The economic recession has brought about a wave of centralization across training functions as organizations strive for greater efficiency. As one example, I recently interviewed a global financial services company that had consolidated its decentralized training groups into a single, centralized operation, resulting in the loss of one-quarter of its total training staff. This may sound harsh, but on a positive note, the new centralized structure has helped to eliminate redundancies in learning programs, staff, and technologies and has provided a more strategic, corporate-wide view of training activities.

Many companies, including this one, are moving toward a federated or "shared services" structure, in which a central training group sets the strategy and standards, manages the learning infrastructure, and provides support to business units in training delivery and implementation. This organizational model supports the training needs of different business units in addition to ensuring alignment with corporate priorities – typically with fewer overall resources.

The challenge with a shared services structure, however, is that it requires different job roles and skill sets for training personnel. Capabilities for training delivery and fulfillment are no longer paramount; what’s needed are consulting skills and strong business acumen. The challenge is that this requires a totally different skill set among training professionals. So how do you build these skills within your training team?

Here's what that financial services company did... Training executives realized they needed new job roles to meet the demands of the business going forward. The new roles required strong coaching and consulting skills in order to help business managers solve their performance problems. To fill these new roles, training executives first assessed the skills, potential, and career interests of the current training staff. Based on this assessment, some training personnel were let go. The personnel who were retained were capable of, and interested in, growing into this new type of role.

To build the necessary skills, one of the first steps was to have all training staff read Performance Consulting by Robinson and Robinson. Afterwards, the training team discussed the concepts in the book and how they could be applied to their jobs. This reading, along with other developmental opportunities, has helped the training staff to grow into their new roles.

As this example demonstrates, many organizations are headed down the path of transforming their training staff into performance consultants. Hence, a new breed of training professional is emerging. Organizations will need to redefine their job roles and evaluate the capabilities of their current training staff, then hire or develop staff to fill these new roles. Unfortunately, many lifelong trainers and L&D professionals will find that their current skills are becoming obsolete.  L&D organizations will need to focus development initiatives on their own teams to build the necessary skills for the future.

(For more information on how L&D staffing has changed over the past year, and how companies are dealing with these challenges, see The Corporate Learning Factbook 2010.)