Ground-Zero Training

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Use rehearsals. When Plough Electric was preparing its quality course, Ken Plough created a steering committee of managers. Each manager presented an outline of his or her section of the course to the committee for suggestions. Then, before teaching the class, each manager did a dress rehearsal for the committee. That, Plough thinks, improved the experience for both the teachers and the taught.

4. Where can I find course material -- or someone to design a course?
Big companies you work with. If your company is a supplier to large companies, they can be an excellent source of training material -- and it's usually in their interest to provide it to you at a reasonable cost or even for free. Unitech, for instance, borrowed an old blueprint-reading curriculum from customer Boeing, then added, deleted, and modified material to fit its own needs. (One example: Unitech, as a supplier that produces only parts for airplanes, found it could do without the sections of the course that discussed blueprints for the entire airplane.) Similarly, Unitech has found that manufacturers such as Du Pont, which makes one of the materials Unitech uses extensively, are happy to send in technical staff to teach the relevant sections of the company's training program.

For that matter, any company you work with. Steve Braccini of Pro Fasteners has followed that approach. In addition to hiring consultants he knew to teach classes, he turned to business associates for their expertise in particular areas. Pro Fasteners' lawyer, for instance, taught a class explaining such things as Occupational Safety and Health Act regulations to the company's employees. And when Braccini wanted his employees to learn more about the company's financial statements, his banker taught that class for free.

Trade associations. In addition to industry courses and seminars, trade associations sometimes offer publications that are good resources for industry-specific in-house training. In a few cases, they may even have a detailed training curriculum customized for your industry. For example, the National Association of Printers and Lithographers (NAPL), in Teaneck, N.J., has developed a basic-skills program specifically for the printing industry. The employee workbooks (in small quantities, $25 for members; $35 for nonmembers) teach employees to solve problems that crop up in printing operations, like converting the measurements on a job ticket from inches when using a European-made metric machine. Unfortunately, programs like NAPL's are still rare in this country.

In-house expertise. Is there anyone in the company who has received formal training in a particular area? When Paul Silvis of Restek and his vice-president decided to offer a management-training course in the young, fast-growing company, they both culled material from their own reading as well as the notes from courses they had taken. With both of their notes and ideas, they were able to develop a curriculum they liked.

5. Is there any outside assistance available for in-house training?
Community colleges and other local institutions. Often community colleges are the educational institutions best suited to provide affordable and practical training to small companies. In addition to their regularly scheduled vocational classes, community colleges may be hired to provide instructors and help develop a customized curriculum, if you have a large enough group for a class of your own. In fact, Bill Reinhard, director of news services for the American Association of Community Colleges, claims he doesn't know of any community colleges that do not have training relationships with area businesses. "Community colleges work a lot on partnerships with industry and business," agrees Curtis Plott, president of the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), in Alexandria, Va. "They clearly see that as their mission."

One caveat: if your training is relatively brief or nonacademic, it can get short shrift at a community college. For example, Rick Surpin of Cooperative Home Care tried using a community college to train home health aides. He found the college gave a low priority to teaching a three-week hands-on class to a group without much formal education. Then, too, community colleges aren't the only local resources available. In the Southport Institute's study of workplace-education programs, researchers found small companies were most likely to turn to community colleges for help designing basic-skills programs. But they also found that, when it came to teaching basic skills, there was no evidence that community colleges did a better job than volunteer groups or programs run through local public schools.

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