Aaron Hoos

In this second of nine installments, Learn.com explores the critical link between training, HR, and strategy.

The alignment/misalignment of training, HR, and strategy is a huge, huge problem. Businesses have strategies and they try to implement them but don’t always dial HR (and their training) into the same loop. So HR hires to fill conventional roles while strategies falter.

In this 9 part video, Michael Sabbag of Learn.com explores the idea of aligning training, HR, and strategy. Here’s the first installment.

The following is a case study derived from working with a client. To preserve confidentiality, I am only describing the problem and not the client.

PROBLEM: A client approached me with a problem. Their organization had invested thousands of dollars to hire a company to create 3 five minute training videos for their new product. Unfortunately, the result (after pre-paying for the work) was extremely poor quality and insufficient for their needs. They had potentially lost thousands of dollars for worthless videos.

SOLUTION: We talked about what their needs were for these videos (ultimately to train their sales people) and I analyzed the content in each video and redeveloped a storyboard that salvaged significant elements of the videos. I also developed a script that was read by a professional voice artist. Collaborating with other professionals, we recrafted the video by chopping up and repurposing the videos, and then adding a new voiceover. For a small additional investment, the client was able to salvage what was once lost.

RELEVANCE TO THE BUSINESS DIAMOND FRAMEWORKâ„¢: I’ve done this kind of work (in various media) with other clients, too, and I’ve found that the most frequently wasted assets are in the Support Diamond — typically training material intended to help different areas of the organization. A lot of investment is put into the content and then it goes unused.