About 80% of the training that occurs in the workplace doesn't occur in a formal training program.  About 80% of the training that occurs is just one person assisting another in an informal way.  You stand up and look over your cubicle and ask your cubicle mate, “Do you know how to take text out of table and just make it into a paragraph?”  Or, a sales manager decides he's going to take his administrative assistant out on the road for a day so she can actually meet the customers and better understand what their customer's needs are.

This interview, with Dr. Nanette Miner, will discuss ways to formalize informal learning in your organization.

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Miner: Most of new-hire training is what we consider “follow Joe around” training.  This means that you hook a new person up with a more experienced person - follow Joe around and he'll show you how to do your job. Although this is efficient, there are many problems with this style of training. If you have more than one person who is “Joe,” in this case, the training can be different from individual to individual because every trainer is going to emphasize what they think is important or perhaps show shortcuts, or “their way” of doing things which may not be the prescribed way of doing things. So while it is efficient and it doesn't take a formal training process, in the end you can actually have some pretty poorly trained new hires.

One of the things you can do to keep that process in place while making it a little more formal is to create check lists of training so that you have some kind of assurance that everybody's getting the same training process.  For instance, in the retail industry there's a lot of turnover. Organizations tend to hire clerks on an individual basis.  If you had a new hire training checklist you could at least ensure that everybody was getting the same training on the cash register.  For instance you’d show them how to ring a cash sale, how to ring a charge sale, how to run a coupon, how to process a refund – these are a the topics any new hire would need to know, but you could “formalize” the training by prescribing the order of learning from easiest (cash sale) to hardest (refund).

Another way to formalize the training would be to recruit individuals who are interested in training.  Believe it or not, there are a lot of people in organizations who love to transmit their knowledge to others and would be happy to do it for free.  Recruit those people to serve as mentors or coaches for everybody, not just new hires, but everybody.  They can be the go-to person when a new process needs to be created or a process runs into a problem; this person can be the one who figures it out and then trains everyone else in the “new way.”

Another idea would be to make training the responsibility of everybody in the organization.  Require everyone to take on new learning and then share it with others.  What we often do, as individuals, is figure something out on our own and say, “Oh cool, now I know how to do that,”  and we don't ever share it with anybody else.  I remember reading about a software company that made it everybody's responsibility to take on new learning to the point where it was in their performance review every year.  What did you learn this year and how did you disseminate it to the rest of the organization?  So, the employee might run a lunch and learn or they might write something up in the company newsletter.The point is that everyone is learning all the time, and we should formalize a way to share that learning.

T/D: Thank you Dr. Miner, those are great tips in making it everyone's responsibility and sharing the knowledge.  Next month we will finalize this interview by focusing on Accessing Employee Training through your local College or University.

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Dr Nanette Miner has been an instructional designer for over two decades. She is President and Managing Consultant for The Training Doctor which specializes in working with subject matter experts to take the knowledge from their heads and design learning in such a way that others can adopt and implement the training immediately.   She is also the author of The Accidental Trainer and co-author of Tailored Learning: Designing a Blend that Fits.