Your best training is the next one

At first, you don’t provide any ethics & compliance training.

Then something happens and you realize it was a mistake not to train your employees. So you develop a short training for newcomers. And you beat yourself up for not having done it sooner.

Don’t.

Because soon you’ll realize that your induction training doesn’t cover everything it should. After you beef it up, you’ll realize that long-term employees need refreshers too. And then, it’ll just make sense to provide employees in different functions their own customized training. Later, you’ll feel it would be more efficient to use a vendor to create online training. Only to discover, a few years down the road, that in-person training can be more effective. Then you’ll try to produce short animation, text messages, and funny comic strips to fill the gaps between training campaigns. By then, some employees will tell you that there is so much information that it’s hard for them to know what’s really important, so you’ll consider reducing your training. And you’ll beat yourself up for not getting it right all these years.

Don’t.

Your training needs to change with the state of the market. The best you can do is to pause regularly and to reflect on whether your training program is doing its job. If yes, great. If not, change it. But don’t dwell on what has been. You’ll never win that game.

Instead, we need to think of our next training idea like the launch of the latest iPhone. When Apple executives are touting the phone’s cutting-edge technology while pacing the stage, what they don’t tell us is that the next 2 or 3 generations are already in development. Prototypes with flexible screens, built-in projectors, 3D screens and holograms. No matter how great our latest training is, we need to deploy some humility and remember that all of our prior attempts had a short life. By all means, we should launch that latest training with pride but we should already have an eye out for the next best thing. Because the marketplace has already changed.

That’s how we stay relevant.