Business and Money Tips

(This article was published in The Straits Times on 3 Feb 2016 at page C44) Some people think that training and development are a luxury for you cannot really measure its tangible benefits. Yet others think that there must at least be a 200% payoff (benefits over training cost) for any training program to be considered beneficial.  To us, there are 7 tangible benefits that you can touch and feel IMMEDIATELY after the   training : 1.      Ask the participants to do a written assessment  of the training in terms of  3 areas: how does it improve their work, make their work easier or given them new ideas . You can also ask them to do a  30-day Action Plan  on the action that they will take within 30 days of the training 2.      Voluntary self-reporting by the participants .  If your participants can report to you without being asked, you can be sure that they enjoyed the training and find it useful 3. ...

It's time to make more money - from training. 3 Steps:  Know what you want to learn .  Like I want to learn how to negotiate successfully, so I source for such a  training program .  Learn with an objective in mind . When I attend the course on negotiation, I am not interested to learn everything about negotiation, I just want to apply negotiation to my work situation n ow .  Assuming I am a buyer, I want to learn how to get a good deal from supplier without being fooled by them Apply the learning within the next 3 days .  Studies show that unless you apply what you learn within the next 3 days, you will not apply the learning at all.  In fact, people lose money on training in one of these  5 ways , application is the main reason. To ensure that your training is profitable, you have to compare 2 things: What you gain from applying the learning . Like I will gain a 1% discount from my vendor when I apply negotiation tactics. Assuming I ...

My previous article on how to make money on training drew a response from one person who commented that 'Isn't making money from training the norm?"  I replied him, "No".  From our experience in training since 1996, most people lose money on training.  In fact many companies do training because the training fee is subsidised by the government's PIC scheme .  They just want to 'take advantage of government's money'.  Few of them know how to apply the benefits of training (click here for the 7 ways to apply benefits), left alone make money on training.  One may attribute this to the high stress that companies people have (unless they know how to reduce stress ).  There are 5 reasons for this: Most companies do not consider training as an investment but just an expense .  Since they didn't expect to have any return, they are very happy to have spent money on training.  This is the same as some companies considering marketing as an expe...

In response to an earlier article  stating that training is one of the 5 costs that cannot be cut, 3 persons asked me to elaborate how we can ensure that our training is profitable.  There are 3 simple steps to make money from training: Know what you want to learn .  Like I want to learn how to negotiate successfully, so I source for such a training program .  Learn with an objective in mind . When I attend the course on negotiation, I am not interested to learn everything about negotiation, I just want to apply negotiation to my work situation n ow .  Assuming I am a buyer, I want to learn how to get a good deal from supplier without being fooled by them Apply the learning within the next 3 days .  Studies show that unless you apply what you learn within the next 3 days, you will not apply the learning at all.  In fact, people lose money on training in one of these 5 ways , application is the main reason. To ensure that your training is profi...