Soft Skills: Hard results

Any soft skills development programme must result in workplace changes which contribute to the business. Often because of the nature of these types of events the content and the material used might be engaging and interesting but does not necessarily impact on work activity and organisational results and outcomes.

 

Upfront a needs analysis should have established what was required and what the outcomes should be. Then it should be entirely possible to identify what the developmental event should be achieving, what changes it should be contributing to in the workplace. Essentially we are looking for the outputs from the inputs.

 

Inputs     = Programme content in terms of knowledge and skills.

Outputs  = Changes in workplace activity, tasks and results.

 

Sometimes the argument made against this concept is that outputs are not so clear cut and apparent, especially when the participants or users are from varied backgrounds or different parts of the organisation, results becoming diffused and varied. In these circumstances a more creative approach must be adopted to ensure there is a real return on the financial investment.

 

A methodology to adopt in these circumstances concerns a process of agreeing and tracking how learning received on the programme is transposed into hard outputs back in the workplace. This is achieved through the interaction of three people: The learner, the facilitator and the line manager, each of these players must play their part.