This document discusses how training functions are organized in companies and aligned with business strategy. It explains that centralized training models are increasingly common, with corporate universities. Four conditions are necessary for organizational change: understanding reasons for change, having needed skills, seeing leadership support, and supporting structures. Resistance, loss of control, power imbalance and redefined tasks must be addressed for new training practices. Marketing and branding training helps gain buy-in by showing business value and identifying champions. Outsourcing training can meet needs but some companies prefer internal control.

1. Current Practice:
The BE Model with Centralized
Training
 Because many companies are recognizing
training’s critical role in contributing to the
business strategy, there is an increasing
trend for the training function, especially in
companies that separate business units, to
be organized by a blend of the BE model
with centralized training that often includes
a corporate university.

2. At General Mills, innovation is a core
company value. As a result, learning and
development is aligned with the business
strategy and its internal customers. Each
of the company’s functional teams
develops short- and long- term
strategies.

3. Learning, Training, and
Development from a Change Model
Perspective
For training and development programs and
learning initiatives to contribute to the business
strategy, they must be successfully implemented,
accepted, and used by customers (including
managers, executives and employees).

4. Four Conditions are necessary for change to occur:
1. Employees must understand the reasons for change and
with those reasons;
2. Employees must have the skills needed to implement the
change;
3. Employees must see that managers and other employees in
powerful positions support to change; and
4. Organizational structures, such as compensation and
performance management system, must support the change.

5. Process of Change
Four components of the organization:
• Task
• Employees
• Formal organizational arrangements (structures,
and systems)
• Informal organization (communication patterns, values,
and norms)

6. The four change-related problems that need to be
addressed before implementation of any new training
practice are:
• Resistance to change
• Loss of control
• Power imbalance
• Task redefinition

7. • Resistance to Change refers to managers’ and
employees’ unwillingness to change.
• Control relates change to managers’ and
employees’ ability to obtain and distribute
valuable resources such as data, information, or
money.

8. • Power refers to the ability to influence others.
• Wed-based training methods, such as Task
redefinition, create changes in managers’ and
emloyees’roles and job responsibilities.

9. Marketing Training and Creating a
Brand
Marketing is also important for the successful adoption of
new training programs by helping to overcome resistance to
change, especially misconceptions about the value of
training. Here are some successful internal marketing tactics:
• Involve the target audience in developing the training or learning efforts.
• Demonstrates how a training and development programs can be used to solve
specific business needs.

10. • Showcase an example of how training has been used within the company to solve
specific business needs.
• Identify a “champion” (e.g., a top-level manager) who actively supports training.
• Listen and act on feedback received from clients, managers, and employees.
• Advertise on e-mail, on company websites, and in employee break areas.
• Designate someone in the training function as an account representative who will
interact between the training designer or team and the business unit, which is the
customer.
• Speak in terms that employees and managers understand. Don’t use jargon.

11. Steps in a Change Process
1. Clarify the request for change
2. Make the vision clear
3. Design the solution
4. Communicate and market for buy-in
5. Choose and announce the action as soon as possible
6. Execute and create short-term wins
7. Follow up, reevaluate, and modify

12. How to build a Training Brand
• Ask current “customers” of training, including managers who purchase or ask for
training and employees who participate in training what their perceptions are of the
brand.
• Define how you want to be perceived by current and future customers.
• Identify factors that influence your customers’ perception s of the training function.
• Review each of the factors to determine if it is supporting and communicating the
brand to your customers in a way that you intended.
• Make changes so that each factor is supporting the brand.
• Get customers feedback at each step of this process (define the brand, identify factors,
suggest changes, etc.).
• When interacting with customers, create an experience that supports and identifies the
brand.

13. Outsourcing Training
Outsourcing refers to the use of an outside company (an external
services firm) that takes complete responsibility and control of some
training or development activities or that takes over all or most of
company’s training, including administration, design, delivery, and
development.
Business process outsourcing refers to the outsourcing of any
business process, such as HRM, production, or training. Survey results
suggest that slightly more than half of all companies outsource
instructions.

14. Two reasons that companies do not outsource their
training are
1. The inability of outsourcing providers to meet company
needs and
2. Companies’ desire to maintain control over all aspects of
training and development.

15. Summary
For training to help a company gain a competitive advantage, it
must help the company reach business goals and objectives. This
chapter emphasized how changes in work roles, organizational factors,
and the role of training influence the amount and type of training, as
well as the organization of the training functions. The process of
strategic training and development was discussed. The chapter
explained how different strategies (such as concentration, internal
growth, external growth, and disinvestment) influence the goals of the
business and create different training needs.