Training Penetration Benchmarks

Be very careful on establishing your targets. You don’t need 800 hammers to build 5 or 6 garden sheds (or even 5 to 6 per month).Pervasive training of YB’s to get overall organization awareness is good. Champion training for all division directors is also great. HOWEVER, target the number of GBs and BBs at the level of concurrent change your organization can digest. Otherwise you will have tons of “projects” with fuzzy soft benefits, just so everyone can get their GB or BB certificate.Consider your GB and BB target portfolio as the proper outfitting of the toolbox to fulfill the strategic business change plan.

Just a note of caution based on my previous experience working at a small manufacturing company called General Motors (it used to be a big manufacturing company). We went through a similar exercise when we started doing training for Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA). We set targets for how many engineers to train, and we achieved the targets. However, no one was using the training to improve performance and there was no measurable impact from doing the training. I would suggest that you establish targets that measure what is being accomplished as a result of being trained. Regards, Roger Ellis, PMP, Six Sigma Master Black Belt

Dtlay, no one overlay will work for all industries. Think a minute.
An Intel has far different needs than a Walmart. Do I need to explain this or do you grasp the difference in employee mix, the repetitiveness of a Walmart store, etc?There are certainly other X’s – geographic disperion, complexity of processes, life cycle of products/services, distribution methods, on and on and on.
Base your skill set needs and quantities on your opportunities. Figure out what it is you can fix then match those to the skills needed and how quickly you wish to resolve the issues. No one else’s program will match yours.