Navigating business grows more complicated every day. The experienced workforce of baby boomers is retiring and taking their knowledge with it while many remaining employees lack the skills that come from decades of work experience. As the pace of technology continues to accelerate, companies are forced to become more agile when it comes to training — or face challenges that can stall business operations.
Companies struggling with maintaining a skilled workforce can solve these challenges with an approach known as transformational training. Developed by Peter Drucker in 1999, transformational training is based on the notion that increasing the productivity of knowledge workers is the most important contribution managers can make in the 21st century. To date, organizations have largely failed at this task, with Gartner research finding that 70% of employees have not mastered the skills they need to do their job.
From lack of engagement to lack of follow-up, training fails for a number of reasons. Ultimately, however, it does so because companies provide the wrong training at the wrong time in the wrong way. By following the guidelines of transformational training, businesses can actionably improve training to better support knowledge workers.