Planning and Managing Training

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To ensure that Head Start staff are providing quality services to children and families, it is essential that they receive ongoing, up-to-date training to help them acquire the skills and knowledge they need to perform their jobs. This training becomes increasingly important as Head Start expands, new staff are added, staff responsibilities change, and the needs of children and families change.

Often grantees develop training programs because they happen to identify a problem. Using this approach, their training plans consist of a series of individual - often unrelated - decisions which respond to separate problems. This approach, however, presents many problems as grantees:

• Run out of the resources and the "steam" which they need to address these problems;
  
• Realize that they have not addressed the most important problem;
  
• Find that they cannot solve the problem through training; or
  
• Find that the training they are providing with their resources is already available in the community.
  

These are all planning and management issues that can be addressed by thinking strategically about training. Rather than being a separate, unrelated process, planning and managing training should be integrated into the grantee's management systems, which include planning, budget, and personnel.

To better plan and manage their training, grantees should undertake a comprehensive step-by-step process for planning training which is structured to work in tandem with a grantee's management planning process. The process begins with identifying training needs and continues through writing a training plan to providing the training and follow up.

The steps in a planning process are:

• Assessing Programmatic and Organizational Needs
  
• Developing Outcomes for Training
  
• Prioritizing Training
  
• Identifying Options for Delivering Training and Estimating the Costs
  
• Developing a Budget and Allocating Funds
  
• Writing the Training Plan
  
• Implementing the Training Plan
  
• Assessing the Training
  
• Providing Follow up

More information about this planning process and the Head Start Bureau's expectations will be communicated through program Information Memorandum and additional resource information.

WANTED: Photos and Information.. Send your identified photographs and items of interest for possible use in future issues of the Bulletin to: Head Start Bulletin P.O. Box 1182 Washington, DC 20013

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