Ontario association relaunched as Canadian Society for Training and Development
The Canadian Society for Training and Development (CSTD) was officially inaugurated on July 1 but the real coming out party is happening this month at its annual conference and trade show in Toronto. Formerly the Ontario Society for Training and Development (OSTD), CSTD is now a national organization.
Canadian HR Reporter’s Todd Humber sat down with Lynn Johnston, executive-director of CSTD, and Dale Wilcox, president of CSTD and president of the Waterloo Management Education Centre, to talk about why the Ontario society went national and what it hopes to accomplish.
CHRR: How did the decision to transform the society from a provincial entity to a national body come about?
Wilcox: There have been several attempts to take this organization national. This time I think what the difference is was that we had members who had been members in Ontario and had been active in chapters and then got transferred and had been moved, because of their company, outside the province.
And those are the folks that said, ‘We want to see a chapter in Halifax, we want to see activity out in Calgary, but we can hardly set up the Halifax chapter of an Ontario society.’
Another key factor is that the federal government is putting a lot more emphasis on training and development in organizations. The pinnacle of that was when the Knowledge Matters report (from Human Resources Development Canada) came out. Before it came out they met with some members of OSTD and they did see that at a provincial level we had something very strong and very special. We certainly told them of our plans to go national and they have been very encouraging.
That, culminating with the fact our members feel that nationally we can do so much more, was the driving force. Whether it is our certification, our connection with the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) or whether we can do national research. Our focus is much more globally minded and therefore to work in Halifax today and work in Edmonton tomorrow is not the issue it used to be.
CHRR: How did you know that members wanted a national organization?
Johnston: We did some focus groups at our conference last year, we did a mail survey and an Internet survey. And the results were pretty much ‘go for it.’ I think we had 97 per cent approval which is almost unheard of.
CHRR: What is the relationship with the American society?
Wilcox: We were aware there were members in Canada of the ASTD outside of Ontario who really felt that they would have liked to have a Canadian body to belong to but because there was nothing available they opted to join the ASTD. And now that we’re a country that ASTD is talking to, not just a province, it has raised what we can and cannot do with them. In the past, Germany could take benchmarking resources and research with them because they were country-wide. Because we were only provincial, we couldn’t. At the same time we had a lot more members than Germany so it was a bit frustrating. But we just didn’t have the connectors to make it a national survey. Now, when we do work in the future, we can be part of the international report and that makes a lot of sense because it means that we can be aware of what’s happening in other countries and take our place in the global picture.
CHRR: Where is the first expansion outside of Ontario going to happen?
Johnston: About 10 per cent of our 1,600 members are outside Ontario, so we’re going out to those members to see if there’s an interest in investigating the possibility of a chapter to their geographic area. But it does need to come from the local area. We’re having a series of events in Calgary and Edmonton because there are members out there who would like to bring folks together and see if there is enough interest to start chapters there. So that’s kind of the model. The impetus needs to start in the local area as opposed to us coming out and saying we want to do this.
CHRR: What is the benefit of having a local chapter?
Johnston: The big benefit is they provide a face-to-face networking opportunity for people in an area. We do that through professional development events. The local chapter executive committee would get together and develop a series — a minimum of four per year is what they usually do — whether they are evening seminars or lunchtime get togethers or breakfasts. The other services we can provide from here include certification and the annual events like the conference and tradeshow.
Wilcox: It’s part of that ‘act global and work local’ initiative. It certainly means that within your community you get to know who the players are and it gives you a chance to develop yourself professionally. Some of the things they talk about are things around assessment, e-learning, the latest tips and techniques for presenting different information to different learning styles. It’s a chance to access and share all this useful information that you can’t just do once a year at a conference.
CHRR: Now that you’re national, will the annual conference move from Toronto to other cities?
Johnston: I think we’re guided by the needs. But we may look at larger regional events. Last March we had a cross-border event in Dayton, Ohio working with ASTD chapters locally and that model of something that is regional but cross-border we may try to bring into different areas. There is interest in doing something like that in Chicago with Canadian participation so we may do more of those kinds of regional events.
CHRR: Where does your funding come from?
Johnston: It’s all member related, either through membership fees or events that we hold. We’ve done a couple of small research projects with government funding but they really haven’t contributed to the organization, they’ve contributed to the research that we’ve been asked to do. We did a couple of symposiums with HRDC’s help. So the funding certainly comes from members supporting the organization through fees or event participation. I don’t know that we see that changing.
Wilcox: No. I don’t know how we could and still be non-profit. But at the same time, the current board of directors has certainly laid out the business plan of how we will grow and how we will try and maintain our costs to a degree. We made certain we were financially sound before we undertook this national move and fortunately we got ourselves into a position where that was the case. We took money out of our reserves and earmarked it for the national growth and all the initiatives that will come from that. So we haven’t done this willy nilly, that ‘Okay, the membership said we should go national so let’s just drop in and do it.’ It’s all been thought out and very much planned out by the core that’s on the board right now. We’re both very excited that this month (October) we’re taking a trip west to Calgary and Edmonton. We’ve put off Vancouver until after the conference. Lynn has had some folks down from Montreal who are looking at how they can establish with us and we’ve seen a revitalization in Ontario of some of our own chapters. I think it’s because now that we’re national we have something more to take to people as a reason to join.
CHRR: Who are CSTD’s members?
Johnston: About 70 per cent are corporate, the other 30 per cent are independent. About 20 per cent of the corporate people are quite senior and we do have some entry level people too. We have students, people in adult education programs who are working towards the Certified Training and Development Professional (CTDP) designation. And the independent can be a fairly large company like WATMEC or an independent person who works on their own.
CHRR: What is CSTD’s biggest weakness right now?
Wilcox: It’s going to be a challenge, if you want to call that a weakness, to bring together such a diverse country. But I would say we don’t see that as a weakness but as a challenge. It’s something that certainly can happen. As a weakness, we’d always like to have more money to do more things. We’re constantly having to decide which priorities get done based on funding and the financial situation.
CHRR: If you had more money, what would you do with it?
Johnston: We could do more research and that would be something that we’re working towards. There are some issues out there that we would really like to be able to explore so hopefully with growth that will come. A wage salary survey of some sort within the industry would be a wonderful place to start. There’s certainly some issues around benchmarking against other countries like what we’re trying to do with the U.S. It’s a little tricky to do that because with their definitions of different sectors we run into little problems. Like whether a health care group is in the public sector or the private sector, there may be different views over the border so when we make comparisons we’re not sure we’re comparing apples to apples. So doing it ourselves in Canada would be a great place to start.
Wilcox: There’s a vast amount of things that we would like to know more about that companies are doing that relate to lifelong learning, but it’s not being tracked. It’s not being captured and much of it is being done in a haphazard fashion. We’ve explored the fact that within a lot of medium-sized companies there’s a lot of internal training that goes on where it’s the manager showing staff how to do something. That manager may have never had any formalized train the trainer or anything of that nature and yet he’s expected to impart learning to others. In some cases it’s happening very successfully and in others it’s a bit of a challenge to say the least and it would be nice to capture how much of that is going on and how it might be improved.
People really see that if our country is going to go ahead, learning and knowledge and the management of those two things are very, very important if we’re going to play on the international scene. We could be doing all kinds of research if money were no object.
CHRR: Have you attracted many new members since you went national and do you have a target you’re hoping to reach?
Johnston: Not really. But we just launched in July and so really our launch is now. We have about 1,600. I don’t think we have a goal at the end of the day. Our next benchmark is to get to the 2,000 point but that is three years down the road and if it happens faster, so be it. We’ve decided those are the types of problems we can handle.
Wilcox: Our country is just waking up to how important lifelong learning is for us and just how important that’s going to be on the international scene. There have been times when I felt we were falling behind countries like Australia and New Zealand. It sort of scared me for a few years when I saw stuff coming out of a country as small as Ireland and said, ‘Whoa, where are we in all of this?’ I think this is giving us a chance to take our rightful place globally as well because this country is full of a lot of bright people and we’re having a glimpse, that exciting things are happening in provinces other than Ontario and we’re having a chance to spotlight those things and pull them all together.
CHRR: What is the society’s strength right now?
Johnston: Our biggest strength is our certification — CTDP, which stands for Certified Training and Development Professional. It’s encompassed in a publication we put out called the Training Competency Architecture. So we’ve set a standard and we actually had a steering committee review the standards almost two years ago to ensure they were up-to-date with learning technologies and what’s been happening. With some tweaking, it’s certainly come back as a very strong document.
CTDP is an attempt by our members to set a national standard. There are five different areas for the CTDP. You could be in design, facilitation or instruction, needs analyst, coaching or evaluation. It was launched about five years ago and we’re thinking, perhaps if — and this was a message that came from the survey — this was a national certification people would respond a little more strongly to it. It’s something that we really believe in and something that members seem to want and now we can bring it nationally.
The other strength to mention is the members. They make this place happen. It’s an interesting mix of corporate members — people employed in organizations other than training companies and the independents — and the others that have products or services to sell back to the first group. It’s an interesting dynamic and members will move between those definitions. You’ll find somebody come out of a corporate position and set up their own business in the same industry. It really is a wonderful dynamic and it makes it very strong.
CHRR: What’s hot in the training realm right now?
Johnston: One thing I’m seeing relates to return-on-investment (ROI). There’s a great deal of discussion about that right now. People are seeing the need to align business objectives with what they are doing so they need to find a way to measure what they are doing and to evaluate what they’re doing and that’s not an easy thing to do. The Canadian ROI network that we just launched is a way to try to help people look at ways to do this and when they might do it. It isn’t particularly easy, but we need to do it. The industry has to grapple with the need to do it.
Wilcox: I think you can set measurements, but they will not always be financial. But the same thing happens if I put in a new printer. I can see that it’s going to give me this quality of improvement of my output. I may also be able to tag a certain value if it prints faster. But amongst the other reasons I would put in that printer is that I would have a better quality product. I may have more efficiency in paper usage, any number of things that I would list and I think that part of our problem with ROI and learning and training is that everybody has tried to focus just on how many dollars are we going to save and not on what are the other outcomes. I think the question should be, “What do we need to see different happening in this organization as a result of this initiative.”
One of them may be that we reduce turnover and therefore that translates into a dollar figure that I can give you. It may mean shorter hours for certain part-time staff, and again I can translate that into a dollar. But there are lots of things that I can’t translate into a dollar but I can show you a difference. I may be expecting more work to be produced in a certain time, more of a quality than we had before, less stress, less conflict, shorter learning cycles and all those things that are just as important but don’t always have a dollar sign behind them.
CHRR: What about e-learning?
Wilcox: A lot of organizations are listening to the hype that’s international on e-learning, recognizing that there is a lot of value to e-learning. But how does it fit into the Canadian marketplace? A lot of the e-learning that is written up in the U.S., it kind of boggles the mind that a company saved $2 million by going to e-learning. Many Canadian firms will say, “We haven’t $2 million in the budget to start with, so how could we save $2 million?” But when you’re working with large organizations with 40,000 or 80,000 employees, you can come up with those kinds of savings.
But how can organizations interpret that down to using e-learning when they only have 800 employees or 400 employees? That’s definitely one of our challenges — how do we make e-learning work in Canada because we are such a spread out country. But it seems to make sense that e-learning would work here for us in a very viable way.
Canadian HR Reporter’s Todd Humber sat down with Lynn Johnston, executive-director of CSTD, and Dale Wilcox, president of CSTD and president of the Waterloo Management Education Centre, to talk about why the Ontario society went national and what it hopes to accomplish.
CHRR: How did the decision to transform the society from a provincial entity to a national body come about?
Wilcox: There have been several attempts to take this organization national. This time I think what the difference is was that we had members who had been members in Ontario and had been active in chapters and then got transferred and had been moved, because of their company, outside the province.
And those are the folks that said, ‘We want to see a chapter in Halifax, we want to see activity out in Calgary, but we can hardly set up the Halifax chapter of an Ontario society.’
Another key factor is that the federal government is putting a lot more emphasis on training and development in organizations. The pinnacle of that was when the Knowledge Matters report (from Human Resources Development Canada) came out. Before it came out they met with some members of OSTD and they did see that at a provincial level we had something very strong and very special. We certainly told them of our plans to go national and they have been very encouraging.
That, culminating with the fact our members feel that nationally we can do so much more, was the driving force. Whether it is our certification, our connection with the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) or whether we can do national research. Our focus is much more globally minded and therefore to work in Halifax today and work in Edmonton tomorrow is not the issue it used to be.
CHRR: How did you know that members wanted a national organization?
Johnston: We did some focus groups at our conference last year, we did a mail survey and an Internet survey. And the results were pretty much ‘go for it.’ I think we had 97 per cent approval which is almost unheard of.
CHRR: What is the relationship with the American society?
Wilcox: We were aware there were members in Canada of the ASTD outside of Ontario who really felt that they would have liked to have a Canadian body to belong to but because there was nothing available they opted to join the ASTD. And now that we’re a country that ASTD is talking to, not just a province, it has raised what we can and cannot do with them. In the past, Germany could take benchmarking resources and research with them because they were country-wide. Because we were only provincial, we couldn’t. At the same time we had a lot more members than Germany so it was a bit frustrating. But we just didn’t have the connectors to make it a national survey. Now, when we do work in the future, we can be part of the international report and that makes a lot of sense because it means that we can be aware of what’s happening in other countries and take our place in the global picture.
CHRR: Where is the first expansion outside of Ontario going to happen?
Johnston: About 10 per cent of our 1,600 members are outside Ontario, so we’re going out to those members to see if there’s an interest in investigating the possibility of a chapter to their geographic area. But it does need to come from the local area. We’re having a series of events in Calgary and Edmonton because there are members out there who would like to bring folks together and see if there is enough interest to start chapters there. So that’s kind of the model. The impetus needs to start in the local area as opposed to us coming out and saying we want to do this.
CHRR: What is the benefit of having a local chapter?
Johnston: The big benefit is they provide a face-to-face networking opportunity for people in an area. We do that through professional development events. The local chapter executive committee would get together and develop a series — a minimum of four per year is what they usually do — whether they are evening seminars or lunchtime get togethers or breakfasts. The other services we can provide from here include certification and the annual events like the conference and tradeshow.
Wilcox: It’s part of that ‘act global and work local’ initiative. It certainly means that within your community you get to know who the players are and it gives you a chance to develop yourself professionally. Some of the things they talk about are things around assessment, e-learning, the latest tips and techniques for presenting different information to different learning styles. It’s a chance to access and share all this useful information that you can’t just do once a year at a conference.
CHRR: Now that you’re national, will the annual conference move from Toronto to other cities?
Johnston: I think we’re guided by the needs. But we may look at larger regional events. Last March we had a cross-border event in Dayton, Ohio working with ASTD chapters locally and that model of something that is regional but cross-border we may try to bring into different areas. There is interest in doing something like that in Chicago with Canadian participation so we may do more of those kinds of regional events.
CHRR: Where does your funding come from?
Johnston: It’s all member related, either through membership fees or events that we hold. We’ve done a couple of small research projects with government funding but they really haven’t contributed to the organization, they’ve contributed to the research that we’ve been asked to do. We did a couple of symposiums with HRDC’s help. So the funding certainly comes from members supporting the organization through fees or event participation. I don’t know that we see that changing.
Wilcox: No. I don’t know how we could and still be non-profit. But at the same time, the current board of directors has certainly laid out the business plan of how we will grow and how we will try and maintain our costs to a degree. We made certain we were financially sound before we undertook this national move and fortunately we got ourselves into a position where that was the case. We took money out of our reserves and earmarked it for the national growth and all the initiatives that will come from that. So we haven’t done this willy nilly, that ‘Okay, the membership said we should go national so let’s just drop in and do it.’ It’s all been thought out and very much planned out by the core that’s on the board right now. We’re both very excited that this month (October) we’re taking a trip west to Calgary and Edmonton. We’ve put off Vancouver until after the conference. Lynn has had some folks down from Montreal who are looking at how they can establish with us and we’ve seen a revitalization in Ontario of some of our own chapters. I think it’s because now that we’re national we have something more to take to people as a reason to join.
CHRR: Who are CSTD’s members?
Johnston: About 70 per cent are corporate, the other 30 per cent are independent. About 20 per cent of the corporate people are quite senior and we do have some entry level people too. We have students, people in adult education programs who are working towards the Certified Training and Development Professional (CTDP) designation. And the independent can be a fairly large company like WATMEC or an independent person who works on their own.
CHRR: What is CSTD’s biggest weakness right now?
Wilcox: It’s going to be a challenge, if you want to call that a weakness, to bring together such a diverse country. But I would say we don’t see that as a weakness but as a challenge. It’s something that certainly can happen. As a weakness, we’d always like to have more money to do more things. We’re constantly having to decide which priorities get done based on funding and the financial situation.
CHRR: If you had more money, what would you do with it?
Johnston: We could do more research and that would be something that we’re working towards. There are some issues out there that we would really like to be able to explore so hopefully with growth that will come. A wage salary survey of some sort within the industry would be a wonderful place to start. There’s certainly some issues around benchmarking against other countries like what we’re trying to do with the U.S. It’s a little tricky to do that because with their definitions of different sectors we run into little problems. Like whether a health care group is in the public sector or the private sector, there may be different views over the border so when we make comparisons we’re not sure we’re comparing apples to apples. So doing it ourselves in Canada would be a great place to start.
Wilcox: There’s a vast amount of things that we would like to know more about that companies are doing that relate to lifelong learning, but it’s not being tracked. It’s not being captured and much of it is being done in a haphazard fashion. We’ve explored the fact that within a lot of medium-sized companies there’s a lot of internal training that goes on where it’s the manager showing staff how to do something. That manager may have never had any formalized train the trainer or anything of that nature and yet he’s expected to impart learning to others. In some cases it’s happening very successfully and in others it’s a bit of a challenge to say the least and it would be nice to capture how much of that is going on and how it might be improved.
People really see that if our country is going to go ahead, learning and knowledge and the management of those two things are very, very important if we’re going to play on the international scene. We could be doing all kinds of research if money were no object.
CHRR: Have you attracted many new members since you went national and do you have a target you’re hoping to reach?
Johnston: Not really. But we just launched in July and so really our launch is now. We have about 1,600. I don’t think we have a goal at the end of the day. Our next benchmark is to get to the 2,000 point but that is three years down the road and if it happens faster, so be it. We’ve decided those are the types of problems we can handle.
Wilcox: Our country is just waking up to how important lifelong learning is for us and just how important that’s going to be on the international scene. There have been times when I felt we were falling behind countries like Australia and New Zealand. It sort of scared me for a few years when I saw stuff coming out of a country as small as Ireland and said, ‘Whoa, where are we in all of this?’ I think this is giving us a chance to take our rightful place globally as well because this country is full of a lot of bright people and we’re having a glimpse, that exciting things are happening in provinces other than Ontario and we’re having a chance to spotlight those things and pull them all together.
CHRR: What is the society’s strength right now?
Johnston: Our biggest strength is our certification — CTDP, which stands for Certified Training and Development Professional. It’s encompassed in a publication we put out called the Training Competency Architecture. So we’ve set a standard and we actually had a steering committee review the standards almost two years ago to ensure they were up-to-date with learning technologies and what’s been happening. With some tweaking, it’s certainly come back as a very strong document.
CTDP is an attempt by our members to set a national standard. There are five different areas for the CTDP. You could be in design, facilitation or instruction, needs analyst, coaching or evaluation. It was launched about five years ago and we’re thinking, perhaps if — and this was a message that came from the survey — this was a national certification people would respond a little more strongly to it. It’s something that we really believe in and something that members seem to want and now we can bring it nationally.
The other strength to mention is the members. They make this place happen. It’s an interesting mix of corporate members — people employed in organizations other than training companies and the independents — and the others that have products or services to sell back to the first group. It’s an interesting dynamic and members will move between those definitions. You’ll find somebody come out of a corporate position and set up their own business in the same industry. It really is a wonderful dynamic and it makes it very strong.
CHRR: What’s hot in the training realm right now?
Johnston: One thing I’m seeing relates to return-on-investment (ROI). There’s a great deal of discussion about that right now. People are seeing the need to align business objectives with what they are doing so they need to find a way to measure what they are doing and to evaluate what they’re doing and that’s not an easy thing to do. The Canadian ROI network that we just launched is a way to try to help people look at ways to do this and when they might do it. It isn’t particularly easy, but we need to do it. The industry has to grapple with the need to do it.
Wilcox: I think you can set measurements, but they will not always be financial. But the same thing happens if I put in a new printer. I can see that it’s going to give me this quality of improvement of my output. I may also be able to tag a certain value if it prints faster. But amongst the other reasons I would put in that printer is that I would have a better quality product. I may have more efficiency in paper usage, any number of things that I would list and I think that part of our problem with ROI and learning and training is that everybody has tried to focus just on how many dollars are we going to save and not on what are the other outcomes. I think the question should be, “What do we need to see different happening in this organization as a result of this initiative.”
One of them may be that we reduce turnover and therefore that translates into a dollar figure that I can give you. It may mean shorter hours for certain part-time staff, and again I can translate that into a dollar. But there are lots of things that I can’t translate into a dollar but I can show you a difference. I may be expecting more work to be produced in a certain time, more of a quality than we had before, less stress, less conflict, shorter learning cycles and all those things that are just as important but don’t always have a dollar sign behind them.
CHRR: What about e-learning?
Wilcox: A lot of organizations are listening to the hype that’s international on e-learning, recognizing that there is a lot of value to e-learning. But how does it fit into the Canadian marketplace? A lot of the e-learning that is written up in the U.S., it kind of boggles the mind that a company saved $2 million by going to e-learning. Many Canadian firms will say, “We haven’t $2 million in the budget to start with, so how could we save $2 million?” But when you’re working with large organizations with 40,000 or 80,000 employees, you can come up with those kinds of savings.
But how can organizations interpret that down to using e-learning when they only have 800 employees or 400 employees? That’s definitely one of our challenges — how do we make e-learning work in Canada because we are such a spread out country. But it seems to make sense that e-learning would work here for us in a very viable way.
