What’s being learned, how people are learning, and where learning takes place have evolved dramatically, and how we manage training delivery has also changed.

Your training delivery management may need alignment with what your business actually needs. Read on for tips to ensure alignment in this area can facilitate better engagement, more growth, and increased customer satisfaction.

Five Tips for Better Training Delivery Management

1. Plan for Demand and Leverage Downtime

It’s important to know your organization’s anticipated delivery needs—these details help guide and allow you to decide how best to utilize your team and identify any resourcing gaps.

When you adequately plan for demand, you can optimize efficiency by leveraging your downtime. This involves measuring your utilization—tracking how many days and hours facilitators and other delivery resources spent delivering learning.

Bringing attention to seasonal trends indicating peaks and valleys in training demands can help you manage resources effectively. Anticipating any future need also helps this process, and utilizing a common system for training intake and requests can help your demand planning run more smoothly.

2. Align With Your Customers and Stakeholders

A foundational step in successful delivery management is a deeper understanding of your customer and stakeholder needs. Whether you are working with program stakeholders, content designers or developers, or even a workforce management team, aligning everyone to the same vision is imperative.

A strategy our delivery management team utilizes when aligning with our partners is to ask various questions like:

• What business problem are you trying to solve?

• What will be the duration of this initiative and program?

• What locations and languages do you need delivery support in?

• What expertise and skill sets may be required?

Details that questions like these reveal can help you build a resource profile to aid in selecting the right team members for the delivery. Once you have drafted a resource profile, remember to calibrate it with your customers and stakeholders.

3. Have Processes and Procedures for Various Modalities

Many organizations have examined their learning programs in recent years and begun utilizing different modalities to support learning, such as VILT. While programs are still being delivered in person, many have shifted to virtual and digital deliveries.

To optimize and ensure a successful delivery management function, examine your processes and procedures, and question the reason for choosing specific modalities. For example, while much of the training we see today can be done virtually, a learning need may involve more than self-led e-learning and job aids, requiring a team of producers, facilitators, instructors, and systems that must be synchronized.

4. Commit to Ongoing Upskilling and Resource Development Efforts

Learning modalities and strategies are constantly evolving and changing, and keeping current with trends is critical for delivery management. Because of this, you need a plan for the ongoing development of delivery resources. One way to do this is to take advantage of the various resources through ATD or a partner like GP Strategies, with its many blogs, articles, and webinars on industry changes and hot topics.

With this information on new industry trends and strategies, you can build a strategy around how your team will continue its growth. A side bonus of committing time to resource development is that it can dramatically increase engagement and the retention of your top talent.

5. Invest Time in Community and Engagement

A final, key way to improve your training delivery is to provide an opportunity for your training facilitators to communicate in this era of decreased connection. Providing a space for your teams to share ideas on hot topics, themes, wins, new programs, and learner reactions enhances your team’s morale and promotes knowledge sharing and celebration.

Outside online communities, you can also consider hosting regular Q&A events on hot topics or creating ongoing touchpoints inviting discussion. Find the ways that make sense to build a community for your team and provide easy and consistent access to it.

Build and Maintain a Successful Training Delivery Team

For more information on creating or managing a successful delivery team, download GP Strategies’ e-book, First Class Delivery | Building and Maintaining Successful Global Training Delivery Teams.