The company I work for does not have a centralized training department. I manage a training team that reports directly to a newer division within the company. We provide product, sales, customer service training; and more recently implemented a new leadership development program for this division. What are the advantages and disadvantages of becoming central? The executives have asked me to develop a plan to centralize the training with a heavy emphasis on product and sales as part of the short term solution.

Advantages: if there is clear communication, everyone on the team will be aware of what others are doing; yields content sharing and collaboratin.

Disadvantages: easy to lose sight of the business needs in specific areas.

In my company, we have a group of people whose job is to establish and maintain close relationships with key business units to ensure that they receive training that is relevant to their jobs. Often, we can make relatively minor changes to existing content to make it suitable from one group to another.

Lydia, the usual suspects: Advantages: uniformity of training material, economies of scale, pricing leverage, no duplication of effort wider population for evaluation. Disadvantages: power centralized therefore hindering flexibility, adaptability, does everybody need the same knowledge the same time, way etc.
It will swing in part on these criteria:
what business are we in, how are we serving our customer and what challenges and conditions are there and how do we respond? Management philosophy and culture, what organizational structure do we have now? What WORKS for US.

In addition scan a basic manageemnt textbook and I find it curious in a sense, that your colleagues in management asked you to prepare this document.

Nero

I believe the pros far outweigh the cons in favor of a centralized department ... but here is the key -- It should be a stand-alone department that reports directly to the key stakeholders, and should NOT be housed under some other department (usually Ops or HR).

Obviously I'm late to this conversation; however, I now find myself in the same situation as Lydia and therefore the conversation is very relevant.

Everyone's responses have been helpful. But I still find myself wondering about the transition from a decentralized structure to that of a centralized. In particular, how have people dealt with the political landmines of that transition? There's alot of personal ownership out there when it comes to the existing training and people are not always keen to let it go.

What are people's thoughts/experience?