You are an experienced instructional designer and you’ve even got some tech chops. The creative solutions you provide for your business are good, but you know there is more you can do. There is a big quarterly review meeting coming up and you’ve been invited. Now what?

Your graduate education did not include “Talking to Executives 101”.  You’ve read “How to Make Friends and Influence People”. This is your opportunity to show how much better the training can be if they would only agree to give you more money, and more IT support. You are confident. With presentation in hand you join the “suits” in the executive conference room.

Your requests are denied.

What went wrong?

It should have been obvious that the current 13 year old LMS is less than efficient. And it’s not as good as current cloud-based systems you’ve learned about. Why couldn’t the executives agree to make the change?

Have you experienced this or something similar? If you can’t relate to that scenario, then maybe you’ve been asked to reduce your spending. It was a random Friday, and you were called into a meeting and told to reduce your costs. “WHAT? Don’t they understand how important training is? Do they not see how hard we work to improve performance?”

If you have not experienced any of this, you will. The key is to not take it so personally. And trust me when I say executives DO respect the work you do. They take training very seriously. You just aren’t going to get hugs and kudos every morning and be told how awesome you are at every meeting. They actually do have more important things occupying their time.

This is the business world you’ve chosen to join. It’s not academia. Your job is not all about learning.

If you are new to a management role in training, then you need to shift your thinking. Yes, your expertise with instructional design, and learning solution development is still important but now you need to add some business acumen to your skill set.

Every Wednesday on L&D Talk Ajay Pangarkar and I discuss the business of training. In this recording  we discuss some business basics: Costs, Expenses, Assets, and more.

Contact Litmos and ask about Training Ops.