From the desk of Professor Robert O. Brinkerhoff.
“When it comes to learning and development, organizations around the globe face the same challenge: Getting training to stick, making sure that mission-critical learning actually leads to sustained and effective on-the-job behavior.”
I have spent over 30 years researching this question. I have worked in partnership with academic colleagues and dozens of energetic learning and development professionals. I have also worked in a range of roles and organizations, from government agencies to Fortune 100 companies, including training vendor partners.
And we have made considerable progress, developing concepts, methods and tools that now have proven efficacy in increasing learning transfer, as well as helping to accelerate the execution of strategic initiatives.
Then we hit a bit of a wall. Our tools were essentially paper based and our methods required a lot of effort. Getting the kind of Manager engagement and learner focus needed for longer lasting results was challenging. Added to which, after several decades of work, I was beginning to move more towards my retirement, my time and energy also being spent on family and local volunteer initiatives.
Towards the end of my career, however, I then met Jon Serrander, the CEO of Promote International. Jon had earlier attended a lecture of mine, in Chicago. Now, several years later, he was visiting me at my home in Michigan, while touring the United States, on business.
Jon told me of the frustrations that he and his co-owners were currently facing. Namely, how best to help their clients make training stick. He walked me through Promote “a brilliant, web-based platform” that took everything I knew about getting impact from training, and put it neatly into an accessible and simple tool, effectively creating a learning process.
I could see immediately how the Promote platform overcame the problems that I had previously been experiencing. Promote clearly promised a quantum leap forward.
And so, I decided to join the Board of Promote, moving off the retirement bench, so to speak, and shifting my professional efforts to making training work, from the back burner of my retirement, to the front burner of Promote.
I am inspired and re-energized by Promote and their passionate founders. I look forward to working with them, bringing my experience and creative powers to bear. I want to do what I can, to help make this powerful tool even better. In particular, I want to get in into the hands of those who need it most, learning and development professionals, everywhere.
Professionals who share the same interest in getting learning to play its rightful role in helping organizations and the people in them, to success and prosper.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Brinkerhoff