The Five Stages of Training Program Evolution

Jeff Walter (00:04.745) 

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter and welcome to another episode 

 

Hi, I’m Jeff Walter, host of the Training Impact Podcast, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today, we’d to focus on different types of training programs or the evolution of training programs. You know, when you’re trying to train, there’s a lot of challenges that you may face. might have geographically dispersed learners, you might have field support networks you have to deal with, cultural difference in your learners, language barriers, lots of different types of challenges. 

 

And when you look at how you’re going to address those challenges and how you’re going to put the type of program that you’re going to put together. And when I say type program, I don’t mean an onboarding program or a screw development program. It’s the nature of the program. And over the years, we have helped many companies implement training programs on our platform and others and to address these challenges. And we’ve noticed that there’s a pattern of behavior or a 

 

pattern of evolution that programs go through to go from modest levels of impact to very high levels of impact. And we brought that all together into what we call the training program roadmap. And it outlines five different stages of evolutionary development in a training program. And as you go from one to another, your return on investment gets exponentially greater. 

 

So let’s start at stage one. So let’s talk about the five stages. Stage one is a self-directed program. And those are training programs where there’s no requirements on the learner. It’s a collection of courses that the learner can go to when they want to go through them, and they kind of self-direct their way through. can be very effective for very motivated learners that want to learn skills and new things. 

 

Jeff Walter (02:07.406) 

But because it’s self-directed, because there’s no assigned training, because there’s no required training, they tend to have marginal impact. Going on to number two, a knowledge acquisition program. This kind of takes you to the next level up. And here you want to ensure that your learners have some basic level of knowledge on a given subject or subjects. So it’s a knowledge acquisition type of training program where you’re wanting 

 

the learners to acquire a certain level of knowledge. Of course, you’d like it all to be expert knowledge, but there’s a base level of knowledge that you’re hoping to achieve. The analogy I like to use is when you’re getting a driver’s license, you take the written test and the road test, and the road test is really ensuring that you’ve acquired a base level of knowledge about the rules of the road. So then that takes us to stage three, which is a skill development. 

 

program. And just like the name implies, it’s about developing the skills, being able to do something. And so again, back to our driving license analogy, you know, there’s the written test to test your knowledge of the rules of the road. And then after you pass that, you have to take a road test. And the road test actually, you know, you have to demonstrate a certain proficiency of skill in driving. 

 

And skill development usually requires a lot of practice, a of coaching, and to develop those skills. Then we work our way up to stage four, which is all about individual performance. It’s not just enough to do that skill or perform a skill at certain level of proficiency, but it’s about putting the skill or skills together to hit a certain level of performance. So that may be a certain sales threshold or customer satisfaction threshold or speed at which you do a certain. 

 

process or the quality of that process. It’s a performance metric, right? So it can be customer satisfaction, can be sales, it can be retention, but you’re looking for individual performance levels. And then going from there is the ultimate is stage five, organization performance. Where you’re looking at optimizing the performance of an organization. And if you’re dealing with 

 

Jeff Walter (04:32.642) 

multiple organizations like most partner training programs are, then that takes you to looking at each of your partners and trying to optimize their performance and what you do to do that. So as you go from self-directed to knowledge development to skill development to individual performance. 

 

So as you go from self-directed to knowledge acquisition to skill development to individual performance to organization performance, your return on investment for your training goes up exponentially. When you’re at that top level, you’re really getting a tremendous bang for your buck in terms of training. 

 

So now let’s dive a little deeper into this, that each stage, know, stage one, the self-directed training program you can think of as your base camp of training. It’s like giving learners a map and a compass and saying, forth and conquer. It’s designed to empower learners, take control of their own learning and development. They have the opportunity to become more knowledgeable, self-sufficient, and it can lead to, you know, very well trained. 

 

learners if they’re motivated and if they take advantage of the tools that are put in front of them. Additionally, the learner has to spend some time and energy figuring out how to navigate the program and what kind of content they want to consume. And so generally what that leads to is learners engaging only when necessary. Only when there’s something that they don’t know that they want to know or something they have to learn how to do that they don’t know how to do and getting it by talking to a colleague. 

 

just isn’t cutting it. And so, you know, they tend to be relatively low utilized programs and tend to have a very, very modest ROI because of that. But if we, you look at the goals, it’s provided them by the learners with the tools and the flexibility to acquire the knowledge at their own pace and develop those skills at their own pace. It can be very empowering and it can 

 

Jeff Walter (06:41.912) 

deliver a lot of benefit if the learners are motivated. How you get past that motivation so that they’re only consuming content when they need it is one of the big challenges. Now if we get into the best practices there, it starts off with providing a comprehensive set of training resources. These can be courses, videos, articles, interactive modules, all related to the task at hand. 

 

In the world of partner learning, selling, servicing, using an organization’s product tends to be the focus of those programs. If look at supplier, it’s how to integrate with the OEM supply chain. But those comprehensive set of resources and courses is what you’re looking for. And then another best practice is blended learning, developing those safe, self-paced 

 

courses, those e-learning courses, those video courses and assessments combined with instructor-led courses that can optimize that knowledge transfer. And so we’ve done it as an industry, done pretty well there. Then you kind of get into suggested training based on your role in the organization or your career path. This is what we might suggest courses you take or a learning path you might take or other learning materials that you might take based on your role in your training history. 

 

And so that helps the learner navigate and helps, you know, kind of cuts down the friction on taking the courses. But again, it’s just a suggestion. We’re not assigning anything because it’s a self-directed training program. Of course, to make all this happen, you need a learning management system to provide that catalog and that enrollment and track all the training and serve up the learning and serve up the videos and schedule the instructor led. 

 

and the webinar-based training. So as you scale, you definitely need to implement a learning management system. Now, that’s the consumption of the course. Some of the things that also best practices is to get learner feedback. What did they think of the course? Was it valuable? Did it help? And this aids administrators in improving the content as the program evolves. Another best practice is to do regular updates. 

 

Jeff Walter (09:07.724) 

you know, the training content gets out of date, especially if we’re talking about partner training where it’s all related to products and the products get updated continually. And so the training materials have to be updated continually. need to have a process in place for continually updating your training materials. And then one thing, like I said, motivation is an issue. So another best practice is to recognize or reward the learner in some way, shape or form, whether that’s 

 

whether that’s through a certification or some type of acknowledgement or other things we’ve seen, points that they can go by, things that a company store based on points, even up to cash rewards. But the real question is how do you want to recognize the… 

 

And then in general, these types of programs tend to get their success because it’s catch-is-catch-can in terms of who’s taking what training and what type of impact that might have. These programs tend to measure their success on the number of enrollments. And so if this year’s enrollments are greater than last year’s enrollments, the program is doing well. If the enrollments are down, the program is struggling. And that’s because it’s all voluntary. It’s all self-directed. 

 

more people are opting in to take the course, there must be value there. So those are the basic best practices for a stage one self-directed training program. So now we move to stage two, which is a knowledge acquisition training program. And so now, know, in stage two, composers of everything in stage one, and now we start adding things. So you still have that. 

 

comprehensive set of resources, you still have that LMS, you have the learner feedback, you have some type of recognition program in place. And now you need to kind of up the game because there’s a space set level of knowledge that you want to make sure your learners have acquired. And that can be based on role. Your technicians have a certain base knowledge, your salespeople have a certain base knowledge, your store managers have a certain base knowledge. And so you want to ensure that. 

 

Jeff Walter (11:25.47) 

And especially when comes to selling and servicing an organization’s products, you want to make sure that your resellers have a certain base knowledge and your authorized technicians understand what’s going on, especially if you’re paying for the warranty work. And so, you know, it’s building on that strong foundational understanding and enabling participants to acquire process and apply this new information effectively. At this stage, you know, we’re combining theoretical learning with practical exercises. 

 

But most importantly, we’re using knowledge assessments to ensure that the learner has acquired a certain level of knowledge. And so again, the goal is to establish a consistent baseline of knowledge across all learners or different types of learners. This comprehensive knowledge transfer ensures that your partners acquire a thorough understanding of how to self-service and use your products. It can lead to higher partner performance. 

 

Again, since you’re establishing a baseline of knowledge, a certain set of knowledge that the learners have to acquire, there will be an improvement in performance. There should be some higher customer satisfaction on a partner training program and improved consistency as people in the same role and your partners have standardized the training and they understand what’s going on. You still have the challenges of engaging and motivating people, especially if they’re external learners. 

 

you know, internal learners, can use, you know, employment and you have direct managerial authority over them, so you can motivate them that way, both positive and negative. Feedback when you’re dealing with external learners, it’s a lot harder, and so engagement and motivation, so that they consume and acquire that level of knowledge can be challenged. And also, assessments are a tricky business, you know, trying to assess somebody’s knowledge. 

 

there’s a lot of different variables. So having an accurate assessment that really assesses their knowledge is crucial and difficult. So now let’s get into our best practices for the Stage 2 knowledge acquisition training program. So first off, the best practice is usually the organizations will create some type of certification. And so now you can think of this kind of like 

 

Jeff Walter (13:49.816) 

traditional school, right? You get that high school diploma. It’s a certification that you’ve acquired some base level knowledge that high school students would know. A college degree, same thing. It’s an accreditation. It’s a certification. In the corporate side, we don’t see use of lot of certifications necessarily in training internal learners, but it’s used extensively in training external learners. 

 

And that’s how you can be sure that those business partners have some base level of knowledge about your products. so creating certifications, implementing a series of certifications, go level one, level two, level three, as somebody a particular role, like say an installation technician goes from basic installation to advanced installation. Then also another best practice is not just having those 

 

certifications defined, but also assigning them, right? And so if you are a technician, you’re going to be assigned the level one technician certification. If you are a salesperson, you will be assigned level one sales certification or store manager certification. you know, having those different, you know, assigned the certifications, because this is knowledge you want them to acquire. It’s baked into the certification. 

 

Again, you can kind of think of a college degree, same thing. If you’re gonna get a bachelor’s degree or an associate’s degree, there’s a certain set of courses. Every university has a certain set of courses that you have to take that are base to every student, the core, and then you focus on your major and that’s distinct. But then everybody in that major takes a certain set of courses. So anyway, create the certification, assign the certification, and then… 

 

especially when it comes to partners assigning certification objectives, that you want a partner to have a certain number of certified staff per role. And that’s how you can ensure, that’s how you make sure that the partner has that base level of knowledge. Now, another best practice is doing pre-assessments. That is, rather than taking somebody through an entire 

 

Jeff Walter (16:16.366) 

program, again, these are all employees and they’re partners and their time is valuable. Rather than taking them from A to Z and then assessing them much like we do in K-12 and the university, best practice here is pre-assessment. So let’s get to know, let’s have a really good assessment, let’s assess their knowledge before they begin anything, let’s give them credit for the things they already know, and then they can take courses. 

 

on only the things that they don’t know. And that can dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to get that complete set of knowledge, that certification. Because these are people that are out there working, they have a lot of knowledge, and so we do a pre-assessment to really understand where they’re at and then fill in the gaps. And then going from just recognizing them to incentivizing training, and this is where we see either at the 

 

partner level or at the individual level. Some type of, could be, like I said earlier, points where they can go buy something. A of times it’ll be monetary at the partner level or monetary at the individual level. You’re basically wanting people to achieve a certain, you want to incentivize the training. You see this a lot in the school systems with teachers where what they’re, one of the incentives that are provided there. 

 

is that you need to have a master’s to be a teacher, but then if you do master’s plus 15, master’s plus 30, every 15 credits, you get a bump up in base pay. So that’s a good incentive for training. So we see that over on the educational side, on the corporate side, much more focused. It’s not just go get 15 credits, but it’s like. 

 

I want you to achieve this certification when you do, I want to incentivize that and give you this type of award. Then again, if you’re talking partners, you want to integrate this with your field staff support so that the field is supporting the partners, seeing where they’re at, where they are on their certification objectives. And then you want to brand the partner locations. 

 

Jeff Walter (18:34.744) 

with the brands that they support because not every partner supports all of your brands. And so you want to be selective and make sure that they only need to get to training with the brands that they’re supporting. One other thing that happens a lot with external learners is they operate in multiple locations. A particular partner might have three or four different locations where this learner roams through. And if you’re expecting each location to have 

 

a certain knowledge base that factors into it. But also the learner can be playing different roles in the different locations. They might be a barista at one coffee shop, an assistant manager at another coffee shop, and a cashier at a third coffee shop. So it’s not only understanding that they’re in these different locations, but it’s also understanding what role they’re playing in each location. And all those locations may or may not be with one partner, you know, in my… 

 

My coffee example, there might be moonlighting on the weekends as a cashier at a coffee shop. It’s all part of the same network. It’s all Starbucks, but it’s owned by different firms, different franchisee, let’s say. Although Starbucks is not a franchise operation, but close enough. And then, like we had feedback before at the individual learner level, here we want to start getting feedback at the manager level. 

 

That’s another best practice. And that’s a easy way to start seeing is this training, does that knowledge, that you’re doing this training to make sure that everybody has a certain base level of knowledge. And from the manager’s standpoint of that person, does that base level of knowledge actually help them? Does it impact behavior? Or is it just, you know, spurious knowledge that they happen to have? 

 

And so, again, like the learner feedback is important, the manager feedback actually gets to the are you starting to have an impact. And then here, it’s not just enough to measure your success via enrollments like we did back in the self-directed program, but here you want to really look at measuring success via certifications. How many certifications were achieved within the partners did they hit there? 

 

Jeff Walter (21:02.678) 

certification objectives. And so those are some of the best practices for stage two knowledge acquisition training programs. And so as we move over to stage three, your skill development training programs, you’re climbing higher. And now it’s not just making sure that everybody knows something, but that everybody can do something. That they have a certain level of skill proficiency and skills that are important to their role in the organization, know, in development. 

 

those hands-on practical skills. And with skills, skills are all about practice and coaching and that kind of comes into here too. So the goal here is to equip the learners with these skills necessary to perform the roles effectively and to ensure that they can apply those skills in a real-world scenario. It’s not good enough to just do it in the classroom, you got to do it out in the real world where it makes a difference. If we do this well, we’ll get a ton of benefits, right? 

 

improved performance of the learner because now they just know something, but they can actually do something. And so you’ll tend to see higher ROI because they’re able to actually do something with some well-developed skills. That leads to higher sales, higher customer satisfaction when you’re training your sales force or your partner’s sales force. It leads to lower warranty costs and support costs when you’re training the technicians that do the warranty work. 

 

or your training, those customer service reps that people are calling into at the help desk. Being better trained allows them to fix it right the first time or resolve the call on the first or resolve the issue on the first call. And so you get benefits there. And then also a well-trained network, if you’re talking about a partner network, a well-trained network of highly skilled 

 

learners leads to improved network retention because people are all invested in the program. now, big challenges you face are especially when you’re dealing with external learners, the skill levels are all over the place. One person may come in and have never touched a hammer and you’re asking them to be a very skilled technician or type of, let’s say, a carpenter. 

 

Jeff Walter (23:28.746) 

and another person comes in and they’ve been a carpenter for 10 years and they’re very skilled. And so how do you deal with the, you know, varied skill levels? And then it’s also, we wanna make sure these skills are practical and they have a practical application, right? And they are, you know, make the person effective in real world scenarios. So skills for skill sake, not very useful, but we wanna make sure that there’s a real world application for the skills. 

 

So, okay, so now let’s get into the best practices of Stage 3 skill development. 

 

Well, one of the best practices is regular practice. You got to be able to practice these skills. You know, it’s hard to develop a skill if you don’t practice. Anybody that took an instrument in elementary school and learned to play the saxophone or piano or any of that in elementary school knows you got to practice, practice, practice. But along with practice comes mentorship and coaching. You know, it’s practicing without getting that expert 

 

feedback can be frustrating and is not that efficient. So there are your first two best practices there are you to have some way of doing regular practice and you have to have some way of mentoring or coaching the individual for the skills. But those skills exist within the skill profile. And so what is a skill profile? And it’s another best practice. 

 

is defining skill profiles for each role. And the skill profiles is pretty much what it sounds like. It’s a profile of skills. What are the skills that a given role needs to, a person playing in a given role needs to have? And at what level of proficiency? And so you can have a level one, level two, level three levels of proficiency. And so, you know, the profile is this skill at this level of proficiency, that skill at this level of proficiency, right? 

 

Jeff Walter (25:34.466) 

And then just like we were assigning certifications in the knowledge acquisition training program, here we want to assign skill levels. We want you to be a level two certified in repairing breaks or the operations of a store or operating a piece of machinery. You’re at level one, which is some base level of efficacy and we want to take you up to level two. 

 

you know, so assigning skills and assigning skill levels. And then just like the Knowledge Acquisition Program, if this program includes partners, we want to assign skill level objectives for our partners. You you need to have one, you know, level one barista, two, level three baristas, you need a level one. 

 

store manager, you want to have two level two assistant managers, et cetera, et cetera. So coming up with those objective, those skill level objectives of what’s the optimal skill set that a partner needs to be successful. Very, very important, very, very important. And so now we get into, okay, so now great, you’ve got all these, you know, you’ve got the skill profile, you’ve assigned these skills, but you gotta be able to assess the skills. And so you have to implement skill assessments that evaluate the skill, the learner’s skill proficiency. 

 

And that gets us back to the practice and that gets us back to the mentoring. so up until recently, all of that was very manually intensive. And so most training programs stopped at the knowledge acquisition because, you know, being able to assess skills, being able to practice skills, being able to mentor or coach people on skills, very labor intensive and very expensive. One of the things I’m very excited about 

 

right now is with the advent of augmented reality and virtual reality and artificial intelligence. We’re starting to see on the soft skill size avatars that allow you to practice your soft skills. And we’re starting to see with virtual reality and augmented reality, these reality sessions that allow you to practice your hard skills. There’s some really cool things happening. 

 

Jeff Walter (28:00.75) 

I’d suggest you go check out the Napa AutoTech Accelerator. They’re doing some really cool things with skill development there. So shout out to them. And then, you know, and then not only do you want that mentorship and coaching, but you want peer interaction. You want to talk to other people that are at your level or maybe a little above you or even below you. because they, you people that are not at your level tend to ask really good questions and you want to have forums and discussion groups. 

 

And so that’s best practice in skill development. And then, just like we’re incentivizing knowledge acquisition, we got to incentivize skill development. And just like we had manager feedback on knowledge acquisition, want manager feedback on skill levels to see are we really, when we assess somebody at a level two technician, are they really materially better than a level one technician, right? And then… 

 

Again, as this is moved over to skills where there people who being able to demonstrate they can do things, your measure of success starts to get skill levels. know, number of people, number of learners and partners have achieved certain skill level objectives, and that’s how we’re going to measure success in a Stage 3 program. So, as we go over to Stage 4, the individual performance, now we’re really getting up there in altitude in terms of return on investment. 

 

we’re leapfrogging because now we’re going to start to bring in measurable key performance indicators such as sales or fixed right first time or repair time into the picture to see how, know, not only do have the knowledge, not only have the skills to do it, but they can perform at a certain level, right? And so, and what, and you know, we want to, you know, everybody is performing at a certain level. We want to be able to. 

 

improve their productivity, improve their proficiency and their efficiency. And that’s really cool. And so with the higher productivity and higher efficiency, and improved training program effectiveness, you’re really hitting on the ROI for training and just having a major impact on your organization. To do that, you need to be able to accurately measure and track these key performance indicators. 

 

Jeff Walter (30:20.64) 

And this is, think, one of the key things that we as learning professionals have struggled with over the last number of decades. And that’s understanding what are the business drivers, what are these key performance indicators that we’re trying to impact? It’s not just enough to give somebody a skill or make sure they retain knowledge, but they to be able to put that to good use. 

 

that has a real impact on the organization. So challenge there is really defining what KPIs, key performance indicators, we’re focused on, and then being able to measure and track that with consistent and reliable methods. And so, okay, let’s get into the best practices. So the best practices for Level 4 is integrating those individual KPIs into your training program. Now, that’s something that a lot 

 

and I would say the vast majority of training programs we have been affiliated with do not do. They do not integrate the KPIs into training. But our LMS just happens to be able to do that. And so we have a nice way to bring in these performance metrics and compare them to a person’s training record, but also use these key performance metrics as part of somebody’s accreditation. So you can become a… 

 

level one by acquiring knowledge, or level two by demonstrating some type of skill, and a level three by continuing all that and performing at a certain level. Another best practice is learner, is discriminant analysis. Discriminant analysis, the short thing on discriminant analysis is it discriminates between groups of people. And so, a nice way to get an understanding if you’re training program or training courses or specific courses. 

 

are having an impact is once you bring those individual KPIs into the process, you can break up your learners by quartile or quintile, know, the top quintile, the second quintile, the third quintile, the bottom quintile, and those would be your groups. And then you can, you know, look at the members of the group and see what percentage took what type of training regimen. And if you see that, you know, the people top quintile, 

 

Jeff Walter (32:43.918) 

took a particular set of courses or achieved a particular set of certifications in high percentages and people further down the line, as you get to the next level quintile, level three quintile, and the bottom quintile, where those numbers just drop off precipitously, then you can be pretty confident that those training interventions that the high performers are taking are moving the needle and having an impact. 

 

a very positive impact on performance. so doing that discriminant analysis, another best practice there. Assigning KPIs, KPI into the training and that they have to achieve a certain level of proficiency, setting clear performance goals to very other important best practices. 

 

You know, with the assigned KPI training, it’s, hey, you know, this particular key performance indicator is not up to snuff. Here’s the training that you should take to get that number up. You know, if your customer satisfaction is off, you know, here’s the training modules you need to take to improve customer satisfaction that have been demonstrated to improve customer satisfaction for that discriminant analysis. And the next best practice is the 

 

setting clear performance goals to say, okay, you’re selling, you know, 100 units a month today, we want to get you 110 units. And then again, you know, what skills do I need to develop in order to get there? So another very good best practice in this type of training program. Improving the impact on individual performance, you know, using the, you know, kind of already mentioned that it’s using the results of the discriminant analysis to sit there and go these courses, this certification. 

 

these skills have this impact on these performance metrics. And then you want to, know, while we put an LMS in place before, you want to make sure that, you your LMS now can, you know, the best practice is implementing a partner LMS that supports bringing in KPIs because it makes it a lot easier when all that data is in one place versus having to export data and do things outside of your learning platform. So getting a partner LMS that supports KPIs is very important. 

 

Jeff Walter (35:12.942) 

And then, just like we were incentivizing skill development, incentivizing knowledge acquisition, you want to incentivize individual performance, so you have to help people achieve their goals. And then here, we’re really shifting the measure of success to individual impact. What type of impact or improvement in KPIs are we seeing as a result of the training program? And the most viral 

 

So what does that mean practically? Well, if you do that discriminant analysis and then you bake it into your certification and a certified salesperson, if you can get it to sit there, you can do your analysis and you find that a certified salesperson sells twice as many units as an untrained salesperson. If that is the most viral statistic, 

 

that you can have in an organization, it’ll get picked up, it’ll go right up to the chain and command up to the top because that is majorly important. And I’ve seen that at some clients where they’ve done that level of analysis and I’ve said a trained salesperson sells twice as many units as an untrained salesperson. And everybody knows then, you know, if an untrained person sells a thousand units in a year, and a trained person sells 2,000 units in a year, 

 

everybody knows what the price tag of a unit is, everybody can do the math and go, the training, being a trained salesperson is worth, you know, $2 million a year in additional revenue. so, measure success starts focusing on individual impact of a trained versus untrained and most viral thing you can do in your organization. So that wraps up the… 

 

Stage four, now we take it to the ultimate level, stage five, an organization performance training program, where you’re looking at a particular organization and optimizing its performance, using training to optimize its performance. And we see this a lot when we’re talking about partner training, where we’ve got resellers and authorized service providers, and we’ve got hundreds or if not thousands of these organizations, and you want to… 

 

Jeff Walter (37:38.392) 

focus on each one and make sure that they’re getting the training they need to optimize their performance. And so, what we’re looking here is what is the well-rounded mix of knowledge, skills, and individual performance level that really optimizes partner performance? And if we can optimize that partner performance, it leads to higher productivity, higher efficiency across the network, increased revenue, increased profitability, and really strengthens those partner relationships. 

 

And so of course one challenge is actually measuring partner key performance indicators. And so measurement is always a challenge. switching over to the best practices. 

 

You know, it starts by integrating those partner key performance indicators into your LMS, doing that integration, bringing that data into the learning environment. So you can track not just partner learning, but partner performance, right? And then doing that discriminant analysis at the partner level to identify what number, how many, you you might have done at the individual level and show that, hey, people that take these courses, sell to, you know, 

 

hard and high performing sales or high performing technician or high performing installers versus the average person. Now you’re looking, and that’s on an individual basis, now you wanna look at the number of trained staff in each role. And you wanna do that type of discriminant analysis to take your partners, put them in, break them up again by quintiles or quartiles. 

 

and so to go here, my high performing partners, my above average performing partners, my below average, and my poorly performing partners, right, know, four quartiles like that. And then you wanna look at, okay, how many trained staff in each role and trained, you know, using our certifications as a definition of trained, how many trained staff in each role does the high performers have versus the low performers? 

 

Jeff Walter (39:49.966) 

and do that discriminant analysis and see which training, which courses, which accreditation really drive things and what level of, know, what level of knowledge does the staff need? How many, you know, like, need 10 master technicians at each partner or do you just need one and nine really solid technicians? 

 

The individual level, you’d love everybody be a master, but does that really make a difference in performance or is it you just need one or you need two, right? And then everybody else can just be a certified technician, let’s say. Once you understand that, once you’ve done that discriminant analysis, now you can start assigning those staffing levels to the partner that to be a certified partner, you gotta have three people that are level one certified salespeople. 

 

and you need four certified technicians and you need three certified store managers. And if you have all that, our highest performers, that’s what they have, right? And so, you’re setting those, you’re assigning those staffing levels to the partners and then you’re comparing that to where they’re at today. And then from that, you’re setting clear goals for the partner in terms of. 

 

you know, getting up to those staffing levels. And then you can also translate that into KPI goals. Because let’s say a certified person outsells a trained salesperson outsells an untrained salesperson two to one. And the optimal number of trained salespeople in a store is say five. You can, you know, and a given store has three. Well, you can do the math and say, well, if you had five, 

 

you should see your sales go up by so much and that would be your KPI, your sales goal for your KPI sales goal. And then, using the results of all that, kind of tweaking everything like I just said, that’s the other incentivizing partner performance, just like we incentivize, incentivize, incentivize, people respond to incentives. So you want to do the same thing here, incentivize that partner. 

 

Jeff Walter (42:15.438) 

performance, even though you would think it’s in the partner’s self-interest, giving them a little help, a little incentive never hurts. And then lastly, now you want to really measure the impact of your training program, measure the success based on the partner impact. When a partner has the proper number of trained people in each role. 

 

it performs at this level where others don’t perform at that level. And so, you know, having a trained partner instead of a trained individual leads to, five million more here in sales at that partner. And that’s how you want to measure your success is the impact on the partner. And so that kind of hits all five stages and it’s an evolutionary thing. You you don’t start off at stage five by, you know, by far. 

 

The vast majority of training programs right now are at that self-directed or knowledge acquisition. By far, most training programs are not doing the discriminant analysis. They don’t know what business impact they’re having. And so there’s plenty of headroom for improvement. And I would just conclude in saying, wherever you are at, if you take a look at those stages and those best practices, you can kind of go through that list. 

 

You can go to our website and download a paper on this and you can see all the best practices. And then kind of highlight the ones that you’re doing today. Because I haven’t seen any client that’s on all of stage one, then all of stage two, or all of stage three. It’s usually they’ve done most of stage one and then a smattering of stage two and one or two things in stage three or four. so, know, reality is a lot more complicated than these models. But what you want to do is you want to kind of look at this training program roadmap and you want to sit there and go, okay, 

 

these are the best practices I have in place. That kind of makes me a knowledge acquisition or I’m almost a knowledge acquisition. I’ve got like half of the knowledge acquisition best practices and 90 % of the self-directed best practices. So maybe I need to incorporate a little bit more. I can improve my knowledge acquisition program. bring some of those other best practices in. And so I can use that all these best practices. if you look at your training program, 

 

Jeff Walter (44:41.026) 

which ones you’re implementing. And then when you’re going to evolve your training program, it’s hard to evolve to a stage five and one fell swoop, but you can start bringing in new best practices over time. And again, use this as a roadmap to take your training program to the next level. Because at the end of the day, we’re all in this because we believe that training could be a very positive force on organizations. Human capital is really 

 

the only capital and that’s why we got into this in the first place. so, you know, hopefully this roadmap and this discussion gives you the tools and the roadmap to take your program to the next level as you continue to iterate it and bring it up and up and up and achieve some amazing results. Cause you know, we all know knowledge is power. We all know it can. 

 

You can change things. And so hopefully this gives you a roadmap to get there. And that’s it. Thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. I hope you learned something. I learned something every time I do one of these. So thank you for listening and I really appreciate your time and your energy and good luck out there. Have a great day.