Waking up to new ways of training

pharmafile | November 3, 2005 | Feature | Business Services |   

From sales forecasts to the marketing mix, from business information to regulatory project management, there are as many training courses, seminars and workshops available to the ambitious pharmaceutical employee as there are topics to be covered.

But this sheer range of choice brings its own problems. How should individuals choose what training will benefit them and impress the boss? What makes for cost and time effective training? What should individuals and companies look to get from training? What skills do product managers and those at higher grades need? And what sort of courses are held in high regard by employers?

There are broadly three types of training in the industry: training for mandatory professional qualifications; technical skills designed to improve performance in particular skill areas; and soft skill training, designed to enhance personal characteristics such as communications and leadership.

For all three types of training, a number of criteria need to be fulfilled:

• Is the knowledge gained relevant to the job?
• Has the knowledge been retained by the trainee?
• Can we prove that it has by some form of testing or exam?
• Is it cost-effective, and can it be done cheaper?

Typically, as we will see, the answers to the four questions above are often: 'no', 'I don't know', no and 'I don't know', respectively.

Colin Wight, chief executive of strategic healthcare business consultancy Galbraith-Wight, comments: "In the UK, as the healthcare system continues to be turned inside-out, training must deliver greater precision in reconciling specific brand needs with the evolving priorities of all stakeholder groups."

To accomplish this he says courses need to be flexible, linked explicitly to brand needs, and include mechanisms that deliver quantifiable outputs.

The most formal approach to training leads up to the medical reps exam, and is given to new trainees. It is also the most visible and most expensive, so the way it has been changing over the past few years offers some valuable pointers for training later in the career  in terms of what individuals and companies should look to get from training.

The most formal approach to training leads up to the medical reps exam given to new trainees. It is also the most visible and expensive, so the way it has been changing over the past few years offers some valuable pointers for training later in the career – in terms of what individuals and companies should look to get from training.

Towards the end of the 1990s, pharma requested the ABPI make the course more flexible and recognise the changing profile of potential candidates; the proportion holding a science degree had fallen to around 50%.

In response the format of the exam was offered in three different ways: through the traditional one-day examination and two new initiatives – the ABPI Institute Integrated Programme and the ABPI Accredited Programme.

Complementing existing company training

The ABPI Institute Integrated Programme, launched in January 2002, extends internal company competency programmes, to encompass that knowledge the ABPI believes candidates should have. This programme is delivered entirely by in-house trainers or external providers, with the ABPI providing regular examination services. CSO Innovex has used this programme for two years, during which time it has increased its first time pass rate from 65% to 93% – lowering cost, stress, study time and time off the road.

The third approach, the ABPI Accredited Programme, offers a modular approach. Learning materials are based on accredited company product training manuals and they can sit, and re-sit, individual examination papers as necessary. A comparison of the ABPI exam and Pfizer's training manuals found about 98% commonality between them and the pharma company estimates it will save over 1,600 days of rep time using the new ABPI system – a saving of more than £1.25 million per year.

When it comes to training in technical skills, the sheer range of choice is staggering. The Training Pages website (www.trainingpages.co.uk) lists 35 different courses for sales and marketing professionals in the pharma and biotech industries. These range from relatively low cost (£100-£200 per head) generic training in subjects like Key Account Management or Sales and Operations Planning to more specialist offerings like The Key to Product Management in the Pharmaceutical Industry.

One of the most expensive courses, at £2,950 for a two-day in-house course, is, curiously enough, on Pharmaceutical Selling.

On site courses replacing traditional format

Interestingly, the traditional format of booking a conference in a hotel and inviting all comers seems to be giving way to providing courses on site. There are arguments, of course, for attending public courses, although these tend to favour the employee who has opportunities for networking and possibly getting new jobs with competitors, more than the employer who may glean the occasional titbit of information about the opposition.

Either way, the course is likely to take a manager or rep out of service for at least the two days of the course, and if they are coming from far afield, another day or two on top of that for travelling. In fact, sending people on a training course is often seen as a disguised perk or reward for good effort.

The types of courses that are held in high regard are those which can demonstrate an immediate return on investment, but this is rarely undertaken.

Measuring ROI in any kind of standardised way still seems to be the exception rather than the rule, industry-wide. According to a 2005 survey from learning and development consultancy MaST International, among over 80 HR professionals, 49% did not have a specific budget for measurement and evaluation of training initiatives.

The evaluation methods that do exist are fairly primitive and subjective. Course evaluation forms (26%) – dismissively known in the business as happy sheets – and anecdotal feedback (21%) are the most popular ways of measuring the effectiveness of training with just 8% of respondents using pre and post course diagnostics.

The biggest driver for measuring and evaluating training is to demonstrate the positive impact of training on the business (34% of respondents). This was followed by the desire to allocate training spend more wisely in the future (24%) and to justify the training budget (19%).

The survey also found that only one in five link course work to real-work projects and activities, and that 60% of the HR professionals surveyed do not have a specific budget for measurement and evaluation of training initiatives.

James Sena, head of client development at MaST says: "Our survey shows that despite the acknowledgement that training should be properly evaluated, very little evaluation actually occurs on how training positively impacts peoples ability to do their job."

Evaluating ROI not rocket science

In fact, evaluating and calculating an ROI on training is hardly rocket science, since it consists largely of commonsense and counting. What seems to be missing is a will to do it.

Criteria for measuring training success can include 'bums on seats', efficiency improvements (measuring the time taken to perform a task before and after training), performance to schedule (was it delivered in the timeframe originally agreed?), the extent to which trainees mix (particularly those from physically separate departments which are next to each other in the workflow process  in a pharma context, this might mean sales reps mingling with marketing people), delegates' reactions, learning, behaviour change, and crucially, performance change.

Return on investment is the extent to which the benefits (outputs) of training exceed the costs (inputs), so it can measure some of these criteria but obviously not all. It is hard, but not impossible, to attach a monetary return to whether students liked the training or not, although the numbers of participants is a key indicator, as is the extent to which students' personal objectives were achieved.

Galbraith's Wight strongly believes companies should take a top-down approach, through which senior management actively measure, endorse and support training outputs to ensure measurable ROIs are achieved.

"As always, follow-up is the key and this is where senior management have critical impact through reinforcing the company's expectations and ensuring action plans turn into reality and impact is quantified," he says.

The process of calculating ROI, naturally, starts with the investment costs, which will comprise obvious direct costs such as design and development, promotion, administration, faculty, training materials, facilities, and evaluation costs.

The largest single cost will relate to the students themselves. You need to estimate student costs, in terms of salary and opportunity costs, which might be an estimate of lost sales for a rep, say, during the time they are being trained, plus direct expenses – travel, accommodation and subsistence.

On the benefits, or return side of the calculation, the two main categories are cost savings and productivity increases. Labour savings occur where, as a result of the training, less effort is needed to achieve current levels of output, from reduced duplication of effort, less time spent correcting mistakes, or faster access to information. Examples of productivity increases include improved methodologies reducing the effort required, higher levels of skill leading to working faster, or higher levels of motivation leading to increased effort.

In some job positions, new income may be generated as a direct result of training, such as a higher success rate in winning competitive pitches, sales referrals made by non-sales staff, or new product ideas leading to successful product launches.

The trick which very few trainers (or trainees, for that matter) seem to be missing is to analyse training programmes as if they were capital investments to help senior management change their attitude to training.

And at a time when there are so many exciting new developments in training – not least online learning – and a possible recession ahead, you need their co-operation.

Online training earning spurs

Online training is beginning to earn its spurs. Where it goes wrong is in trying to transfer classroom training to an online format without amending the training package to take account of a completely new delivery mechanism. Increasingly, what makes for cost and time effective training is the bite-sized chunk of information.

Workskills21, for instance, is a pioneer in bringing e-learning direct to the desktop. Its courses are new bite-size chunks of learning delivered direct to the PC. At present it is limited to courses in IT, personal development, work skills, giving tips on how to solve IT problems, communicate better, be more creative or build sales.

The most important feature of this training is that courses are accessed via your PC. There are no classes to attend, so trainees can study online at a place and time convenient to them – work or home, 7am or midnight – with a view to providing just-in-time learning.

Increasing seniority brings its own special new challenges, so what skills do product managers and those at higher grades need?

The consensus of opinion among training experts is that the more senior a manager gets, the more important soft skills become. These tend to be personal skills rather than technical skills, and include people skills, presentation skills, time management, communications skills, and leadership skills.

Finally, at a certain point in the career path, training gives way to coaching. The benefit of an independent coach is that he gets to know the strengths and weaknesses of the manager and can act as an impartial sounding board for ideas, give an assessment of whether those ideas can be carried forward, and help the manager to overcome any obstacles, either by changing his outlook or picking courses of action that are likely to work.

So training is moving out of the classroom into the workplace and on to the PC, it needs to prove its return on investment, and yet it is clearly a key aspect of continuing improvement in an increasingly competitive market place.