Bravo Texas!
The state of Texas is being proactive about preparing its children for workplace success. Based on a 2005 survey of employers, the state has learned that 39% of high school graduates are unprepared for entry-level jobs and 49% are not academically prepared or skilled to go further than those entry level jobs. In addition, college enrollment is down, which the state recognizes translates directly to lower earnings and fewer skilled workers.
Four years ago the state instituted a Recommended High School Program, which will see its first wave of graduates this fall. The program requires all high schoolers to take 4 years of math and science - which is now a requirement at the state universities and colleges as well. Bravo TX!
ASTD State of the Industry Report
We just finished reading the 32-page ASTD 2010 State of the Industry Report (which is based on 2009 numbers, btw), issued in November, by ASTD. Here are some of the things we found interesting:
Although organizations made many changes in the past year to adapt to the economic environment, they continued to support learning and development for their employees at levels equal to or greater than in past years. <Hooray!>
The average annual expenditure on training, per employee, was $1,081 which is an increase from the year prior, but which is attributable to smaller workforces. Tuition reimbursement continues to be the smallest budget proportion of training budgets <why? it's the least labor intensive and it's reimbursable by the federal government! why don't more companies use tuition reimbursement? We don't get it>.
The ratio of "learning staff" to number of employees is 1:240
Employees enjoy an average of 31.9 hours of formal training per year and the cost of a learning hour is $63.00 (up from $52 the previous year)
The 3 topics in which people are most frequently trained: Professional / industry specific, knowledge / skills, Managerial / supervisory, IT and systems
27.7% of all formal learning hours are available via online delivery.
Training, as a percent of payroll, is 2.14% Training, as a percent of profit, is 10.88% Training budgets spent on external resources: 26.88%
Outsourcing increased to 26.9% of total training budgets (first increase in 4 years)
68% of training is still delivered via instructor (includes classroom, virtual classroom, moderated, etc)
Self-paced, online learning accounts for 22% of learning that is delivered"
Everybody" does Level 1 evaluations and "nobody" thinks they are very effective - 92% of respondents reported they conduct level 1 evaluations while 36% think they are effective.
In our opinion -Things sound rosy!
NOT training costs money too
According to the Chicago Tribune, a Nebraska plumbing company has been fined by OSHA for failing to conduct employee training after the deaths of two workers. Their fine is $94,500!!
Free and low cost training options
We just found this great website: http://www.bizlibrary.com which offers wonderful free and low cost training options. Check out their free Wednesday webinars, coming up:
Jan 12: Redefining eLearning Metrics
Jan 19: Building Bench Strength; Trends in Leadership Development
Why Your Training is Failing
One of the things The Training Doctor specializes in is Training Triage. In other words, we fix sick training. We figure out why it isn't working and then provide solutions to fix it. Over the years we've identified a number of typical reasons why "your" training isn't working. Often it's because it was designed by a subject matter expert - someone who is expert in the content, but who doesn't know how people best learn.
Here are the typical mistakes we see, in no particular order:
There's too much information - it becomes a fire hose of information for the learner who does not know how to apply importance to what is being presented to them.
Example: A software trainer explained the difference between a comma-delimited file and one that was not. This explained how the software worked, but now how the worker was to do his job. Someone could easily do the job without understanding what a comma-delimited file was.
A SME designed the training and it includes all sorts of information that is fascinating to the SME but not necessary to do the job.
Example: A project management course taught a way to manage projects that we had never heard of. Upon further research we found one example of this method in a Harvard Business Journal dated 1991. This was not a 'standard operating method' for project management but it was a nifty nuance that the SME/designer threw in because it fascinated him.
The person designing the training is a SME who doesn't remember what it was like to be new and needing "just the basics." When designing training ask yourself, is my audience in need of 'basic,' 'advanced,' or 'expert?' And design the content accordingly. If you give people too much information at the beginning, they haven't had the opportunity to master the basic skills yet so there is no way they can advance to more difficult work.
Tip: It's often a good idea to design your training and then have someone else review it. Preferably someone who doesn't know the topic at all. They will help you to see the gaps.
You have no idea how you do what you do. This is a constant challenge for subject matter experts. At some point one becomes so expert they can't even explain what they do - it's intrinsic to them and they can't imagine how to explain it, so large parts of "why" and "when" are left out of the training.
Example: An instructional designer was hired to teach a 3 day grad school course in instructional design but jumped from topic to topic without starting at 'step 1' because he really couldn't remember what step one would be for a newbie.
Trainers can't imagine why their audience "doesn't get it." Typically this is because the training doesn't include any practice and no repetition of the content (people rarely understand something simply because you've told it to them once) OR because there is an inadequate learning process applied to the content.
Example: A participant guide designed for a software training class was 70 pages long, single-spaced text. A helpful guide would have included facts, step-action-result tables, practice exercises, problems to solve, etc.
When is a cookbook training?
Rachel Ray has just released a new cookbook titled Look and Cook. The review says:
Packed with 200 never-before-published recipes and 600 four-color photographs. The first 170 recipes have step-by-step instructive color photographs, which makes cooking foolproof. The book also has recipes that are demo'd online in real time videos hosted on foodnetwork.com.
Huh. Sounds like a self-study training manual to us.
Training Magazine's Industry Report
According to Training Magazine’s recent Training Industry Report, 52.8 BILLION dollars were spent on workforce training last year. Yowsa!
Eight hundred and one respondents were polled on everything from the size of their training budget (in dollars) to what they spent their money on, to how much money was allotted to each individual learner.
The results:
Online learning tools and systems far surpassed any other training expenditures. On average, organizations spent slight over $500,000 on tools and technology. The next most popular expenditures were authoring tools and systems and learning management systems (all the same category as above, if you ask us – it appears that organizations are investing in technology to make themselves more efficient in the design and delivery of learning programs).
In terms of budgets, manufacturing organizations have the largest budgets followed closely by government and military organizations. Retail and wholesale organizations have the most paltry budgets.
The amount of money invested in an individual’s learning was determined to be $1,041 – up slightly from last year when it was $1,036. And, on average, workplace learners receive 40 hours of training per year. The topic that is expected to receive the most funding in 2011? Management and supervisory training.
Training, in and of itself, is not worthwhile
Saw this note recently in raining Magazine (Nov / Dec 2010 issue, p 52)
Dr. Robert Brinkeroff said in an interview, "What you do before the training and after the training, accounts for more of whether it works or not, than whether the training itself is any good."
AMEN
Training is simply a moment in time. An opportunity to transfer knowledge and skills. But if those new skills aren't practiced back on the job (what you do after training) or management is not prepared to allow for altered work behaviors - to support and reinforce them (what you do before the training) - then the training, in and of itself, is not linked to any changes in behavior and eventually the new knowledge and skills fritter away.
Does training really help the organization?
We came upon an interesting blog posting from Stephen Gill regarding how easy it is to attribute cause and effect when so many variables can be at play. He cites a book, The Invisibile Gorrilla which analyzes all sorts of "causal relatonships" between behaviors and events that happen at approximately the same time get linked by the human mind. The paragraph, from Stephen, that really caught our attention was this:
Another area where leaders suffer from the "illusion of cause" is in judgments about the value of employee training and development programs. If there is no significant improvement in the performance of employees who go through training, the training is considered ineffective when, in fact, it could be a host of other behaviors and events that are barriers to learning and to learners applying what they learned.
Amen Stephen! See his whole blog posting here: http://stephenjgill.typepad.com/performance_improvement_b/
Worst Training I Ever Attended
During a training session today we were discussing "the worst training I ever attended."
For us, it was a 4-day training course we were auditing for a "training triage" project. In training triage, we help organizations figure out why their training isn't working. In this case there were a number of factors:
The training was designed and delivered by an SME (typically this equals too much information)T
The training was intended to teach people to DO something (psychomotor skills) yet it was all lecture (teaching them 'about' stuff, but not how to 'do' stuff)
The participant guide was 70 pages, single spaced, text. There was absolutely no way to find anything in the guide, if you needed to.
It contained a lot of information that was fascinating to the SME / instructor but made no difference to the learner (for instance, he explained how the tables in the software did their parsing, when really, what the learners needed to know was whether they were to press enter or tab)
They were given a test at the end of the training (which most of them flunked, which is why we were called in to figure out what was going wrong) which asked them to demonstrate what they had just learned (but there was never any practice exercises, so really, taking the test was the first time they had an opportunity to "do" the job)
Finally, there were 4 different trainers teaching the content, but there was no leader guide. So each instructor did it his or her way, teaching what s/he felt was the most important.
What is the worst training YOU'VE ever attended - and why?
Creating Training That Appeals to Teens
We just read an interesting article in a Silicon Valley newspaper about a food service company that staffs boardwalk concessions stands all over the US (20 in total). The company, Whitings Foods, employs 250 young people (ages 16 - 21) in the summer months.
Training is conducted via: YouTube video (launched from the cash register no less!)Text Message, Web Pages
The VP of Human Resources says the key to developing a productive and hospitable workforce is training new employees using high-tech media that teenagers can relate to - such as cell phones and the internet.
Musings on Informal Learning
Recently, we were updating a course we teach for ASTD called Essentials of Adult Learning. It is a 3-session, online, course and the last session is actually about anything BUT adult learning. The last session is called Outside the Boundaries of Adult Learning. One of the topics within this last session is Informal Learning. You know - the notion that learning goes on all the time - whenever learning is needed - not necessarily within a prescribed period of time.
Informal learning used to be a short mention in this course, but we decided to spend more time on it (hence the redesign) because "formal" training is really becoming a dinosaur these days. So, as part of the redesign, we read Jay Cross' EXCELLENT book "Informal Learning" (2007 Pfeiffer). It's a fast, informative and fun read.
Then, something interesting happened - we actually WITNESSED informal learning going on all around us! (You know how you never noticed there were so many [insert your car make and model here] on the road, until you bought one? Same concept.) Overheard in the gym lockerroom:
Two mid- to late-50's women
Woman #1 - Did you fix your washing machine yet?
Woman #2 - Almost. It took forever to figure out how to remove the (garbled) but I went to You Tube and found a video.
Woman #1 - That's what I did last year when I had to fix mine! I found a video on line with step-by-step instructions.
Then... even closer to home...The other day one of our colleagues needed to un-hide some columns in Excel. No clue how to do this. Alone in the office. Nobody on Skype she could ask (Informal learning solution #1). Hmmm how about Ask.com (Informal learning solution #2)? Sure enough, the query: How do I unhide columns in Excel? produced the correct answer in about 12 seconds. The solution was sooo simple and right at her fingertips. She went from problem to problem-solved in under one minute! What if she had had to wait for a training class to learn this? Or... what if she HAD taken a training class where she DID learn this, but had since forgotten? How is formal training the more appropriate answer?
Granted, even a decade ago we could not have been as self-sufficient in terms of finding our own answers. But with the incredible (recent) power of technology and the internet - we trainers really have to stop and consider how crucial our role - and formally designed training programs - really are. And this thought is coming from a 100% instructional design firm! We make our living designing formal training. Go figure...
And the winner is...
The Training Doctor, LLC, offers a $500 scholarship twice per year - for the spring and fall semester. To apply you must be a working professional who is pursuing an advanced degree in Training or Organization Development.
Our winner for the December 2010 award is...nobody!
That's right. Not a single person applied. Boggles the mind, doesn't it?
Don't lose out on free $ for your own education - go to our website NOW and complete your application for the July deadline. Don't worry - we won't lose it between now and then. Good luck!
An adult learning rant (short)
The nice thing about blogs is that you can vent to people who care about the same thing(s) you do.
So here is a short rant on adult learning principles:
We are currently reviewing a handout from an adult learning "guru" (who will remain un-named, obviously). The handout has no visuals, uses a variety of font sizes and colors (although, thankfully, it is all the same font style), has instructions such as "write your answer here" and then allows only one line of empty space, and starts with this exercise:
Assume it is the end of this training class and it has exceeded your expectations. Write a headline for today's paper that expresses how you feel about the class.
Seriously?
GREAT learning (music) video
What a phenomenal learning video.
It's got facts, information, video, music. Check it out. Watch it to the end!
We're losing $$!
Front cover of Training Magazine Nov / Dec declares: Trainers fight for dollars as average salaries plunge $2,334 and budgets are cut.
We haven't read the article yet - have you?
Interview with Training Expert: Tim Richardson
How to Deliver Powerful Presentations with Pizazz:
Tim Richardson: When we first begin to design a training program, I think we need to ask ourselves a some questions: What is it about this topic that's interesting? What is about this topic that's new? What is it about this topic that's fun? What is it about this topic that's serious? When we start answering some of these questions we can say, how can I make this come alive? How can I make it fun? What can I do to add a little jazz or a little pizazz or a little excitement to that?
We’ve all been PowerPointed to death where somebody just does slide after slide after slide of information. That makes a presentation boring. Anything that's a long list of things where a presenter is presenting and reading slides to an audience is a recipe for putting people to sleep. One thing we could do is have a little bit of fun by creating some type of list, like a Top 10 list.
Another thing we could do take some of that dry, dull or boring typed content and turn it into a game. If I were doing a smaller type training session, I might give the audience an opportunity to come up with the questions. They would write down three questions based upon some of the content that we have covered on the front of a Post-It Note. On the back lightly in pencil they would write the answer. I would have them placed on a flip chart. Periodically throughout the training program I would simply pull a Post-It Note off the flip chart, read it and ask for the first person who knew the answer to stand and then I would give them an opportunity to answer the question.
Then I would say something like, “Congratulations, you've won a cheap and highly superficial prize,” and I might toss them a candy bar or something like that. It doesn't really matter if there's a prize or not, just kind of creating a little bit of fun and creating a little bit of energy. There’s a benefit of having the audience write the question, it allows you as the instructor, to judge if learning has occurred or not. You know if they get the answer correct because they came up with the question and the answer. It allows you an additional teaching opportunity to make the learning fun and to do a check-back to make sure that they've gotten the message that you want them to get.
Tim Richardson is a motivational and inspirational speaker. He works with sales and service professionals to show them how to live, create and think "IM RICH!” For more information you can visit www.timrichardson.com.