How to Develop Management Training Programs
Whether you're looking to update the skills of your own workforce or market development programs to other companies, developing management training programs can be daunting. There are a lot of things that need to be covered in these programs and it's not enough to simply gloss over management principles. It's important for trainers to understand the necessity of a broad, results-based curriculum for their management training programs. Without this type of approach, it can be very difficult to develop management training programs that place students in a position to implement the things they learn in a productive way.
Structuring Your Training Program
The first thing you need to do is decide on the structure you want to work with for your training program. While it might seem like you would be able to just use any generic training schedule, the truth is that it's much more complicated than that. You need to direct your training schedule to best serve people you'll be training.
Generally, you want to start off by looking at the industry your students will be in. If you're training your own staff, that's easy enough to do. It's important to set yourself apart right out of the gate.
What to Train In
There are a lot of different schools of thought in how you should plan your curriculum. While much of how your set up your training will depend on the industry you're serving, there are a few things you can keep in mind that will be more or less universally applicable.
First, you should cover the basic company ethic that your employers want to get across. What is the main mission of the company and how can decisions be made so that they are in line with that ethic? The idea here is that you want the students to be thinking of themselves as an outgrowth of the company. You want to instill the feeling that they are responsible for ensuring that the company's message is being pushed in the appropriate way.
Next, you need to go over the best practices of your industry as a whole. This means covering the ethics and standards that are applied to your industry. Management trainees need to understand that your company doesn't exist within a bubble. You are part of the general business ecosystem and therefore need your representatives to know how to conduct themselves. You want to be sure that management trainees going through the program understand how they are expected to conduct themselves.
Finally, you need to get into the industry-specific concepts they need to understand to effectively lead within your organization. While some of these things vary from industry to industry, there are a few things that are fairly standard.
Industry Specific Concepts
All management trainees should have a complete understanding of how the business works from the top to the bottom. If the manager of a bottling plant doesn't understand how inventory is received and managed, he or she won't be able to make educated management decisions on handling inventory in the future. No matter how lowly or how advanced the concept is, a manager should at least have a passing familiarity with how it works.
Management trainees should learn how to take the proven business skills they already have and direct them into managing in your specific industry. MBA programs around the country teach many of the same business concepts to their graduates. However, these concepts are not applied in the same way from industry to industry in a universal way. It's up to you to show your management trainees how to best apply their proven business knowledge to the unique demands of your industry.
Take it Seriously
When taking on the development of a management training program, it's important to keep things in perspective. This isn't just any training program where you're teaching someone the ropes of a job. This is a program that's meant to instill an understanding of what your company is all about. When you think about it like this, it's easy to see why this program should be as extensive as you can make it. After all, you want to be sure that your management trainees take the business as seriously as you do.
