After reading the blog article (below) regarding how volunteerism can help your organization to provide training, we got to thinking of other ways to provide free or low cost training as well.  Here is a short series of ideas, to be published for the next few days...

Day 1

Did you know that 80% of training that occurs in the workplace does not occur in a formal training program? Eighty-percent of workplace training is informal training. It is someone popping their head over their cubicle and asking their office mate, “Do you know how to convert text in a table to paragraph form?”  It is the supervisor taking the machinist aside and showing him a way to check the calibration on his machine without stopping production. It is the sales manager taking his fresh-out-of-college administrative assistant on a sales call so she can meet a real customer of the organization. 

One of the easiest and fastest ways to provide free and low-cost training is to formalize the informal training that is already occurring in your workplace on a daily basis. Here’s a stellar example: A 700-person software company requires the sharing of knowledge and training fellow workers as part of the job description of every employee. On a yearly basis, each employee is tasked with learning something that increases their skill on the job and making a presentation to their workgroup or writing a summary of that new knowledge or technique for the company newsletter. In addition, each executive in the organization is required to teach at least four training courses, or two-hours, each year. 

In addition to the formalized training curriculum such as providing constructive feedback, or negotiating a sale, the executive is able to impart his or her on-the-job experience and real-world knowledge on the topic, to the trainees.