Case study: Personal training tools

The problem with training and development is that it can too often appear as a disconnected, compliance-driven function of the firm. Herbert Smith is one firm to explore how the training agenda can be made less rigid and more appealing.

There are a number of obstacles to a climate conducive to effective training in the typical professional-service firm – most notably the imperative to maintain billable hours. In their early stages of developing training law firms focused on compliance, using continuing professional development (CPD) requirements to get people to take training seriously. This has its problems, however, particularly the creation of a compliance attitude to training. This is not really the spirit you want your employees to adopt for their development.

Many firms have responded to this by creating big central training courses, tracking career progression from induction to partnership and operating something like a compulsory curriculum that applies to all professional staff. This develops the individual in response to their growing seniority and specialisation over time. Principal features are that professional staff will attend prescribed courses at fixed points in the year – their learning effectively embodied in that core programme. Benefits of the structure are its relative ease of management, scalability and cost control, but a disadvantage is it continues to make learning something done ‘by the centre’ (i.e. not owned by the individual) to the centre’s agenda. Scope for adaptation to personal preference or needs is difficult to achieve. Allowing individuals to ‘pick and mix’ their training is awkward.

Many professional-service firms are therefore moving to develop the training agenda, responding to these problems to create a less rigid, more responsive training environment, encouraging more choice and individual preferences.

Just-in-time training

The ‘nirvana’ of professionals, just-in-time training is the process of picking up technical know-how moments before it is necessary to apply it in the client transaction. This can be compared with attending a course on the subject a few months before (when it suited the department) and then promptly forgetting all about the subject hours later. Although notoriously difficult to achieve because of the cost and resource implications of providing training virtually one-to-one, it can be facilitated through e-learning and other remote learning packages. The advent of sophisticated intranet-based know-how systems has provided some key opportunities. With training and basic know-how material reduced to easily accessible guides, users are able to absorb essential technical material quickly and at no cost, safe in the knowledge it has been approved by the firm. It is not interactive, however, and users are dependent on well-written, high-quality materials. It is only a start – a beginning to the personalised guide to technical issues sought by the professional as a ‘last minute’ stopgap solution. And from the firm’s perspective it is about bringing know-how to life and making it genuinely useful and valuable to practitioners.

An example of an effective just-in-time training method at Herbert Smith has been the creation of an intranet page dedicated to a vital and new piece of legislation, the Companies Bill (already the single largest piece of legislation in British Parliamentary history). This page comprises links to underlying documents – both internal and external – that serve as guidance notes to the critical aspects of the legislation, such as its impact on directors’ duties, articles of association and the registration of company charges. It brings together learning on one subject, thus serving as a one-stop-shop that can be quickly and easily updated as the legislation changes and new analyses and opinions are formed. It is obviously a know-how source, but it also acts as a dedicated training resource on a key technical issue – no more than a few clicks away and accessible 24/7 as the need arises.

E-learning

Online learning also offers the advantage of being just-in-time, but its 24/7 characteristics suit other contexts as well. Mobile, remote-working staff can remain in touch with their development programmes through e-learning delivery. It is also highly effective for ensuring a consistent message across geographically-diverse organisations, helping to reach the further-flung outposts of the global professional firm that might otherwise miss the training available. It is training within the control of the user: perhaps the ultimate expression of choice. Its singular advantage over know-how is that it is interactive and can be designed to assess understanding through the completion of online exercises, responding to questions and case studies. Linking e-learning to learning-management systems also allows managers to track user attendance and completion rates – a particular advantage for compliance programmes.

Of course, there is a danger that e-learning is seen as a cure-all salvation, offering instant solutions, with reliance placed upon it as the exclusive antidote to the monolithic and inflexible centrally-driven training programme. The concept of blended learning – integrating e-learning into face-to-face and other training – reduces this risk and simultaneously introduces users inexperienced in the ways of e-learning to its benefits.

Herbert Smith’s introduction of money laundering training through an online package illustrates some of the benefits of e-learning over traditional face-to-face methods. In common with many other professional-service organisations, it is essential (as well as compulsory) to ensure all lawyers in Herbert Smith recognise money-laundering risks and apply money-laundering procedures. Historically, attendance at lectures on the subject – even if mandatory – has been patchy, but it is vital to show the regulators that everyone attends the training. The online course has not only improved compliance rates substantially (because the training is available to be taken at people’s convenience and is presented in an interesting, interactive format); it also allows much more effective monitoring of individual compliance.

Reflective learning

Most lawyers believe the best learning is that acquired on the job. The problem that most trainers have with the concept is that too few on-the-job learning opportunities are seized and treated as such; instead, they are dismissed as just ‘another job done’. This is because the billable-hours culture drives practitioners on to the next deal; time to reflect is seen as time wasted. Creating a willingness to use experience as the basis of analysis, and encouraging discussion about lessons learnt and how to do things differently, is a significant breakthrough.

As part of its work-based learning proposals, the Law Society Regulation Board has put forward suggestions to create elements of just such a reflective-learning environment for trainee solicitors. Some management-development programmes for partners use similar methods to enable practitioners to draw their own guided learning out of difficult or complex situations. One important facilitator is to create mentors who can support those wishing to engage in the process, a lack of skilled mentors being the biggest obstruction to reflective learning in a professional-services environment. The challenge is to convince busy practitioners that this is a more useful application of their time than attendance at courses that are easy to sit through but whose value to them is questionable.

On joining one of three departments, Herbert Smith trainees are required to undertake a research and drafting exercise tailored to that department’s practice. Trainees are given individual feedback on their performance and encouraged to identify for themselves how and where they need to develop further skills and improve.

Coaching

Coaching is a more structured process than reflective learning in that it demands the intervention of an outsider working with the learner to assist in identifying where and how they need to direct their development. It is becoming a more established technique in professional-service firms, particularly for more senior practitioners. As with reflective learning techniques, an advantage is that it is tailored directly to the individual and is personal to their exact needs at a relevant point in time. It also gets closer to the heart of many of the underlying development needs of the individual being coached: a person may sign up for a training course, identifying their need as delegation skills, when in fact they have a broader issue about communicating confidently with others. Coaching will flush this out and help to address it in a way that the training programme may never do. Coaching requires time – and as it involves two people, it is not as immediately flexible as e-learning, for example. However, it is still a more flexible animal than centrally-managed training programmes, attracting learners because its benefits can significantly outweigh the upfront investment in time required. The main disadvantage is that it requires skilled (and therefore expensive) resources and so should be used sparingly.

A coaching programme at Herbert Smith supports senior associates that have been identified as partnership-promotion candidates. This benefits the firm directly by bringing forward candidates who are better prepared for partnership. Coaching as a method is ideally suited to this context because of the differing development needs and expectations candidates will have after seven or more years as associates in a wide range of practice areas. The busy schedule of associates with this level of seniority makes attendance at conventional training quite haphazard. Coaching permits more flexibility and quicker response times.

The bigger picture

Underpinning these methods of making training more adaptable and flexible to the individual’s learning needs is the demand for a responsive performance-management process that accurately identifies individual development needs and helps employees become aware of options available to address those needs. Unless there is a commitment to use traditional appraisals to identify where individuals require remedial intervention or general development support, any movement away from the characteristic ‘sheep dip’ approach to training will be based entirely on what individuals think suits them. The firm needs to be satisfied it is committing its human and financial resources wisely to training, and the only way to do that is to have a robust performance-management process that helps the business see what training each person needs in order to be effective within the firm. Most professional-service firms have well-established appraisal systems in place – but how far do they really focus on development needs, rather than the more typical performance measurement?

The approaches described here are by no means the only way to effect a transformation to a more individual approach to training, but they are among the most important tools to help change the way training and development is both structured and perceived. All of this is consistent with the way new generations of learners expect training to work and how businesses want to extract value from development opportunities. They want results rather than just ticked boxes. Increasingly, the challenge for the training manager is to work at evolving the architecture of the historic professional-service firm training programme and take it to the next phase of development.

Richard King is head of legal knowledge at Herbert Smith. He can be contacted at richard.king@herbertsmith.com