Nanette Miner 5/9/13 Nanette Miner 5/9/13

Powerpoint Slides are not Participant Guides

The content and design of a participant guide is critical to its effective use by the learner. Too often, reproductions of PowerPoint slides are considered participant guides. There is absolutely no point in providing participants a reproduction of what they are already looking at. A slide is simply a visual representation of a concept or a reminder of content - it is more for the faciltiator than the participant.

Perhaps the idea of slide-as-participant-guide is the reason participant materials are so often ineffective and therefore often are not provided at all.

Participant guides should include, at a minimum:

The purpose and objectives of the course. Why am I here? What is the point of this training?
The must-have, need-to-know concepts, so you can ensure the learners left the training with the essentials (facts, rules, procedures)
Instructions for any activities they will participate in during class (Note: instructions should include both technical ( you will have 30 minutes to work with a group of 4) as well as instructional (your task is to identify three ways we use XYZ in our business and how that differentiates us from our competitors)
Instructions for any exercises you may want them to complete post-training or instructions for how to begin to implement their new knowledge and skills back on the job (e.g. In the next 2 weeks you should X, Y and Z and report your results to your team lead)
Any resources they may need on the job like links to web pages (internal or external), reports, books, contact information, etc.
The participant guide should be just that, a GUIDE for the learning process; not a picture book of what you are presenting in class.

Nanette Miner 11/21/12 Nanette Miner 11/21/12

1 Day a Week Dealing with Poor Performers?

Managers spend nearly 17 percent of their working hours dealing with poor performers, according to a report from staffing firm Robert Half International. That’s nearly a full day a week that could have been spent being productive!

This is a pretty shocking statistic. We have to wonder what role training plays in this. Can the managers categorize the poor performance? Is it the same for everyone? Unique to each individual? Is it knowledge, skill or personality that contributes to poor performance? Are people with inadequate skills hired-in to begin with and training fails to bring them up to an acceptable level? Did they have the appropriate skill(s) at one time, but then they diminished over time? Could ongoing performance support have prevented that?

The Training Doctor would LOVE to do a follow-on study with the same managers polled for the Robert Half report to find the answers to these questions.

Nanette Miner 10/22/12 Nanette Miner 10/22/12

Your "smart phone" will make you dumber

Have you ever obligingly followed your GPS even though you were pretty sure it was steering you wrong (pun intended)? Have you ever followed your GPS to a location and, shortly thereafter, when you had to return, you realized you needed the GPS to do it?

While having the technology to save us time and save us from mistakes is wonderful, it also "saves us" from having to think. The more we don't have to think, the less capable we become of it.

Here is a simple experiment: pretend you are teaching how to tell time, on a clock. to a 7 year old. We have become so used to digital displays of time - on our microwave, cable box, telephone and car dash - that it is a struggle to explain how the hands and the numbers on a dial indicate the time. And that is just one, very simple, example.

More and more in our professional journals we see articles about mobile technology. With every person (practically) in possession of a smart phone or tablet, the field of training is increasingly obsessed with ways to "push" information and answers to the learner, rather than teaching people how to think, investigate, reason or create an answer on their own.

Smart devices may save us time in the short term, but in the long run, they will hobble our learners' ability to actually learn.

Nanette Miner 10/4/12 Nanette Miner 10/4/12

Quotable: Peter Casebow

"Some would say you can't control or plan for something like informal learning, but you can put a strategy in place.Based on our experience, any strategy for informal learning needs to include three basic areas: improving basic skills, such as searching for information effectively, creating opportunities and encouraging sharing and collaboration."

Quotable: Peter Casebow, CEO of GoodPractice

Nanette Miner 9/24/12 Nanette Miner 9/24/12

Mobile device usage for workplace learning

In a study of 40 large companies in various industries conducted in the fourth quarter of 2011, Boston-based Aberdeen Group found that mobile devices were used by:

55% for internal online communities or forums
48% for informal learning activities and development
42% for formal learning and development.

The results suggest that mobile devices represent a "strategic part of the formal learning plan," Mollie Lombardi, Aberdeen's research director for human capital management, wrote in a January report titled Learning on the Move

Nanette Miner 9/10/12 Nanette Miner 9/10/12

Why the 2-hour training class doesn't work

Research on what’s known as the “spacing effect” shows that we form stronger and more lasting memories by exposing ourselves to information over time. Repeated cycles of learning, consolidating, and then re-encountering material fix it firmly in our minds.

Nanette Miner 8/23/12 Nanette Miner 8/23/12

Speed to Mastery - from Forum Corporation

Forum Corporation has designed a salesforce.com-like product for training. It combines classroom training, individualized support for when learners are back on the job, and a game-like interface. It’s an innovative and inspiring way to learn and ensure on-the-job skills application!

You can learn more here: https://vimeo.com/44737652

Note: Forum Corp is one of The Training Doctor’s clients but we aren’t promoting Speed to Mastery because of that – we are promoting it because it is BRILLIANT.

Nanette Miner 8/13/12 Nanette Miner 8/13/12

Look BEYOND the training - if you want it to be successful

According to Robert Brinkerhoff, training events alone typically result in only 15% of transfer of learning to on the job behavior. So if you truly want your participants to be successful on the job, after training, you need to think beyond the training event itself.

There must be processes or systems in place that reinforce, monitor, encourage , or reward the performance of those things you consider to be critical on the job behaviors. We spend much of our time as trainers, worried about Level 1 and Level 2 outcomes (did the trainees like the training in the short-term and did the trainees leave with more knowledge than they came with) but not enough time on whether or not the trainees are implementing their new skills and knowledge on the job.

Before you start any training program, start with the end in mind, because the training will only contribute 15% to the success of your initiative. Be especially analytical of what you expect to see people doing differently on the job and how you expect them to be successful on the job. Very seldom will someone have the initiative or the time or the thorough understanding to be able to transfer what they learned in a class to their real work responsibilities.

Nanette Miner 7/27/12 Nanette Miner 7/27/12

Are you training for the job? Or training the person? Is there a difference?

Performance Support and Learning have the same objective: working smarter. The trade-off is whether you put the knowledge into the job (support) or into the performer’s head (learning).

So quoted: Gloria Gery