NIIT - Running Learning Like a Business

Across the globe, many learning organizations view themselves as overhead or manage themselves against a set of metrics that are about volume and activity levels. Ed Trolley, author of Running Training like a Business, recognized that businesses were having trouble interacting with training organizations because the language, behaviors and measures of success were drastically different. His proposed solution is simple: run training like any other business.

The foundations of his solution are effectiveness and efficiency. An effective training organization will get more than a dollar back for every dollar they spend, adding value to the business. An efficient training organization will operate at acceptable, not lowest, cost.

In the value chain of training activities, many companies mistakenly focus on the activities that add little value to the larger organization. This does not mean that you stop doing low value-added activities because there are many important functions that don’t add value. However, if you were to plot these different functions on a graph it would look like a camel’s hump. This ‘camel chart’ can reveal the high value activities that should receive more resources than the low value-added activities.