Time to develop training

- How long will it take to develop the training? This is perhaps one of the most frequently asked questions in all the realm of training. One of the things I think managers and executives secretly hope is that the training can be Shazammed into existence. In other words, the training is suddenly conjured and ready to deploy just by saying the magic word, Shazam. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Instead, good training takes time. Your role is to accurately convey the message of how long and why it takes time to do it right. Fortunately, there are several methods to help estimate the timeframe for training development. None are perfect, but all can be helpful. The simplest method is to use the time it took to develop a previous training program to estimate the time needed for the new program. In project management speak, this is called analogous estimating, meaning that one project is analogous to another. This, of course, means that you have previous projects for comparison and that you've kept records on how long previous projects took. Tracking hours to develop training is a good discipline and practice to have, but if you're just getting the training department off the ground, this method might not work. Another method is the bottom up, or work breakdown structure approach. What this means is that you break the entire training development process into smaller and smaller pieces until you can finally assign a time to each piece. Then you add up all the pieces and you have your estimate. For example, if you're going to develop a training on safety, you decide that you're going to do classroom instruction, and that will last two hours. You then estimate the amount of time to create learning objectives, the amount of time to write up the learner guide, the amount of time to develop in-class exercises, and the amount of time needed to create the slides, et cetera. You then add up all that time and you have your final estimate. This process works well, but it does have some drawbacks. You might miss a large piece of the development effort or you might severely over or underestimate the time for a task, and in the end, this estimation process does take a long time. Another method is to use industry standards. While there's no governing body of training standards, there are several sources available that provide estimated timeframes for developing one hour of training. The Association for Talent Development has published articles related to developing one hour of instruction. You can easily find training development ranges by searching for how long does it take to develop one hour of training. Use these numbers as guidance when providing estimates. Remember, the important thing is for you to develop a method to properly set training development time expectations. Experiment with the methods I've presented until you find one that meets your needs.