I am doing a presentation to the Austin ASTD chapter called Marketing Training and I wanted to start a discussion on the problems folks have marketing training particularly internally to an organization. What are some of the issues y'all have getting trainees to show up and be engaged?

What are some of the strategies and tactics you have used to work through this?

quote:

What are some of the issues y'all have getting trainees to show up and be engaged?

What are some of the strategies and tactics you have used to work through this?

Sanjay... honestly no offense here, but isn't it the point of your presentation to answer these questions? I mean...since you're the one doing this presentation; since you were the one selected to do this for a convention... shouldn't you be the one who knows the answers to these questions (and/or knows that there are already massive amounts of existing materials about this)?

I do have my answers to these questions. In fact, I've reached out to local membership and our customers and have their answers. I also reached out to my professional marketing buddies and got their input. I've gotten management perspective from a number of C level people I work with. I have also looked at a bunch of online material--I've been keeping up with that on a weekly basis in different forms for 20 years.

I do find that the different perspectives I get from talking to training coordinators and managers my presentation improves.

I also thought it'd be an interesting discussion.

For me, a lot of this comes down to value-add. I have known lots of training departments that have thrown their hands up and said that it was impossible to market their training in the 'corporate climate' of the organisation. However, upon further inspection it often comes down to the fact that the potential participants do not see the value of the training and are not inspired or engaged by it.

I'm sure there are many exceptions to this, but I think when people see the results from effective training they are soon motivated to attend or send their team.

Managers don't see the need for most training, and they're usually right. Marketing training would be a breeze if the training offered were absolutely necessary to the companies' business. But when trainers (mostly in HR) go off half-cocked and put together some course that they dreamed up and justified to themselves, without jumping through the hoops of needs assessment, design, etc.,etc., nobody wants it. There's nothing you can do to market that successfully.

Do your homework and offer something useful and you won't have to market. They'll come to you. If marketing is a problem for you, you haven't done your homework and you're not offering the right product.