About a decade ago, when I worked for a once-prosperous ISP, I signed up for a Microsoft Access class provided by the company's training department. I daydreamed of the databases I would create and the data I could mine.

The three-day class was taught at company headquarters in Northern Virginia, so I flew from LaGuardia to Dulles. Factor in the dip in my productivity due to being out of the office, and throw in my two-night stay at a Reston hotel, plus meals and taxi rides, and it added up to quite an investment for my company.

The class itself was intense. I learned the basics of database design, running queries, what primary keys are, and a host of other information.

When it was over and I returned to my midtown Manhattan office, I had every intention of using my newly acquired knowledge, but I never did. I knew where to begin, but beyond that, I was lost.

Unfortunately, my experience is typical in corporate training. Without support and ongoing learning, it's difficult to master an application.

A recent feature in Chief Learning Officer magazine addresses this issue and offers strategies for building corporate learning systems that actually work. To come to a solution, writes author Ed Emde, you need to answer three questions:

1. What approaches make learning stick?
2. What are the challenges when trying to implement those approaches?
3. How can a company increase the likelihood that the best tacks will be used and implemented?

The answer to number one is easy: instruction, plus a whole lot of practice. But even if you know which approaches are best, challenges persist. The current corporate culture views training as a necessary evil. What's more, employers expect their workers to function at near-expert level upon completion of training. That's an expectation that will rarely be met.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in migrations from Office 2003 to Office 2007. In a post from May, I discussed three ways to build better employees with support. Here's an excerpt:

"People are more likely to retain information that is learned in small chunks over time than what is studied during marathon cramming sessions. We know this. We've been told at least once in our lives not to cram.

Yet, in the case of Office 2007 migrations for example, employees are given mini courses or just PDF cheat sheets to learn a software suite that is radically different from previous versions. Do you think your employees are going to remember that the chart options have changed in Excel 2007 if they learned it upfront but create only one chart a month?

Likewise, if you took a three-day course on jet propeller engine repair, would you submit your resume for a job as an American Airlines mechanic? Apply that same logic to standard corporate training courses. While you have given your employees initial training on applications, you cannot expect them to walk out of the classroom as experts."

To increase the likelihood that your company will get a little ROI from its efforts, it needs to look beyond the present moment and prioritize. For example, cutting ongoing training and software support may seem like a money-saving solution -- at least for now, during an economic slump -- but such a move surely will be felt later on, after the economy rebounds.

MORE INFO IN: Productivity Loss Index (PDF) | Office 2007 Migration Checklist + Tools | Migration Case Study | PC Helps eTraining |Desktop Application Support | Contact PC Helps

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