Principles vs Rules vs Heuristics in Learning

Or what I learned through working at a casino

I was having an interesting conversation with a colleague the other day about how we use or should use principles, rules, and heuristics in learning and development.

It hadn’t occurred to me before this conversation that these probably should be identified and defined at the start of any learning/training process so that our learners understand the parameters for the information that is to follow.

Let me explain the difference between the three through a story….

In the early 2000s I taught various courses in human resource management, business management, training and development, and ethics, for the University of Connecticut system. In one of my training and development courses the students had an assignment to develop a short training lesson that included objectives, knowledge, skills, and behavioral outcomes. They then had to teach the lesson to the group.

To get real value from the assignment, the topic had to relate to their work.

One of the cool things about my job with the University was that, rather than teaching on the college campus, I was sent to businesses to teach the college’s courses to an intact group of employees who were working toward degrees. This particular client happened to be a casino.

As their final assignment, two of my students taught the rest of us how credit at a casino is determined and extended to gamblers who have run out of money. It is a very involved process which in the end comes down to a judgment call.

Principles: A fundamental truth that serves as the foundation for a belief, behavior, or for a chain of reasoning.

In practice: ALL casinos share credit information with one another. You cannot run out of money at one casino, borrow, run out of money again, and move on to another casino – every casino knows how much debt you are carrying and who you owe it to.

Rules: Official policies or regulations.

In practice:  Before a line of credit is determined and extended, the casino employee looks at credit scores, bank records, and the customer profile (based on their gambling history and use of credit in the past) to determine how “good” of a credit risk they are. It is incredibly difficult to get credit extended the first time because the gambler has no history of paying it back (unless, as noted above, they have used credit at a different casino).

Heuristic: A rule of thumb or an educated guess that allows you to make decisions efficiently.

In practice. Assuming the person applying for credit has a good history of using credit in the past, and their bank records and credit score don’t reflect anything alarming, they will be extended credit.

Here is the part of learning that cannot govern the final decision: the amount of credit extended is entirely up to the casino employee. Two different employees may come up with two different decisions. Neither one is “better,” and so long as both employees followed the process’ principles, rules, and heuristics both are right.

Now, your assignment: When designing or delivering workplace training, start by defining the principles, rules, and heuristics - it will help you to organize the content and help the learner to understand what processes are de facto vs. when and how they apply their own critical thought.

Here's How You Can Create Training Without Knowing a Thing About the Topic

Have you ever had to design a training program for a topic you just didn't get? Us too!

The wonderful thing about being a professional instructional designer is that you don't actually have to understand the topic, but you MUST understand the process of how people learn.

If you understand how to design learning - the topic is irrelevant.

For instance, we created Row, Row, Row Your Family Feud Boat (download, here) when we were charged with helping financial planners to overcome client objections to moving to a new platform.

At first, we referred to it as a "product" and we were quickly corrected: It's not a product, it's a platform.

When then changed our wording to "service." Wrong again. It's not a service, it's a platform. How could we design training to overcome objections to a platform if we didn't even get what that WAS?

Easy - you design a learning process and have the learners themselves fill in the content.

Check it out here. You can use this design for all sorts of topics.

Helping Small and Medium-sized Businesses to Prepare for the Next-Era of Leadership

Free 4-day Event

Every business - small to supersized - has changed significantly since the start of 2020.

Leadership teams are turned upside down.

Companies are being forced to downsize, right-size, and sometimes capsize.

Your company’s future depends on having strong a leadership plan in place as you adapt to the workforce that lies ahead.

We are here to help, with a series of leadership conversations. All FREE.

Meet with fellow business people, hear from experts with long tenures in developing organizational leaders, ask the questions you need answered.

Check out our roster of speakers

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Patricia Carl

June 3 3:00 pm EST

Re-imagining / Redesigning Your Leadership Team

Patricia Carl has 20+ years’ experience in Human Resource leadership for both private and public companies, across multiple industries. As President of Highland Performance Solutions, she coaches and consults with executives in order to help them build high-performing teams.

Lee Eisenstaedt

June 10 3:00 pm EST

What Skills Are Needed in the Next 3 - 5 Years?

Lee has been the Chief Operating Officer of a number of top companies included 22 years with the SC Johnson family of companies in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Lee has authored four books, co-authored one, and is a frequent contributor to Forbes.com

Jeff Harmon

June 17 3:00 pm EST

The 5C Method to Create Sustainable and Scalable Leadership Development

Jeff Harmon has over 20 years of experience building relationships to equip and mobilize leaders to achieve their most important goals.

He helps company leaders to identify their strengths as well as the strengths of their team.

He is the author of “Become a Better Leader, 10 Minutes at a Time.”

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Nanette Miner, Ed.D.

June 24 3:00 pm EST

Creating a Master Plan for Leadership Development

Dr. Nanette Miner founded The Training Doctor in 1991 to help organizations to grow and thrive by a developing worker capabilities.  She is on a mission to help organizations to sustain their success through developing their future leaders from the moment they walk in the door. 

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3 Free Leadership Development Resources

Note: This article originally appeared on Forbes.com
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/09/26/how-to-develop-your-future-leaders-for-next-to-nothing/#69afc9ec2d11

Are you a business owner or managerwho knows you need to startdeveloping the future leaders of your organization, but you’re paralyzed by theidea of where to begin? No worries. This article will help you get started withno cost and minimal effort.

When people learn that The Training Doctor helps companies to develop their leadership strategy, we often hear, "Yeah, but we have no money.”

There are a LOT of organizations - big and small - in this same situation. And the good news is - leadership development does NOT have to be expensive or time-consuming. Here are three resources (and we have PLENTY more to share, if you are interested).

Reading and Discussion Groups

The best activity your company’s futureleaders can master is to be knowledgeable about business in general and yourindustry in particular.  A businessleader needs to know how a business works, not how a job is done. Assist yourup-and-coming leaders by subscribing to industry journals and general-businesspublications such as Forbes, Harvard Business Review, or the Wall StreetJournal.

More importantly, form weekly orbi-weekly discussion groups around an article or two that you think isparticularly enlightening or that would be good for discussion. If you reallywant to go the extra mile, pre-formulate discussion questions that get awayfrom opinion (What do you think of that?) and lean toward critical thinking(Could that happen to us? What would we do, if that happened?).  It’s important to have your future leadersthinking about “the big picture,” and your company in the context of yourindustry and business in general.

Job Rotations

Job rotations are traditionallythought of as an activity reserved for “hi-pos” (high potential individuals).Why?

It’s important that your futureleaders understand how your business works, what departments areinterdependent, and especially how you make money. They cannot learn thesethings if they are stuck in the silo of their own department or role.

A job rotation doesn’t have to beextensive or lengthy, but it should give the “visitor” a thorough understandingof another department’s work processes, priorities, and constraints. Imaginehaving a customer service representative work in the sales department for aweek. They could travel on sales calls, learn about your competition,understand better about contracts and pricing and the customer lifecycle, andon and on. Wouldn’t that make them a much more knowledgeable and helpfulcustomer service rep? Now imagine the reverse - a salesperson on the phones inthe customer service department for a week. Wow.

When people have a perspective onthe whole organization they do their own jobs better, have better collaborationskills, better communication skills, more empathy, a better understanding ofthe constraints or opportunities throughout the organization, and are not justfocused on the role that they do at their own desk.

Tuition Reimbursement

Finally, my third free leadershipdevelopment recommendation is to institute a tuition reimbursement program.Now, this isn’t exactly cost-free because it will take a bit of money to hire alawyer and/or accountant to set it up correctly (for instance, the rules aredifferent for C-corps vs. LLC’s) but once that process is done, the payback isextraordinary.

First, you have little to managebut the reimbursement process because participants are engaged more with the institutionwhere they are taking classes. Second, you are able to take advantage of a taxcredit of slightly over $5000 per participant. Third, courses often requireon-the-job projects, which means that your company reaps the rewards of betterproject management or a better HR communications strategy, for example.

And individuals often feel loyaltyto those companies that help them to further their career and their education, soan added benefit is that you’ll see increased retention (which mutes thosecynics who worry “What if I train them and they leave?”).

Bottom line: You CAN afford todevelop the future leaders of your organization with little cost and minimaleffort by starting reading and discussion groups, instituting job rotations,and offering tuition reimbursement, for everyone, not just for those employeesyou think are “high potential.”

For more great suggestions for leadership development follow The Training Doctor on Twitter or LinkedIn.

3 Ways "We" Have Destroyed Young People's Ability to Think

Here are three ways education has undermined thinking in theyounger generations:

The primary education system has changed quite a bit in thelast 50 years and many of those changes have resulted in young people'sinability to think critically and instead to rely on cues and memorization.

1 - Memorization

For decades we’ve been lulled into believing that memorizingand recalling information is learning. And perhaps, in anindustrialized world, recall was all that was necessary. When theindustrial age was ruled by manufacturing and work was repetitive, perhapsremembering the steps in a process and executing them properly was "theskill." We are now in a knowledge economy (and have been for at least 20years!). We pay people to think. We pay people to make decisions,solve problems, innovate and synthesize. In direct opposition to this, oureducational system (and generally our corporate training system) focuses onteaching learners to memorize information so that, with the proper prompt, itcan be recalled; educating/training does not teach us how to useinformation in a variety of ways and circumstances or (heavens!) use it in away that wasn’t taught at all (extrapolating).  

2 - Cramming

Somewhere along the line, we have lured young learners intobelieving that “cramming” is a proper methodology for learning. Duringexam week at colleges, the libraries and dining halls stay open around theclock to accommodate the learners who are staying up around the clock studying– this only reinforces the idea that the last-push to learn is a crucial time.

Typically young people prepare for a test or exam the day beforethe exam – which means that they are simply working from short term memory,which generally is good enough if the measure of one’s learning is being ableto spot the right answer on a multiple-choice test - but not enough if weexpect them to use that knowledge "out in the real world."

Real-world application is built from learning over multipleexposures to a concept or process, not a cursory review of the keypoints. 

3 - Testing

Thanks to the introduction of Scantron Bubble Sheets in the50's and 60's - everything became a multiple-choice test. The bubble sheetswere extremely helpful to teachers and administrators as class sizes grew andrecord-keeping became more stringent.  Unfortunately, they took morethan they gave. This type of testing fueled the usage of the 2"learning" strategies discussed above AND undermined the value of theteacher's input into student's testing.

Prior to a machine grading tests, teachers had to read eachresponse, giving the answer critical thought. Very often they would addcommentary to the grade, rather than simply marking an answer wrong. They mightremind the student where the correct information was found or help them toremember how the concept they got wrong was similar to what they werethinking. Sometimes they would give partial credit if the student was onthe right track but then veered off before their final summation (this is theonly way I passed geometry, believe me).

Prior to a machine grading tests, even when a student got ananswer wrong - they were learning. They had coaching, correction andrefinement from their teacher based on how the teacher graded thetest. Once the Scantron bubble sheet became de rigueur in public schooleducation, students simply received their grade with little to no explanationor intervention.

Unfortunately, I can spot factors that led to the demise of thinking skills (and there may well be more that you are thinking of!) but I am not sure what the remedy should be to reverse the trend. Given class-size and teacher pay, it's not reasonable to take efficiencies away from public school teachers. Instituting "study skills" classes in college is smart - but it's usually an elective and addresses a small population of the students (plus, by the time students are in college, it is remedial - we should be teaching study skills at about age 11 and continue it until the end of high school - see my article on 3 Keys to Ensuring Learning for more on this topic).

I think the rise of AI and machine learning will make theseshortcomings even more apparent in coming years, as all of the "easy tospot" answers will be gobbled up by robots and the critical thinking willbe the domain of humans.

Your thoughts?

Note: This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/3-ways-we-have-destroyed-young-peoples-ability-think-miner-ed-d-

Mea Culpa - Is it really better to ask for forgiveness?

The number of “apology ads” I’ve seen on TV in the last month is astounding. It’s caused me to wonder – as a company, is it really better to ask for forgiveness from your customers than to do the right thing, or behave the right way, to begin with? Is the message we are learning “do your own thing, until you get caught, and then apologize and carry on as usual?”

Wells Fargo is apologizing for violating our trust by opening over 2 million fake accounts in order to hit their sales goals. One of their ads (seen here)   begins by saying “We know the value of trust…” later in the commercial they promise they are “holding ourselves accountable to find and fix issues proactively…” Finally, they declare that they are halting the business process (sales goals for branches) that caused the bad-behavior in the first place.

Facebook apologized for unknowingly allowing the personal information of tens of millions of users to be leaked and/or manipulated by advertising; possibly impacting the 2016 US elections. In their apology ads the company says it will do “more” to make you feel safe and protect your privacy.”

In Uber’s apology ad, the new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi , looks straight in to the camera and says “we have new leadership and a new culture.” He states that as a company, “one of our values is to always do the right thing.” Is that a new thing, which started with you, Dara? Or was that always in place but now you’ll take it seriously?

Apologies that Miss the Mark

Wells Fargo stating it has ended the business process that caused the “problem” is simply addressing the symptom – what is the root cause of an organization that is unethical, views cheating as necessary to maintain one’s job, and has little regard for its customers?

In the case of Facebook and Uber, their ads don’t even really claim responsibility; they simply say “Oops, something went south. We’ll fix it.” And Uber’s “responsible CEO” made no appearance at all – they sent out the new guy to apologize for past transgressions.

Here’s Rolling Stone’s take on the limp apologies:

Hi, America. We were awesome for a long time. Here are some culturally representative shots of people like you smiling and enjoying our services. After repeated denials, we recently had to admit to violating your trust, but the unelucidated bad thing doesn’t have to come between us. We promise: we fixed [all] that. You will now wake up feeling refreshed in 3,2,1…

The Burning Question

What role did leadership play in creating these damages in the first place? And what role could leadership development play to get these companies back on track? Teaching individuals to be better leaders after the fact is not the best approach; what about the future leaders of these companies? When does their development begin? And more broadly, of course, the future leaders of any company, because a scandal or business transgression could indeed happen to any company.

Go Forward

A multi-faceted leadership development curriculum – offered over the long-term, to everyone in the organization – would benefit from a groundswell of workers who understand ethics, risk, team work, communication, self-management and more. If companies are not solely reliant on leaders to set the course, then everyone is a leader. That’s what we need going forward.

Silo’d Learning is Limiting Workplace Learning Potential

For years, possibly decades, we have helped people develop expertise around specific jobs, or how to do their current job better. We've kept them learning "up" a topical trajectory, much like a silo.

What was often neglected was the need to expand knowledge, skills, and abilities overall. What we’ve got now are millions of Americans who are very skilled in a narrow area of expertise, but not well prepared for upper management or executive positions because they lack general business intelligence.

While it might seem obvious to only include salespeople in sales-training, what would be the detriment of including the administrative group that supports the salespeople, or the customer service representatives who support the customer after the sale, or the field service representatives who actually see the customer more frequently than anyone else, or manufacturing who will learn how their product works in the “real world?” Wouldn’t each of them learn more about how to do their job well, and learn more about the business as a whole by participating in a developmental topic that is ancillary to their current work?

Estimates are that by 2030, Baby Boomers will be completely out of the workforce. This presents a call to action and an opportunity, because the generation with the most breadth and depth of work experience will be leaving the workforce. We – as L+D departments and professionals – need to quickly rectify the silos of specialists we’ve created by broadening the role-specific training of the past in order to address the workforce needs of the future.

Our challenge is to develop a new generation of company leaders capable of making well-rounded and well-informed decisions based on their experiences in a multitude of business areas. The focus on job-specific training is a thing of the past. Organizations must focus on developing well-rounded individuals who can take the organization into the future. The future success of our companies depends on the actions we take today to develop our future workforce.

Better Learning Through Interleaving

Interleaving is a largely unheard of technique – outside of neuroscience - which will catapult your learning and training outcomes. The technique has been studied since the late 1990’s but not outside of academia. Still, learning and incorporating the technique will make your training offerings more effective and your learners more productive.

What is it?

Interleaving is a way of learning and studying. Most learning is done in “blocks” – a period of time in which one subject is learned or practiced. Think of high school where each class is roughly an hour and focuses on only one topic (math, history, english, etc.). The typical training catalog is arranged this way, as well. Your organization might offer Negotiation Skills for 4 hours or Beginner Excel for two days. The offering is focused on one specific skill for an intense period of time.

Interleaving, on the other hand, mixes several inter-related skills or topics together. So, rather than learning negotiation skills as a stand-alone topic, those skills would be interleaved with other related topics such as competitive intelligence, writing proposals or understanding profit-margins. One of the keys of interleaving is that the learner is able to see how concepts are related as well as how they differ. This adds to the learner’s ability to conceptualize and think critically, rather than simply relying on rote or working memory.

How Does it Benefit?

Interleaving is hard work. When utilizing interleaving, the brain must constantly assess new information and form a “strategy” for dealing with it. For example, what do I know about my competitor’s offering (competitive intelligence), and how am I able to match or overcome that (negotiation skills)? While the technique is still being studied, it is suspected that it works well in preparing adult learners in the workplace because “work” never comes in a linear, logical or block form. You might change tasks and topics three times in an hour; those tasks may be related or not –the worker needs to be able to discriminate and make correct choices based on how the situation is presented.

Interleaving helps to train the brain to continually focus on searching for different responses, decisions, or actions. While the learning process is more gradual and difficult at first (because there are many different and varied exposures to the content), the increased effort results in longer lasting outcomes.

What’s interesting is that in the short term, it appears that blocking works better. If people study one topic consistently (as one might study for a final exam), they generally do better – in the short term - on a test than those who learned through interleaving.

Again, the only studies that have been done have taken place in academia, but here is an example of the long-term beneficial outcomes of interleaving. In a three-month study (2014) 7th-grade mathematics students learned slope and graph problems were either taught via a blocking strategy or an interleaving strategy. When a test on the topic was conducted immediately following the training, the blocking learners had higher scores. However, one day later, the interleaving students had 25% better scores than the blocking learners and one month later the interleaving students had 76% better scores! Because interleaving doesn’t allow the learner to hold anything in working memory, but instead requires him to constantly retrieve the appropriate approach or response, there is more ability to arrive at a well-reasoned answer and a better test of truly having learned.

How Can You Use Interleaving?

As mentioned earlier, although concentrating on one topic at a time to learn it (blocking) seems effective, it really isn’t because long term understanding and retention suffers. Therefore one must question whether there was actual learning or simply memorization. If your goal is to help your trainees learn, you’ll want to use an interleaving process. Warning: Most companies won’t want to do this because it is a longer and more difficult learning process and the rewards are seen later, as well.

Make Links

The design and development of your curriculum(s) doesn’t need to change at all – simply the process. First, look for links between topics and ideas and then have your learners switch between the topics and ideas during the learning process. For instance, our Teaching Thinking Curriculum does this by linking topics such as Risk, Finance, and Decision Making. While each of those is a distinct topic, there are many areas of overlap. In fact, one doesn’t really make a business decision without considering the risk and the cost or cost/benefit, correct? So why would you teach those topics independent of one another?

Use with Other Learning Strategies

Interleaving isn’t the “miracle” approach to enhanced learning. Terrific outcomes are also achieved through spaced learning, repeated retrieval, practice testing and more. Especially when it comes to critical thinking tasks, judgement requires multiple exposures to problems and situations. Be sure to integrate different types of learning processes in order to maximize the benefit of interleaving.

Integrate Concepts with Real Work

Today’s jobs require people to work on complex tasks with often esoteric outcomes. It’s hard to apply new learning to one’s work when the two occur in separate spheres and the real-world application isn’t immediate. Try to integrate topics to be learned with the work the learner is doing right now. For example, for a course in reading financial reports (cash flow, profit/loss, etc.), rather than simply teaching the concepts with generic examples of the formats, the learners were tasked with bringing the annual report from two of their clients (learners were salespeople). As each type of financial report was taught, the learners looked to real-world examples (that meant something to them) of how to read and interpret those reports.

Ask the Learners to Process

Too often we conclude a training class by reviewing what was covered in the class. Rather than telling the learners what just happened, have them process the concepts themselves. This is easiest to do through a writing activity. You might ask the learners to pause periodically, note what they have learned, link it to something they learned earlier, and align it with their work responsibilities. For instance: I will use my understanding of profit margins and financial risk to thoughtfully reply to a customer’s request for a discount or to confidently walk away from the deal. It’s not about the sale, it’s about the bottom line. The process of writing helps the learner to really think through the concepts just taught and it allows them to go back over their learning in the future to remind themselves of the links they made within the curriculum and between the curriculum and work responsibilities. Interleaving enables your training to be more effective and your learners to be more accomplished and productive.

Why do so Many Companies Get Training Wrong?

Earlier in 2017 I was interviewed by the BBC for an article on workplace training and specifically, why companies get it wrong so often. As one of a few expert sources for the article, my entire response was not included, but I wanted to share it with you here.

WRONG: Cram all the learning in to the shortest amount of time possible

Solution: Mete it Out Over Time

One of the biggest contributors to the lack of training effectiveness is that we simply don’t allow enough time for training. First, companies have cut what used to be an 8-hour training day back to 4 hours, or two hours, in many cases. Sometimes it’s even been turned into a boring PowerPoint self-study (this violates a lot of adult learning principles, but we won’t go there today).

Secondly, in combination with the shorter time allotted for training, we deliver all the content in one “sitting.” While this is a great approach for an overview or introduction to a topic, it never develops into learning and skill. So the first thing we must do to make workplace training better is to mete the content out, over time. Learners need an introductory period, a practice period, a period for reflection and a period for perfection. This process cannot be compressed into 4 hours. The brain doesn’t process new information that way and the body doesn’t develop the muscle memory or finesse it needs to perform a skill this way either. (Here is an interesting article on the benefits of spaced learning in training medical professionals.)

WRONG: Teaching things in "theory"

Solution: Real World Application

This best practice has two angles. The first goes hand-in-hand with the meted content suggested above. If you are going to space the learning out over a period of time, you have the ability to assign real-world activities to the learners. This allows them to put what they’ve learned into practice and develop a better understanding of the concept as well as the muscle memory required to perform it. For example, in a sales training course, if step one is to identify prospects – the assignment should be to return to the next lesson having identified and vetted at least three prospects using the skills taught in lesson one. The assignment after lesson two should be to again start at prospecting and then add step two. This allows the leaners to learn-do-reflect-perfect.

The other angle is to have learners work with real-world concepts during the learning time itself. You could have a training class that teaches learners to read financial statements such as profit and loss, cash flow, etc. in a “vacuum,” or you could have them learn to read these same reports while looking at the annual report for their own company, or their competitor. Rather than learning things in “theory,” have your workers learn the same concepts with real-world benefits.

WRONG: Not including management in the training process

Solution: Management Involvement

Management involvement is crucial for real learning in so many ways. First, it is important that managers understand what their workers are learning so that they can reinforce it (how many of us conduct a manager’s overview or ask for their participation before their workers come to us?). Second managers can assist in the practice/perfection phase of training by allowing their workers extra time to complete their newly learned processes (in other words suspending metrics during the practice phase) and by answering questions or providing coaching. Finally, managers are the best choice for evaluating the true outcomes of training. They are the ones who see if the workers are able to truly implement what they learned on-the-job.

WRONG: Having no real plan for training: who gets trained, in what, and why?

Solution: Make it a Strategy

I can’t decide if this failure is the most damning, or if the way we slice and dice content to cut it back to the most minimal amount of time it will take to transmit it is; so this is either #1 or #2 in terms of what companies do wrong when training their workers. For years now – decades- we have trained people in silos (if you are a salesperson all of your learning will be related to sales, somehow) and we administer training on an as-needed basis. If you are good at what you do, are performing well and aren’t in-line for a promotion – you could go years with no training at all. But in order to develop our workers, and our organizations, training needs to be a strategy. What could we teach someone that would make them that much better of a performer? Some “generic” topics that come to mind are finance, continuous improvement, and project management. There is no person in the workplace that couldn’t benefit from having these three skills; yet, if you aren’t a project manager, you’ll probably never get project management training. Companies are short sighted and tend to compartmentalize training as a “department” rather than utilizing training as a strategy that can make their organization better. If companies developed a strategic plan for employee development – like they do for company initiatives such as product launches or facilities expansion – in no time at all they would reap the rewards of a more capable, productive workforce. What are your thoughts? Why do so many companies get training wrong? You can see the original BBC article here.

How will YOU reinforce the learning, once the training is over?

Exit

The Training Doctor was once shown the door at a client site when our response to the question: How are you going to reinforce this learning once the training is over? was... "That's not our job, that's your manager's jobs."

It was an eye-opening experience to realize that a company requesting training didn't feel responsible for ensuring the training would work or benefit the organization.So before you design or develop any training program, be sure to ask your potential client (external or internal): How will this new knowledge or skill be reinforced on-the-job once the training is over?I

t is important for a business / business unit to take responsibility for the training's success. There is only so much an external consultant or even an internal trainer can do to ensure that people are allowed to practice and master their new skills on-the-job once they leave the training.An extra service you might provide to your client is to create a list of options / ideas to reinforce the training. For instance:

• They might schedule a weekly brown bag lunch check-in at which the newly trained employees could bring up new questions or share tips and tricks that they had learned since the end of the training and the practical application began. As trainers we know that it is not possible to teach everything in a training class and often the learners will discover short-cuts or other methods of working as they've had time to implement their new skills on-the-job; it would be helpful for everyone to know about the short-cuts rather than requiring each individual to figure it out on their own.

• The training department might send out a series of emails which would reinforce some of the key points of the training. For instance, following a coaching class, a series of weekly emails might reinforce each step in the coaching process, such as Week 1: Remember to ask the employee how things are going from their perspective; Week 2: Probe and ask additional questions based on the answer(s) you got to the How is it going query.  Week 3: Praise the things the employee has been doing right since your last coaching conversation, etc.

• Suggest a follow-up check-in two to three weeks after the training (allowing time to practice on-the-job).  At this follow up meeting the trainer would be available to answer questions or provide reinforcement of the key concepts.

• Many times managers do not realize that their employees do not come back "fixed" after the initial training, and don't realize that they have to allow for time for practice on-the-job, so a simple suggested schedule for managers which identifies the time needed to practice (such as week 1 allow one hour of practice, week two allow 30 minutes of practice, etc. ) might be all that is needed to see success soar. This approach not only reinforces what was learned but gives employees permission to practice on the job, knowing that it is supported by management.

Whether or not you provide the suggested reinforcement techniques, the responsibility for reinforcing the new knowledge and skills lies with the managers. Trainees must be given time and permission to practice their new knowledge and skills until they are more competent than they could have been by simply "being trained."

Interview with Will Thalheimer, PhD

Thalheimer (1)

What motivated you to write this book?

I've worried about my own smile sheets (aka response forms, reaction forms, level 1's) for years! I know they're not completely worthless because I got useful feedback when I was a mediocre leadership trainer-feedback that helped me get better.

But I've also seen the research (two meta-analyses covering over 150 scientific studies) showing that smile sheets are NOT correlated with learning results-that is, smile sheets don't tell us anything about learning! I also saw clients-chief learning officers and other learning executives-completely paralyzed by their organizations' smile-sheet results. They knew their training was largely ineffective, but they couldn't get any impetus for change because the smile-sheet results seemed fine. 

So I asked myself, should we throw out our smile sheets or is it possible to improve them? I concluded that organizations would use smile sheets anyway, so we had to try to improve them. I wrote the book after figuring out how smile sheets could be improved.

If you could distill your message down to just one - what would it be?

Smile sheets should (1) draw from the wisdom distilled from the science-of-learning findings, and (2) smile-sheet questions ought to be designed to (2a) support learners in making more precise smile-sheet decisions and (2b) should produce results that are clear and actionable. Too often we use smile sheets to produce a singular score for our courses. "My course is a 4.1!" But these sorts of numerical averages leave everyone wondering what to do. 

How can trainers use this book to assist them in the work that they do?

Organizations, and learning-and-development professionals in particular, can use my book to gain wisdom about the limitations of their current evaluation approaches. They can review almost 30 candidate questions to consider utilizing in their own smile sheets. They can learn how to persuade others in using this radical new approach to smile-sheet design. Finally, they can use the book to give them the confidence and impetus to finally make improvements in their smile-sheet designs-improvements that will enable them to create a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement in terms of their learning designs.

Getting valid feedback is the key to any improvement. My book is designed to help organizations get better feedback on their learning results. 

Do you have a personal motto that you live by?

Be open to improvement. Look for the best sources of information-look to scientific research in particular to enable practical improvements. Be careful. Don't take the research at face value. Instead, understand it in relation to other research sources and, most importantly, utilize the research from a practical perspective. 

Will Thalheimer, PhD, PresidentWork-Learning Research, Inc.

What is the Business Goal for this Training?

It is surprising how much training exists that doesn't have a real connection to the goals of the business. Perhaps these are legacy courses left over from a time when there was a need and organizations are still offering them. But these days you want to ensure that any training that you are asked to develop anew has a clear business goal.

In discussions with the business process owner who is requesting the training, be sure that they can articulate what the expected business outcomes are for the training. Not only does this assure you that they have truly thought through the need for the training that they are requesting, but it also establishes an ROI point for you (which is something else that is seldom targeted in training design).

If a sales manager requests training in negotiations or cross-selling - you can be relatively sure that there is a business outcome expected from that training. If a sales manager instead asks for team building or training on a particular software - dig a little deeper to find out what they believe that training would accomplish for the business / their business unit.

If an operations manager for a manufacturing facility asks for a course in quality control or machine calibration - there is probably a link to the output of that department. If, however s/he asks for forklift safety you may want to investigate how that will positively benefit the department and its deliverables to the organization.

Not only will asking "How does this training link to the business goals of the company / department?" save you time and money by not developing courses that have no real relevance for the business, but you'll be seen as a thoughtful contributor to the business overall rather than an order-taker of training requests.

Train People BEFORE You Hire Them

idea

Latin America and the Caribbean will need about 1.2 million software developers within the next decade, according to growth projections, and yet "official educational institutions" only graduate 1000 coders a year. What to do?

How about starting a training division to train people you'll need in the future? A start-up in Lima Peru did just that. Called Laboratoria, the company began training coders because it could not find qualified personnel for its growing web design business. Last year 1,200 people applied; the company trained and graduated 150. This year they hope to graduate 300 .The training is 9-5 daily, over 5 months. Training is free and 60% of graduates landed entry level jobs upon graduation. (Although Laboriatoria was created from one company's need, graduates are not obligated to go to work for the parent company; what they ARE obligated to do is give back 10% of their earnings for the first three years following graduation, to help continue to fund the free training for others.)

Similarly, Code Camp was started in Charleston, SC because of the growing "Silicon Harbor" of technology companies in the area. Two such company owners grew frustrated with not being able to find the right talent and decided to "grow their own." Classes are now offered Saturdays and in the evenings so working professionals can get the training they need to change or further their careers. There is even a 4-session Kids Camp for kids aged 10 - 14 years - why not get them in the pipeline early?

The next time your Talent or HR department is lamenting the lack of qualified candidates - consider growing your own!

Dare to Compare

Training Magazine and Wilson Learning Worldwide recently completed a survey of 544 learning practitioners, surveying how well the respondents felt the L+D department was achieving its objectives, what modes of training delivery they felt were worthwhile, and whether they were considered a strategic partner of the business or not. The summary categorized L+D organizations as "Strategic," "Emerging," or "Lagging".

Here are some of the interesting results:

Strategic L+D departments are more likely to:

• Speak about L+D as an investment rather than a cost

• Have executives involved in program launches

• Mention learning in the company's annual report

• Take an active role in reviewing L+D initiatives

On-the-job training and formal classroom training were the top 2 preferred delivery methods across all three spectrums. The least effective delivery methods were learning libraries, mobile learning, social media, MOOCs and self-paced printed manuals.

The summary of the article suggests ways that L+D departments can become more strategic. See the article here.

It is definitely worth the read - especially if you'd like your organization to become more strategic.

Which Type of Employee Training is Most Effective?

Cited as the most effective approaches for developing global leaders:

• External academic or leadership development programs

• Experiential learning (such as games, exercises, simulation, role-play, case studies, etc.)

• Traditional classroom-based instructor-led training were

Source: 6th annual Global Leadership Development Survey conducted by Training, AMA, and i4cp

Are Participant Training Materials "Necessary?"

We recently had a lively discussion with a group of trainers regarding this statement: Participant "materials" (workbooks, job aids, infographics, etc.) are "nice to haves" but people rarely use them back on the job. The group unanimously agreed that rarely do participants use these items on the job, and, more often than not, they are left behind "in the classroom."

This lack of respect for training materials is quite detrimental to adult learning for a number of reasons:

Most people are visual learners 

80% of Americans are visual learners, which means they "understand" information better (and retain it longer) if it is presented in a visual manner. If 80% of your audience spoke "in another language" wouldn't you present in that language? And yet, we often completely ignore providing tangible, visual elements that complement our training offerings.

Seven-to-ten days after training, people remember only 10 - 20% of what was taught them in a training class. 

If your "training" consists of providing information, with no reference materials, how can anyone be expected to remember what was taught?  Back on the job, it would be helpful to have a job-aid or infographic to refer to in order to do one's job or refresh one's memory about the proper process / sequence / tasks.

Temporal contiguity

Brain research tells us that it is better to present concepts in both words and pictures than solely in text format. Typically, about three days later, text-only information is recalled at a rate of just 15%, but the same information, when presented in both text and visual (a'la an infographic) is recalled at a whopping 65%!

Muscle memory

Muscle memory is not a memory stored in your muscles, of course, but memories stored in your brain (although its origin is related to physical fitness). Providing workbooks or worksheets in which participants actually work (answer questions, complete diagrams, underline pertinent facts in a case study) aid in retention because the body is also physically involved in the learning process.

Solution?

The "problem" is not that participant's don't see the value in the learning materials you provide, but rather, the problem lies with us trainers who do not show people how to use these materials while they are in the training.  The solution is to utilize the training materials at the time of teaching.  Don't teach a process and then say "Here is a job-aid to take back to your desk," but rather teach the process as participants follow along using their job aid.

The solution to participant materials being "left behind" is to utilize them during the training process so that their usage becomes part of the learner's muscle memory.

Why are we not training managers?

Managers are the most undertrained and under-appreciated employees in corporate  America according to a study conducted by Kelton Research and Root Inc., of 205 Training / HR executives.

Among other findings, the survey respondents report that less than  ¼ of their training budgets, if any, are currently allocated to manager training. 

You can view the full report here.

Marketing Your Training Offerings Through an Internal Conference

If your organization has a “catalog” or prescribed curriculums, a wonderful way to engage with potential attendees is to hold a yearly “internal conference.”

Schedule a day which mirrors a professional development conference and invite all employees to avail themselves of the informative, free training sessions. Establish tracks, such as technology, leadership, service, etc., and within those tracks schedule one-hour previews of the various courses to give potential students a taste of what attending the full-blown offering might be like.

In order to determine what content to highlight, think about the “ah-ha” moments in each class. Impress your internal conference attendees with things they may not know (wow, I need to take this class in order to find out…), interactive and engaging topics (this seems like it will be a fun class to attend), and previews of how their on-the-job performance will be enhanced (I really should learn more about financial reports if I want to move in to management).

As participants leave the preview, ask them to complete an evaluation form, just like you would at a professional conference. On that form ask them if they would like more information about the topic, if they would refer a colleague to take the class (and that person’s contact info), and of course ask them for their own contact information. 

Now you have accumulated a “marketing list” of interested and engaged employees for future class offerings and you’ve also determined what topics are most in-demand in your organization, for the coming year.

Ensure Training Validity with an Advisory Committee

Establish an Advisory Committee

An advisory committee should be created in order to help you determine what training needs to be developed for your organization, and what is a priority.  An advisory committee should be made up of front line workers from across the organization and from all levels, from hourly workers to supervisors.  For example, if you want store managers to conduct new hire training, it's a good idea to have input from store management, supervisors, front-line workers, and back office workers.  They will provide their thoughts on how the training should be delivered and what should be accomplished by the conclusion of it.

An advisory committee should have no more than 13 members, and the membership seats should be rotated regularly.  Larger groups can be harder to facilitate, and you want to be sure everyone has an equal chance to participate in the discussion.  You'll find that you don't have to do as much marketing of the training function when you have 13 ambassadors who return to their work areas every month understanding that they are responsible in part for the success of the organization.

CLO's Reasons for Outsourcing Training

Outsourcing some of your training functions such as instructional design (ahem) and delivery can help reduce the stress of creating and delivering content in an ever-changing environment. But don't take our word for it, here are some comments from CLO's Business Intelligence Board members, when surveyed about why they outsource:

• Headcount reductions force us to seek outside assistance

• There is no time for resources internally to develop training (this is the #1 reasons we hear, at The Training Doctor as well )

• Outsourcing is more cost effective and flexible than hiring

• In-house expertise becomes static and confined to specific areas

• Subject matter expertise that the vendor brings

• The vendor's ability to act as a partner