Can we REALLY Develop a Strategic Training Plan?

You bet! The journey toward operational excellence involves, and is heavily reliant on a pervasive and effective training effort at all levels - in all disciplines. As you plan your operational excellence effort, a great training framework, or "strategic training plan" should include the following elements:

- Establish Corporate objectives: return on assets, unplanned downtime less than 10% etc.
- Analyze the skills necessary to achieve these objectives, given your current state.
- Identify your current skills inventory - types and quantities.
- Review anticipated attrition, focusing especially on workforce demographics.
- Review planned changes to processes and equipment and the resulting training needs.
- Do not forget to include "soft skills" training: team building, conflict resolution, etc.
- Review regulatory and legal training requirements.
- Perform a gap analysis of the shortfall between skills -quantities, as well as specific regulatory requirements. Focus training on losses from ideal.
- Develop a strategic training plan including budgets, timing, metrics, priorities, etc.
- Establish clear expectations and outcomes from the training effort, and measure them.
- Recognize that a great training effort involves exposing people to principles, methods, techniques, etc and the real learning does not occur until they actually practice the training.
- Repeat the above steps - at least annually!

These steps, and others as determined by your specific plant culture, can help you develop a strategic training plan. This means developing a strategic training plan vs a reactive, or "what do we have to train on to prevent the errors we are seeing" type culture.

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