Establishing a Training Philosophy at a Performance Consulting Firm

Abstract

This capstone project sought to help Performance Consulting Firm (PCF) establish its training philosophy. PCF is a growing consulting firm whose main source of revenue comes from government contracting. The lack of a training philosophy leads to unclear guidelines around what types of training should be created for internal leadership development. This mixed-methods study used interviews, document reviews, and data from the organization’s annual employee engagement survey to investigate the following project questions: Q1. How do organizational leaders at PCF characterize the nature and quality of internal employee training? Q2. How do organizational leaders view their role in leadership development of employees? Q3. How do organizational leaders align and support organizational growth with professional development? Through our literature review and data analysis, six findings emerged. These included PCF’s leaders not being aligned on the purpose of training, a lack of leadership and manager training in PCF’s learning management system, the leaders’ alignment on needing formal but flexible manager training including more dedicated time, leaders not being fully developed for career advancement, and PCF leaders not thinking beyond the current tuition assistance policy to help develop their employees. Based on our study’s findings and an understanding of the organization, we have developed recommendations to help PCF establish a training philosophy and a training and development program, repurpose the tuition assistance budget to be used for more impactful training, and develop leaders to be more involved in training and development as well as for career advancement.