The Difference Between Education, Training, and Learning
In our 30 years of consulting to organizations both big and small – it has become very apparent that most workplace training fails for one fundamental reason…
People don’t “get” the difference between education, training, and learning.
As an expert in the field, we often speak at industry conferences and always start with this distinction.
It is amazing to hear many people in the audience exclaim “ohhhh.”
Here is the distinction:
Education is something we’ve all experienced.
It is formal. It is typically done in large groups.
It is mostly a one-way flow of information.
It’s usually an expert imparting knowledge - which often takes the form of facts, rules, or underlying theories.
At the end of education we expect people to “know stuff.”
Training is more outcome based.
At the end of training you are expected to be able to do something or to behave in a certain way.
And training is dependent on education because you often cannot do new things without understanding certain facts or rules.
For instance, you can’t hit a golf ball with accuracy unless you understand how your body position changes the trajectory.
But above and beyond that – there are many different techniques for hitting a golf ball …which can be learned through training.
Finally, learning is achieved when you have internalized something.
It is the point where somebody says “how do you do that?” and you don’t even know.
You forget what it was like to be a beginner.
You forget what the steps are – you just do it.
So if we want to get to learning – which we do – how is that accomplished?
Three ways: experience, spaced learning, and reflection.
First Experience – not all learning is done in the classroom or in a formal, prescribed setting, right? Think of all the things you’ve learned in your life. A well-known example is teaching a child not to touch a hot stove. Rarely do any of us actually teach that. If we were to educate the child we’d say “don’t touch that stove, it’s hot!” or “be careful, you’ll get hurt” or the simple NO!
But none of those words mean anything.
Inevitably we all touch a hot stove and IMMEDIATELY learn what we’ve been “taught” but didn’t internalize.
So – if you truly want someone to learn something – they have to experience it.
Next, spaced learning or practice.
Think about when you learned to ride a bike or drive a car.
You didn’t take a class and then miraculously know how to do it.
You practiced over and over – repetition, yes, but also - you practiced over the course of many days or weeks - - spaced practice.
We simply do not learn something once, and change our behavior or our capabilities immediately.
And third: reflection.
Reflection is something only an adult human can do.
Have you ever punished your child by saying “go to your room and think about what you’ve done.” That is futile. They can’t do it.
But you know that internal monologue you have running in your head… as you drive or when you’re in the shower …where you’re constantly reflecting on what has happened and whether you were satisfied with the outcome or not? That’s reflection.
In order to learn - people need time to reflect.
Sadly, we rarely allow for that in the workplace.
We put people into 2 hour or 4 hour training classes and then release them back to their jobs where they get inundated with new and urgent things… and that’s the end of that.
And then we wonder why people don’t change their behavior … despite the fact that we provided them “training.”
So - to reiterate:
Education, training and learning are different.
When people get to the point of having learned – they have internalized the content.
They know what they are doing…
why they are doing it…
when they should do it…
and how their behavior might have to change based on changing circumstances.
Ethics, Leadership, Volkswagen - case study
Periodically, The Training Doctor releases case studies used in our Teaching Thinking Curriculum.Since we want everyone to improve their thinking skills - not just those who are enabled to do so through their employer-sponsored training - we offer these case studies for use in your personal development, corporate or higher ed classrooms.
In the Volkswagen case study, you'll be able to discuss and dissect concepts around:
Ethics
Leadership
Decision making
Stakeholders
In September of 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accused the automaker of installing engine control unit (ECU) software in its diesel cars (beginning in 2008). The software worked as a "defeat device," allowing VW models to avoid violating the Clean Air Act by sensing when the cars were being subject to emissions testing, enabling emissions controls, and thereby enabling VW brand cars to pass inspection.
However, during normal driving conditions, emission control software was shut off in order to attain greater fuel economy and additional power, resulting in as much as 40 times more pollution than allowed by law. Eventually, VW admitted that the sensing device was installed in approximately 11 million vehicles in both the US and Canada.
Learn more here and develop your thinking skills by using the discussion questions posed at the end of the case study.
Update: March 2019. VW has been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with securities fraud to the tune of $13 billion.
Interview with Learning Expert: Will Thalheimer
Measuring Learning Results
T/D: You've written a research in practice report called Measuring Learning Results which is an understanding of learning and focusing on measurement. Can you tell us more about that?
Thalheimer: Over the years I've been immersed in learning and looking at the research on learning. One of the things I noticed in our field is that there are some leverage points - things that affect the whole field, things that drive us to do what we do. One of those is measurement. How we measure affects how we practice instructional design. So I'll share with you a couple of things that I found. One thing is that smile sheets aren't good enough.
T/D: Right, don't we know that at a gut level?
Thalheimer: We may know it at a gut level, but we keep doing it. I did some research with the e-learning Guild and we looked at how it's the most popular method, after completion rate, for an e-learning program. So they've done like a research meta-analysis on this, and they found that smile sheet ratings don't even correlate with learning results.
T/D: Interesting.
Thalheimer: They correlated like 0.09 - which is…
T/D: Negligible.
Thalheimer: Negligible. Smile sheets don't correlate with on the job performance either.
T/D: What does your opinion have to do with your performance? Nothing.
Thalheimer: Right, so that's intriguing. So one of the things we're trying to do when we measure stuff is to get better. There are really three reasons that you might want to measure learning - one is to support learning, to give the learners feedback. The other thing is to improve the learning interventions we create. So improve our learning designs. The third thing is to prove our results to our organization; our certification, grading, that kind of thing. So three main reasons there. If we're going to improve our learning designs one of the things that we need to do is make sure that our learning metrics are predictive of people's actual performance. If our smile sheets aren’t predictive, then they're no good at doing that, they're no good at giving us good information.
I've been playing with trying to improve my own smile sheet so I'm going to recommend a couple of things. One - let's not ask people just overall questions. Let's put in some real learning points that we wanted to get across, because people aren't very good at remembering everything after a session, right? So if you ask them in general did you like it you're going to get general responses. Instead; this is one of the learning points that we talked about, how valuable was that to you?
Then I ask them - what's the likelihood that you're going to use this within the next two weeks? I have from a zero to 100% in 10% increments.
T/D: That's brilliant.
Thalheimer: I also ask them - what's the probability in the next two weeks that you'll share this with one of your co-workers? I also really focus on the open ended comments. I find that those are really some of the most valuable feedback that you can get to improve your course. I've gotten a lot of bad feedback too, but I've gotten some really good feedback on smile sheets that has told me - you really need to improve that exercise. Or, have more stuff going on in the afternoon that's fun because people were tired - stuff like that. Okay, you hear that over and over - you better change it.
Thalheimer: Another thing I do with smile sheets is I also like to follow up two weeks later. I follow up and I do a couple of interesting things. One is I ask the same question on the same six point scale about how valuable you thought the training was. Now they've gone back to the work place. They now really know how valuable it is. So it gives a better anchoring.
I’ve learned a couple of other things from looking at measurement from a learning fundamental standpoint. One thing is, if we measure learning right at the end of learning, what is it we are measuring? We're measuring the learning intervention’s ability to create understanding. Which is fine, that's good, but we're not measuring the learning intervention’s ability to minimize forgetting. You have a full day session or you have an e-learning program and you measure people right away - everything is top of mind.
T/D: You should be able to recall it.
Thalheimer: You can easily recall it and not only that, but you feel confident that you can recall it. So that's a really biased way to get information. That's one of the reasons that make it a bad proxy for your ability to remember it on the job.The final mistake we make is to measure something in the same context that people learned it. That context is going to remind them of what they learned and because of that they're going to get better results than if we measured them in a different context. So we need to do one of two things - we either need to know that our results are biased because we're in the same context that they learned in. Or we need to change the context and make it more like the real world context so that it's more realistic. It's more predictive of that real world environment.
T/D: Great points! Thank you Will.
Will Thalheimer founded Work-Learning Research which is a consulting practice that helps clients build more effective learning interventions. He’s been in the learning and performance field since 1985. His professional focus is on bridging the gap between the research side and the practice side
The Key to Outstanding Learning Outcomes: Design Learning Processes
Designing training programs can be an arduous process if you take on the responsibility for designing all the content yourself. You can lighten your load and also achieve a much greater learning outcome by designing learning processes rather than learning content.
In this article we will share three ways to design learning processes.
1. Use real work.
Learners prefer to accomplish real work while they are in the learning process. So rather than create a contrived situation or a case study scenario that is “representative” of real life, instead have the learners work on real work tasks. For instance, a financial services firm wanted to teach its sales people to read financial statements in order to find cross-selling opportunities in their current client-base. Rather than teach the sales people how to read “generic” financial statements and then leave them to transfer that knowledge and skill to their own client's financial statements, the learning session required them to bring the annual report from two of their current clients. While they learned to read a financial statement (such as a cash flow statement or a profit and loss statement) the learners were working and reviewing the actual financial statements of their own clients. This not only resulted in a better understanding of the learning but it also resulted in the learners being able to have actionable findings be the end of the training class.
2. Create the learning in real time.
Rather than teach your learners a new concept or skill in a large block of time and then expect them to be able to transfer all of that information to their real work responsibilities, break the training up into smaller, actionable learning objectives and on-the-job tasks. That will allow them to implement their new knowledge and skills in smaller chunks and result in more successful implementation on the job.
For example, a sales organization was training their sales people to listen for cues from prospects to better gauge if they could ask for an appointment or not. After a period of time in the classroom, in which the sales people/learners learned the 5 types of responses which would either open a door for them or not, they were then given an hour to return to their desks and make up to 10 phone calls from their personal prospect list; making notes about types of conversations they had and whether they were able to secure an appointment or not. This approach not only allowed the salespeople to accomplish some real work during the training process, but also created a rich discussion upon returning to the training room because they each had real-world experience implementing their new skills and were able to compare and contrast their outcomes and ask additional questions of the instructor.
If they had simply completed the training and then returned to the job to (attempt to) implement what they had learned, when would they have ever had those rich discussions that serve to cement the learning for adults?
3. Have the learners contribute the content.
A third sales organization wanted to teach overcoming objections in relation to a very complex product that their sales people sold. Rather than try to anticipate all the objections and give the sales people pat answers in reply, the training was designed to first solicit the “5 toughest objection you've encountered when attempting to sell xyz” and then a game was created, dividing the larger group into 3 teams and giving each team the opportunity to craft an appropriate rebuttal to the objection.
The learning process went like this
Team A stated an objection to Team B~Team B had a period of time to craft an appropriate response~Team C had the opportunity to challenge Team B's response~Team A chose what they thought to be the best response and awarded a point to either Team B or Team C accordingly.
This learning process continued in a round-robin style, with Team B next sharing an objection, Team C getting the first opportunity to reply, and Team A being given the opportunity to “challenge” team C’s response, until all of the 15 toughest objections in regard to that topic had been addressed.
This process allowed the learners to share their real-world problems and to get the best and the brightest to assist them with being better prepared the next time they heard that objection.
The next time you are attempting to design learning content take a step back and see if instead you are able to design a learning process that better assists the learners in working with and assimilating that content.
Learning processes can often lead to greater learning outcomes because the learners are more engaged with the content, identify with it more clearly, and have less trouble transferring what they learned in the classroom to what they do on the job. An added bonus, from a logistical standpoint, is that designing a learning process requires much less updating in the future should the content itself change.
Interview with an Expert: Susan Boyd
How to Make Learning Stick in Online Courses
T/D: Susan, why is there the perception that e-learning doesn't stick and what can we do about it?
Boyd: I think there are a variety of challenges that can cause an e-learning program to fail. One in particular would be technology barriers which result in the trainee/learner not having the proper access to get to the course. Often a trainee/learner gets to the course only to find the content is really not pertinent to their job needs or find they have to go through 100 page turning screens just to find a small nugget of content that is pertinent. It’s quite possible the training will not stick because it's almost as though we're hiding the forest with the trees. Trainees are not getting the overall picture.
Some trainees/learners really just want to get through the content thinking the ultimate purpose to e-learning is to get to the end. Many are only looking to find the “next” button and continue to push it until it’s at the end of the session.
T/D: What are some tips that can make this better? Are your tips coming from the perspective of instructional designers who are the ones who create the training or are there tips for us as learners?
Boyd: Most of my tips have to do with content - I think that's the instructor and designer. How to break up the content into chunks of learning, how to make it as job specific as possible. Try to give the learner control of the content, make it interactive - those are things that instructional designers can do.
Preparing the learners and preparing the managers are also really key. Many managers thought e-learning was just this magic button people push on their computer and, through osmosis, people would instantly learn the topic. Managers don’t often invest enough time in following through: Did people do it? Do they understand it? And are they applying it?
The key thing for the learners is to ensure, they can access it. We have a generation of learners today that are more internet savvy - so that's wonderful. But their computers at home are typically better than their computers in the office.
We need to make sure we're preparing them by whatever wizards they need to test their system. Whether it's a webinar they're going to attend or it's how to get to the learning management system to enroll in the online course. It needs to be made as easy as possible. Maybe some frequently asked questions, or getting started guides are helpful.
T/D: That’s not as much making the learning stick as making the environment more accessible for the learning to stick.
Boyd: Right. Learning can't stick if you can't get to the course. Good point. I look at this as a multi-faceted problem. Part of it is the content design with the instructional design; part is working with the learners; part is working with the managers - providing them the right support material for what they need to do.
In terms of making learning stick, it’s important to make it real world. People can relate to it and find the information in the course, but can also find it outside the course. If there's a reference card or frequently asked question which can only be found in the course, that becomes the challenge because these are the types of things people need to access outside the course. So there ought to be a way that they know where to find those same types of online references.
T/D: What tips do we have for training designers then?
Boyd: I think it's engaging and having the learning relate to something - hopefully it's a real world example. Making some connection ia key part of it. Using graphics and pictures - for example in safety courses - I worked with one client and the pictures we use are pictures of people on the factory line. This particular client is a manufacturing company and there are examples of them where something is unsafe. Maybe they're not wearing the proper protective equipment or there's a tripping hazard. You're taking these real pictures and saying, what's wrong?
T/D: That's fun!
Boyd: Or saying, there are six things wrong with this picture, can you define them or click them. In that case defining them sometimes is actually click in the area where you think there's a problem. So it is forcing the learner to do something – we want the learners to do more than click on the “next” button.
TD: What I hear you saying, is in order to make e-learning stick, you have to understand how the learner is going to use the content and support them through the process. It's about managing the manager's expectations on how the learning will be used or what the end result of the learning is. Then designing it so that it's mentally stimulating and engaging for the participants, which is a design process. It's pulling the learning from the participants which is what we normally do in the classroom, but we don't think it can be done online in my estimation.
Boyd: That's the challenge. E-learning was supposed to be able to get the right content to the right person at the right time. They were equations that we had trouble with in the classroom - we could never deal with the right place and time - e-learning kind of takes away that barrier. But we're still struggling with the content.
The design of the content has to understand the environment in which the content is going to be used.
T/D: Thank you Susan, The most powerful thing you said to me today was that when we take the learners out of the equation, we design bad e-learning. That's really powerful because I think too often we think of e-learning as the 'e' part and we have to start thinking about it as the 'learning' part.
= = = = = =
Susan Boyd has over 30 years' experience in training and computer education, with extensive experience in planning and managing computer training projects. She has directed and participated in all phases of the projects including needs analysis, course development, train the trainers, course delivery and follow-up. Susan has developed and delivered training in a variety of formats including instructor-led classroom, virtual training sessions using a webinar, and online asynchronous e-learning courses. You can learn more about Susan and contact her at www.susan-boyd.com
Training Triage – Pick One
One of the things The Training Doctor specializes in is TRAINING TRIAGE - that is - why doesn't training work? Throughout our 20+ years in business, we've discovered the answers to this question. This month, we share with you one of the reasons:
PICK ONE:
Very often, especially when teaching a psychomotor skill (how to manipulate something) there is more than one way to complete the task. For instance, when copying text from a Word document in order to insert it somewhere else - one can use the keyboard (Ctrl+C), the ribbon (Home>Copy) or right click and choose from the drop-down-menu. While the variety of options makes for a very user-friendly software it does NOT make it learner-friendly. When something is new to an individual, it must be taught in one way and one way only; offering multiple techniques only leads to confusion and a lack of mastery of any one.
Two solutions for solving this common problem are:
Officially choose the ONE way to be taught and
Document the one way in your learning materials - both facilitator materials and participant materials.
The latter solution is particularly important because we all have our "favorite way" of doing something, so it is imperative that all trainers understand, that for the sake of learning, the ONLY way that can be taught is the documented way. It is OK for the trainer to say "There is another way of completing this task, and once you have mastered THIS way, we can teach you the others," but do NOT allow them to say "I know it says XYZ in your participant guide, but let me show you an easier way."
Imagine that you had three driver's ed instructors when you were learning to drive - one in the front seat and two in the back seat all shouting out different ways to approach an intersection. Would you have mastered any of them? Would you have remembered any one of them? The key to efficient learning is to teach only one way. The others will come on-the-job through informal learning, or can be documented in an appendix for the 'advanced' learner.
Surely They Don’t Mean the Company Party!
The most time-wasting learning and development activity reported by employees is.... Teambuilding Activities; according to the 2011 National Learning and Development Index conducted by the Australian Institute of Training and Development.
Keep It Suitably Simple
While there is still a need for formally-packaged courses, these are for special occasions, when we or our employers require some formal record of achievement (or at least of participation). In the meantime, there's a job to be done, and that's far better achieved through access to videos, PDFs, forums, blogs and simple web articles. These are much easier to produce than highly-structured e-learning and just as easy to consume. Nothing lasts more than five minutes and the emphasis is strictly on practical application.
Excerpted from Clive on Learning - Clive Shephard's blog. You can read the full text here: ttp://tinyurl.com/cc9kwhn
Bring Your Wii to Work!
Too often, e-learning modules end up being glorified PowerPoint presentations. The learner reads through the information in a linear, beginning-to-end format, and is tested for knowledge retention at the end. As detailed in 5 Gaming Elements for Effective E-Learning (Training Industry Quarterly, Fall 2012), there are five takeaways from video games that can take e-learning to the next level.
Contextualization takes the e-learning out of the void, and puts it into a time and place, such as a scenario or story that provides the back bone for the training.
Curiosity draws the learner into exploring the e-learning module, enticing them to completeness.
Control allows participants to direct their own learning, driving the direction of the training, and causing them to retain more information due to engagement.
Cooperation / Socialization integrates a very popular factor of many online games, removing feelings of isolation and fostering teamwork.
Engagement / Interactivity puts the learners in situations where they are participating in the training from the start, rather than at the end of a module.
And with the growing popularity of BYOD (bring your own device) we could have everyone bring their Wii controller to work! <grin>
Formalize Informal Training in Your Organization
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.
= = = = = = = = =
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.
= = = = = = =
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.
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.
Quotable: Bob Pike
Instructor-led, participant-centered training is about involving participants in every way possible in the learning process. The more participants are involved in the content, the greater the retention and application.
Quotable: Bob Pike, Creative Training Techniuqes
Incentivize your training - a great model
On September 29 a concert was held in New York City's Central Park to bring awareness to worldwide issues such as disease, poverty and lack of drinking water.
The concert was free and 60,000 people attended BUT they had to earn the right to attend. First, they had to register at a website. Then, they had to earn points to get in to a lottery to be awarded the free tickets. They earned points by watching various videos on the issues above and / or then forwarding those important messages to their friends via Facebook or Twitter.
What a GREAT model for making your training viral! Especially when you are constrained by having to disseminate your learning through asynchronous methods (in other words, people will engage in the learning on their own time and schedule). Why not have prizes or awards for completing the training and certain tasks along the way?
If you'd like to read more about the concert, click here
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.
Paying workers to learn? Yes! Great idea!
Now here's a twist - and a good one at that. Okanagan College (British Columbia) is offering free training for retail and food service workers. Upon successful completion the learners get paid $500.
The curriculum includes: exceeding customer expectations; powerful sales systems; productivity and efficiency; product knowledge; effective communication; problem solving; accountability and ownership; and workplace health and safety.
The retail employees will have their own "track" as will the food service workers. There are four days of training (9a - 4p) as well as six hours of self study.
Learners must be presently employed in the industry and have no college degree.
What a win-win-win - the employers get free training provided to their employees (and lots of it! How many organizations give 24 hours of training to retail or food service workers?); the employees get enhanced business knowledge and skills that can be put to use immediately as well as being an important addition to their resume; and the local region has a pool of well-trained individuals which can only help the local economy as a whole.
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
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
Quotable: Donald Kirkpatrick
There is general agreement that the same approach should not be used for appraisals aimed at salary decisions and those aimed at improving performance. But in both approaches, an appraisal of performance IS necessary. The main difference is that performance appraisal looks back, and the training looks ahead.
Quotable: Dr. Donald Kirkpatrick, Professor Emeritus University of Wisconsin and Honorary Chairman of Kirkpatrick Partners