Using Training to Build Capacity for Development | Strategic Participation Selection

Strategic Participant Selection

Selecting Participants Through Preliminary Training

InWEnt, a German government-sponsored capacity building organization active throughout the world, uses a "leveling phase" in some of their blended learning courses. Interested course participants first complete a 1-2 week course whose purpose is both to select those who will continue in the full learning program and to ensure that all participants entering into this program have a certain basic level of knowledge on the subject matter. Participants are accepted into leveling phase if they have sufficient internet access and the requisite academic/professional background. Only about 50% pass this phase and are allowed to continue the learning program. Use of this leveling phase has had significant impact on dropout rate in later phases of learning programs.

For training to contribute to development objectives, it has to involve the right people, and the right combination of people, in any given learning situation. Optimal participant selection strategies vary depending on the development objectives. For certain types of training, it is essential for all trainees to be of similar levels of experience and expertise in order to facilitate learning, whereas for others, it may be useful to train an entire unit together, placing high-level managers and low-level assistants in the same classroom.

Donor-funded training courses are particularly vulnerable to distortionary incentives in participant selection. Participants may be sent to training as a "reward", because training courses promise per diems or travel abroad. Alternately, when training is not valued by beneficiary organizations, trainees may be chosen because they can most easily be spared from work. Where there is high beneficiary commitment to the objectives of training, distortionary incentives are far less likely to influence participant selection by beneficiary organizations. Similarly, competitive selection processes can be used to neutralize distortionary incentives.

Four Strategies for Selecting Participants

Type	Strategy Description	Appropriate Use of Strategy	Example
Competitive	Selection based on a competitive application process.	Recruitment of new personnel to be trained for specific roles in the target organization. Selection may be phased, with performance in first stage of course determining continued participation. Multi-country or multi-organization courses, to ensure uniform high quality of training participants.	In the Bangladesh Procurement Reform Project, participants in the training of trainers program were selected through a staged competitive application process. Initial training was done of trainers who had passed the screening process. The best performers in the first training course were selected to proceed to subsequent courses.
Targeted	Invitation of participants based on highly specified job profiles.	Training needed only for persons fulfilling specific key functions within an organization. May be key decision makers or persons with specialized technical skills.	Trainees for plant protection and seed/plant certification as part of the Tunisia Agricultural Support Services project were selected on the basis of job profiles. Only technicians or high-level members of laboratories were accepted.
Widespread	Training of a large number of persons in an organization or across a sector, often with different job functions, levels of expertise.	Training objectives are organization-wide or call for institutional change, including building support for change. Implementation of learning in workplace necessitates coordinated action of persons serving a range of organizational functions. For example, training in coordinated disaster response or rural development.	The Initial Education Project in Mexico trained 1.3 million parents of children aged 0-4 in rural communities of 500-2,500 inhabitants in order to help them play a positive role in their children's education.
Demand-driven	Training open to (qualified) participants on a willingness-to-pay basis. Includes fee-based training, training co-financing credits.	Training for private sector organizations or in the context of community-driven development programs where participants are in the best position to evaluate their own needs.	The Competitiveness and Enterprise Development project in Burkina Faso offered 50 percent co-financing credits to businesses requesting training support. Businesses were responsible for procuring their own training once credits had been awarded.