Our goal with clients is to help build interpersonal skills in their merchant and store teams that drive results.  We do not have a goal to make clients ‘consultant-dependent’. As a multi-national company we serve a broad variety of retailers from mom and pop to retailers known around the world.  So when a client asks us about whether they should deliver the program or should they use one or more of our retail consultants we have to ask a few questions.

The first question is usually about how many people are in the ultimate target audience for the program.  If it’s less than 150-200 that means that potentially they could only have 6-8 classes of 25 people to train.  Is it worth it to put people through a four or five-day certification when they may only train 2-3 classes?  Possibly.  Clients often say that training ‘non-trainers’ in our rigorous certification process is the most significant management development experience because of the intense feedback and high expectations.  If you are trying to train others while developing your own team, certification may be the ticket.

When you certify internal trainer candidates you also get significant cost savings on participant materials.  If saving money over the long-haul is key then certification can help.  The question to consider along with those savings though is the cost of administration.  I recently had a client say they didn’t want to license anything because they didn’t want the hassle of finding a printing vendor, putting the kits together, or worrying about the quality.  They wanted to send us an email and know that in two weeks it arrived at their offices, perfect, with high-quality materials ready to use.

Lastly, a consideration when deciding about certifying in-house trainers or buying outside facilitation services from MOHR should be what is most important to the people in the training.  Your internal trainers know your policies, culture, and values better than we ever will.  If that is a key part of your branding message having your own trainers certified makes more sense.  Our retail consultants come out of retail, they know the industry, train and learn from hundreds of other retailers every year and bring those insights along with their professional facilitation skills to your session.  Maybe for your group it’s more about learning from others that’s more important than reinforcing your internal brand message.

Either way, we have a national network of retail consultants to facilitate sessions around the globe and a structured process for certifying trainer candidates that is second to none.  How will you make this decision in 2013?  Tweet us @mohrretail or share your thoughts here.  In retail every day is a chance to learn. MOHR.

Posted in Editorial
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About MOHR Retail

For more than 30 years, MOHR Retail has developed the critical people-to-people skills needed to create results in the retail industry—and we’re just getting started. Through innovative classroom and online learning methods, as well as our ongoing national retail research projects, we continue to stay on top of the trends so we can fuel the success of specialty stores, chain stores, outlets, catalogue retailers, department stores, and more. Nowhere does learning meet experience as it does in a MOHR Retail training program.