Industry Awards – Benchmarking and Best Practice or Just Silverware?

As a veteran of many an award entry, I would like to share an opinion with you: training awards are not just about winning silverware or becoming ‘award winning’, if you take them seriously they can provide an invaluable opportunity to learn, better your practices, and be benchmarked against training functions in other organisations.

This might sound like “it’s not the winning it’s the taking part”, but no, this is serious. Too much training lacks strategy, pre-defined objectives, proper evaluation and many other best practices that awards encourage. If you regularly enter awards properly then you will find that you start thinking more about these important practices, and how well your training compares with that delivered by your peers in other organisations. That can only be a good thing.

The amount you learn from an award entry exercise probably depends on your attitude towards awards. Which camp do you fall into? Here are the two most extreme camps; it is likely you are somewhere between the two, but which are you closest to?

The reactive camp:

1. You decided a month before the deadline to enter a completed programme into an award.

2. You pulled together an entry by copy/pasting text from available documentation, and reverse engineering objectives to match outcomes.

3. You did not have time to read the judging criteria.

4. You learned little or nothing from the process and next year will do things exactly the same.

5. You don’t win awards often, so you see them as a waste of time, so you do not spend time on them and the cycle continues.

The strategic camp:

1. You decide from conception that your key training activities will eventually be entered into awards.

2. You decided from that point to do what judges look for in award winning programmes. So you document the business objectives the training will address, and how you will measure success against these objectives, you involve stakeholders throughout, you cater for a diverse audience etc.

3. You ensure that the objectives apply to the design and delivery.

4. You measure feedback, knowledge gained, learner performance improvement, business impact, and even ROI against pre-agreed objectives. 

5. You enter multiple awards (see link below).

6. Your ROI calculations impress the board within your company, and ensure future training budget is secured.

7. You win at least one award per year (a Regional Training Awards at the very least).

8. Your award appears on your website, company brochures, recruitment material and becomes a real asset.

9. Your team is energised, your value proved and budget is secured. 

So how do you find time to fit all this in

I have written numerous award entries, and read numerous entries by other people. I can testify that quick entries that are cobbled together from available text or delegated to someone who does not understand training at a strategic level, often get short-listed but simply do not win awards, no matter how good the training or how impressive the impact on the business. 

In an ideal world where all the information is at hand, writing awards should take only a day. In reality, documentation is often not readily available. You could then be looking at 2-3 days work ensuring everything the judges need is clearly provided within the word limit.

If you can spare a couple of days, then this is all well and good. However if your reaction to the suggestion of allocating 2-3 days is “not a chance!” then let me tell you some good news: All award organisers are happy for people to outsource the writing of their award entries. Their objective is to get as many good quality entries as possible, and this helps them achieve that objective. A word of caution, a lot of people use expensive PR agencies, this can result in beautifully crafted entries with a substantial price tag. However, very few points are awarded to entries based on their presentation or the purpleness of their prose. 

Training Awards to Choose From

I hope you are now agreeing with me that awards are definitely worth entering properly. So here is the constantly-growing menu of awards to choose from. 

[If I have missed any out, please let me know]

Author: Chris Robinson, Director of Boost Marketing

(c) 2006 Boost Marketing