Ineffective Training Kills the Bottom Line.

Corporate managers or prospective clients probably have encountered a salesman who has impressed them as having little or no idea as to what he was doing. Then there's the co-worker who just couldn't get things done properly, or the boss who obviously was ineffective. Were all of these people incompetent, or simply not trained to do their jobs?

American corporations spend billions of dollars annually on employee training, notes Clinton O. Longenecker, University of Toledo (Ohio) professor of management, but in many cases the training engaged in may fall short. Instead of training for the purpose of becoming more competitive, it actually is having a detrimental impact on the bottom line.

He calls the problem the "Job Skills Gap Syndrome," a condition, he says, that is spreading rapidly. The gap is the difference between an employee's actual skills level and the skills needed to perform the job effectively.

According to Longenecker's survey results, much of corporate America is involved actively in training, but a lot of it isn't germane to any individual's job. Instead, it falls short or is too comprehensive, is inappropriate, is geared to the wrong audience, or doesn't follow sound practice. "It seems easy to get so caught up in training people around new fads, processes and procedures, new business technologies and techniques, and all the bells and whistles stuff," a director of training and development for a Fortune 500 company indicates. "Or, it seems that we are in such a rush that we fail to train people to perform their actual job effectively."

Several factors are forcing industry to commit to training these days: technological innovation; downsizing and re-engineering; modern management practices; a nationally poor public education system that isn't producing a capable pool of potential employees; and new workplace laws and regulations. Other training needs impacting the worker and the workplace are those which accommodate state and Federal regulations (such as sexual harassment or cultural diversity sensitivity).

Of the companies responding...