Follow Up
(FA-low Up)
LIQUID
What is Follow up?
The practice of ensuring learners have an opportunity to revisit what they have learned through post-training contact. This could include information sent by the trainer, conversations with a supervisor, peer learning groups, or communities of practice.
Other Common Names
Other common names for follow up include:
- Post-training support
- Learning boosts
- Communities of practice
Key Properties
The element of follow up can be characterized by asking, “How will the learners be held accountable to put the investment that’s made in their professional development—in terms of time and money—into action?”
- Follow up often includes post-training communication or assignments as well as transfer support of training from the training environment to the real world.
- It can come in many forms, from action plans completed during a session then shared with a supervisor to post-training email reminders about key content to homework assignments that need to be submitted before receiving a certificate of completion.
Resources From The Train Like a Champion Blog
Insights from What's Your Formula that will Require Your Follow Up!
- "The training program is over. . . . now what? When this question was posed at SightLife—the world’s largest eye bank providing sight-restoring corneal transplants in an effort to eliminate corneal blindness worldwide—they chose to distribute certificates to all doctors in their training program and then gave one last piece of homework. The doctors had to return to their practices and share (via email to the training coordinator) how the training program influenced their work with the next several patients that they saw."
- "Is training technically complete if it’s not tried in the real world? When it comes to doing new things, there’s always a first time and that first time is often uncomfortable. It can simply be easier to just revert to the old, comfortable ways of doing things. Find a follow up strategy that supports learners in applying what they’ve learned in the real world, ideally with a feedback or support mechanism so they can reflect on their first attempt and make corrections as necessary."
- "Outside the training environment, employees are busy. While terms like learners and participants have been woven throughout this book, neither are actually job titles. When it comes to training programs, we’re developing them for employees who have a lot of demands on their time. When they have completed a training program, they still have phone calls and emails and fires to put out."
Elements likely to bond with Follow Up
Follow up can help make sure they take some time out to recall their training amid everything else they have going on. Follow up is a sneaky-important element to effective training. While it’s tempting to think that a training program ends at the end of the final day of an instructor-led session or with the final screen of an e-learning program, that doesn’t quite do justice to an initiative you want people to remember and apply on the job. When you look at the rest of the periodic table, there are a number of elements that can be bonded with follow up to meet the needs of your organization:
