The Training Industry

By JIM SCHACHTER

Jan. 4, 1988 12 AM PT

In the entrepreneurial corporation, training increasingly is being recognized as a profit center. Companies whose basic business has nothing to do with training are selling human development services to other firms--including competitors--without disclosing proprietary tricks of the trade.

Mountain Bell, for instance, collects about $1.5 million annually by selling to independent phone companies and other US West subsidiaries space in training sessions on such topics as telephone pole climbing and switching, according to Robert A. Crites of the Mountain Bell Training and Education Center in Lakewood, Colo.

When the Bell System was broken up in 1984, Crites explained, the center’s curriculum was slashed by a quarter and the company needed bodies to fill the remaining classes. “Tied in with that was the beginning of the opportunity to do things we hadn’t done in the past,” he said. “So we said, ‘Why not generate a little revenue?’ ”

Du Pont has been cashing in on in-house training activities for 15 years. The Wilmington, Del.-based chemical company conducts seminars, offers consulting services and sells training materials on such topics as hazardous materials handling, emergency planning, health prevention and quality improvement. Unisys, the computer company, is selling a videotape training series on listening skills.

Franchising--a mode of business increasingly attractive to companies providing services to business--is catching on in the training industry.

The most far-flung franchise operation is Priority Management Systems, a Vancouver, Canada, firm that in three years has established more than 110 franchises in 17 states and Canada to market a time-management program conceived by former university professor Daniel Stamp, the company’s president. Its first and biggest franchisee is Workstyle Consulting in Simi Valley.

Vocational schools have also been bitten by the franchising bug. Teller Training Institutes, based in Seattle, says it has trained and placed 55,000 students in bank teller jobs since 1974. Franchise buyers are attracted by the company’s domination of what is virtually a monopoly market, said David Lonay, the firm’s president. The company has franchises in Chula Vista, West Covina and about 20 other cities.

After three years of law school and a good bar review course, most neophyte attorneys know a lot about law. They may, however, not know much about the art of lawyering.

Traditionally, those practical skills have been acquired haphazardly--by sitting beside partners as they try a case or by muddling through depositions or negotiating sessions with little preparation. Firms have also packed young associates off to costly training sessions in the hope that the knowledge acquired in a few intense days will stick.

Now, though, a handful of law firms are instituting comprehensive in-house training programs. San Francisco’s fourth-largest firm, Thelen Marrin Johnson & Bridges, immerses new associates in an intensive orientation on the basics of litigation and continues to provide increasingly sophisticated training throughout an associate’s tenure.

Sessions with real judges and experts, mock trials, classes in writing and courtroom skills, and frequent critiques by senior partners are among the facets of the training, according to James P. Hargarten, the partner in charge of the program.

Franchisees are carrying the message of Werner Erhard, the human potential guru who invented est, to the corporate world.

The federal government, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and such major companies as Procter & Gamble, Allstate, Ford, GM, Boeing, Lockheed and General Foods have been clients of Transformational Technologies Inc., a franchise company Erhard founded in 1984 to counsel companies on how to “achieve breakthrough” and experience “organizational transformation.”

San Rafael-based Lifespring, another human potential movement pacesetter, does not seek corporate business, but a spokeswoman acknowledged that many companies pay for employees to take its “basic training.” But Curtis E. Plott, executive vice president of the American Society for Training Development, says he would be surprised if New Age-style training comprised more than 1.5% of corporate spending on human development.

One firm burnt by its dalliance with personal development training was Pacific Bell. Under fire from the staff of the state Public Utilities Commission and consumer watchdogs, the phone company in October abandoned exotic training based on the teachings of consultant Charles Krone. Some employees complained that the training was babble and a form of thought control.

BUILDING BETTER WORKERS

Percentage of companies with 50 or more employees that provide the following types of training.

Management Skills/Development 78.5

Supervisory Skills 69.3

Communication Skills 66.3

Technical Skills / Knowledge 65.0

Executive Development 57.8

Clerical / Secretarial Skills 56.7

New Methods/Procedures 56.5

Customer Relations / Services 55.3

Computer Literacy / Basic Computer Skills 51.2

Personal Growth 49.1