Business outcomes should generally drive the kind of training that you offer to your staff. Do you need to reduce the amount of time customers wait before they can talk with a representative? Do you need to reduce the number of errors being made by employees? Are you looking to increase the adoption of a new software system?

While training outcomes are generally not the sole driver of performance improvement, when you can connect a business need with the purpose of your training program, benefits can include:

• More people understanding what, why and how something needs to be improved, 
• There is a common method and language for improving performance, and
• You have something to measure against when determining if your training was a good use of time and money.

Knowing what business outcomes you’d like to see is just the first step. Being able to design an effective training program that combines the right content and activities will come down to selecting the right learning objectives.

This means that the best training for your company is a combination of identifying the right business needs and good instructional design. 

Step 1: Know why you want training in the first place

Baseline data is essential. Do you have annual employee survey data that brought an issue to your attention (ie: people feel too siloed, people wouldn’t recommend your company as a good place to work, etc)? Do you have efficiency metrics that need to be improved?

Using data – whether quantitative or qualitative – is a much better strategy than just using a gut feeling that your team could use training. Having baseline data can help offer a point of comparison as to whether anything has changed after a training program has been implemented.

Having baseline data can also help isolate what kind of individual performance needs improvement, which brings us to the next step.

Step 2: Identify the individual behaviors you need 

“We need training to break down silos across teams” is a good overarching vision for a training program, but it still doesn’t tell us what individuals who will participate in this training need to be able to do new, differently or better.

Once you have your vision, it’s time to break “success” of this training down into individual tasks. 

Do individuals need to be able to listen better? Do they need to have more awareness about what people on other teams are doing or are responsible for? Do they need to be more transparent about what they’re thinking before they make a decision that will impact people in other teams?

Breaking your vision down into individual tasks helps to focus the content and activities you might need to include in your training program. Sometimes it can also reveal whether training is even the right solution. For example, if people say they need more transparency and communication across teams, perhaps you need better cross-team communication technology (Slack instead of email, for example).

Assuming you’ve identified individual behaviors that need to improve or change, you’re ready to take on one of the biggest challenges in the world of instructional design: coming up with well-written, instructionally-sound learning objectives. 

Step 3: Create learning objectives connected to those behaviors

Continuing with the example of breaking down silos, let’s say the behaviors we want to see include improving cross team communication and a higher level of awareness for what people on other teams do and how one team’s decisions can impact other teams. These may be micro-goals, but we’re not ready to design a training program targeted to improve these behaviors yet.

We need to articulate what our learners need to be able to do new, differently or better. Put another way, we need to create learning objectives.

Too many people who design training come up with some variation of the following learning objective:

By the end of this training session, the learners will know what other teams across the organization do.

But this learning objective is misguided and not at all instructionally sound. It also isn’t helpful when it comes to designing your training. How will you know if your learners “know” something? I guess you could test them, but that’s not very helpful in a real world context. Nobody walks around an office passing out tests to see if people know what other teams do. Can you imagine working someplace where your supervisor walked around giving you a pop quiz every week?

To come up with a learning objective that’s connected to this business and individual performance goal of having better awareness of what other teams do, you have to ask yourself why this is important. Perhaps this is important so that the right people “sign off” on new projects or organization-wide communications.

If that’s the case, then a better learning objective would be:

By the end of this training session, learners will be able to identify key stakeholders who need to inform organization-wide communications before messaging goes out to all staff.

Let’s look at these two learning objective examples side-by-side:

Traditional Learning Objective	Instructionally-sound Learning Objective
Learners will know what other teams across the organization do.	Learners will be able to identify key stakeholders who need to inform organization-wide communications before messaging goes out to all staff.

The traditional learning objective is broad and general. What kind of training activity would you use if you were trying to create a learning experience using that objective? Chances are you’d throw some information about each department onto a slide and lecture… and chances are your learners would be bored and wouldn’t remember much of what you shared, which is a recipe for ineffective training. If people don’t remember what they’re taught, they can’t change their behaviors and your silos are going to remain.

The instructionally-sound learning objective is specific, observable, and kind of writes your activity for you. Perhaps you’ll still use a few slides, maybe an organizational chart, and some lecture, but you can’t stop there if you’re actually going to adhere to this learning objective. You’ll also need some sort of activity – perhaps a series of short case studies, perhaps some small group discussion – in order to see if people know who they should be working with and who they should be informing outside of their own team.

When you have a solid business need for training, when you’ve identified individual behaviors that need to change, when you’ve asked yourself why those behaviors are important, and when you’ve used that critical information to craft instructionally-sound learning objectives, your training will align with your business need.