A Tale of Two Training Programs

You are in the business of developing training and development materials and programs for work organizations. Your company is currently in the process of developing new training products. As someone who oversees a large 30-person team that develops, sells, and administers different workplace training programs, you have always made money each year, and how much profit you have to reinvest in developing new programs is directly tied to the number of trainings held each year. Your team recently came up with a new training program that is in big demand. Each session is selling out quickly, and you need to add more and more training days to meet demand. On the other hand, one of your other training products that helped build the company and has been taught for the past 20 years is seeing decreasing demand. The two programs are very different. There are five individuals who are solely dedicated to the older program but only three to the new one. Unfortunately, the five employees working on the more established but less attractive training program can’t teach the new ones, as they do not have the right expertise. Your company is small, and the trends are clear that demand is growing for the new program and dwindling for the older one. If the trend continues, pretty soon the company will be paying five employees to conduct fewer than one training per week, whereas the other three are giving three and four trainings per week. If you cancel the older program, you will have to let these five employees go. You don’t see any way around these issues, but you want to let the group make recommendations.

Questions

Q1. Given the current trends you have observed, what do you think your training team should recommend to address this growing problem?

Q2. What do you think they will recommend?

Q3. How might you guide them?