The fundamental objective of training is to look for some sort of behavior change form participants. An organization that puts its employees through training seeks for the employees to do something differently or improve in some way. This could be in line with improving production or improving efficiency to save on time and money. But even with the existence of a supportive organization, it is not guaranteed that employees will achieve behavior change. There will be some disparity in terms of behavior after the training process.
For some employees, the behavior may not change at all, for others, the behavior may not have changed consistently or rather has not changed to the level the organization was expecting. It may be perplexing that to some point the employees have gone through training and learnt what they are supposed to do. They have also acquired the necessary skills to enable them to change their behavior as well as motivated through the support of the organization to change yet behavior change is not attained. Why?
The simple reason is that even though the employees have gone through training, behavioral change is not guaranteed as there may exist other barriers. Barriers in this context can, therefore, be defined as impediments to behavior change. Here are some barriers that organizations can face after training:
Lack of Feedback
After gaining skills in training, employees expect to view a direct change in production but it is only evident in the long run. For instance, after a training on handwashing, employees will not see their hands turn blue because they did not wash their hands. Bacteria are invisible so hands may look clean when they are not.
Lack of Immediate Results
As training will not yield immediate tangible results, employees may slack in putting to task the new skills acquired during training.
Poor leadership
This works on the principle of perception. For Example, when a junior employee sees their senior skipping out on new factors they have learned then they tend to do the same.
The best solution for overcoming the challenge of barriers after training is to employ post-training. Post-training will iron out additional barriers to behavior change.
