make the key strategic difference between you and your competitors. As budgets are tightened, reduced and scrutinised further the value of this investment in people development has never been more important. The key words of focus from the business are now: ‘…effective and efficient…’, or ‘…value for money…’ (VFM).

The focus of this Aligning Training and Strategy in an Economic Downturn training course will be around these two key areas: aligning business objectives to ensure the optimum effectiveness of the interventions and development options chosen; as well as ensuring that this is conducted as efficiently as possible, meeting the strategic goals of the organisation. The course will look at the organisational and personal impact of the downturn, moving forward to creating effective development strategies, lean processes, managing providers and negotiation to ensure maximum value, as well as building a case for and calculating ROI (Return on Investment) ensuring value for money (VFM) is achieved.

This is an essential training course for those who are responsible for ensuring the correct engagement and credibility of learning and development in the organisation, as well as the financial control of creating, measuring and managing training and interventions.

The training course will highlight:

• An understanding of the market downturn on organisational and personal impact on the business
• Ensuring that proposed training and development programmes are relevant to the strategic direction of the business to support efficient planned expenditure
• Reviewing lean processes and alternative organisational development methods
• Ensuring efficient value from external learning service providers: (VFM)
• The management of the training budget and potential compromises impacting on the ‘training spend’
• Demonstrating that ROI has been achieved

At the end of this training course, you will learn to:

• Apply techniques to identifying business training needs aligned to organisational strategy
• Review and develop alternative cost-effective methods of development within the organisation
• Review lean processes and models to achieve efficiency
• Deal with external learning service providers to ensure cost-effective development options
• Prepare and create evaluation methods to aid the management and measurement of investment (ROI) and ensure value for money (VFM)
• Develop and propose a business case for training to meet strategic business objectives

This PetroKnowledge course is suitable to a wide range of professionals but will greatly benefit those who:

• have direct responsibility for the training budget within the organisation and wish to gain greater effectiveness and efficiency in managing this
• have a strategic overview of the business and who may also be responsible for initiating training programmes  or authorizing expenditure for training and wish to gain a greater understanding of training budget formulation and ROI
• are responsible for Human Resource / Organisational Development and the planning and delivery of training programmes at a strategic level
• are responsible for the planning and implementation of training programs at an operational level.

The training course will utilize a variety of adult learning techniques to ensure maximum understanding, comprehension and retention of the information presented. This will include highly interactive group and individual activities, targeted case studies and relevant practical exercises. This will be facilitated learning through direct input, discussion and encouragement to test and critically appraise theories, models and concepts.