Phase 3: Action

To be most effective, look beyond the immediate team to see how your cadre can partner with other professionals or organizations with experience, resources, and expertise that can supplement your cadre’s capabilities.

Partnerships lead to sustained conversations and awareness where activities are more likely to be designed to meet identified needs.

As your organization grows in professional capacity, outcomes of effective partnerships include:

• Increased contributions from staff because of improved skills and knowledge
• Better planning and implementation of programs, practices, and policies
• Synergy through collaboration to increase quality, quantity, or cost-effectiveness of programs, practices, and policies
• Better alignment of goals among cadre members, the cadre itself, and the organization

Successful Partnerships

Characteristics of successful partnerships include:

• Mutual respect
• Coordination of administrative responsibility
• Reciprocal roles
• Shared participation in decision making
• Mutual accountability
• Transparency

It will likely be helpful to work with your cadre to create a time line for your activities.

One approach is to determine specific activities your cadre will perform by milestones, such as:

• 1‒6 months
• 7‒12 months
• Beyond year 1

Be sure to include specific tasks for individual cadre members, as needed.

Technical assistance and follow-up support are essential in the professional development process.

Your training cadre will likely provide technical assistance and targeted follow-up support after training events. These are intended to reinforce or strengthen new skills. Follow-up support is ongoing and may change over time as needs change.

Three phases should be considered as your training cadre develops its follow-up support processes:

1. Design phase: Planning for support when developing training events.
2. Delivery phase: Collecting evaluation data to identify the best follow-up options.
3. Follow-up phase: Implementing a follow-up support strategy.