Situation Summary:
A highly-respected professional services firm needed an efficient and effective way to equip its consultants to execute an essential proprietary process. To succeed, the solution needed to be relatable, meaningful, and worthwhile to an “impossible to please” target population of pedigreed, compulsively driven, attention-challenged, consultants.
The Old Story:
Our consultants will never give up multiple days of billable work for any kind of training. Never. Ever. Let’s do the best we can and rely on mandatory compliance to get people to attend.
The New Story:
We changed the story by creating a learning experience that didn’t look like “training”. Instead, the activities closely simulated real life, focused on skills constituents valued, and offered both challenge and competition. Internal experts/mentors designed and vetted the content and also delivered 90% of the training.
Outcomes:
- Reduced the time it took consultants to execute the target process from three months to three days, freeing up hundreds of hours annually for billable work.
- The improvement in productivity provided immediate relief to those requiring the model to progress their work while also radically reducing the drain on experienced modelers.
- The learning process itself increased the firm’s intellectual capital exponentially, as Mentors shared their own modeling “hacks” and nuanced strategies with each other during the training.
- Mentors developed critical coaching skills that allowed them to be more effective when coaching clients and new associates, a much-valued skill set that was not otherwise being developed.
