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.
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Miner: Most of new-hire training is what we consider “follow Joe around” training. This means that you hook a new person up with a more experienced person - follow Joe around and he'll show you how to do your job. Although this is efficient, there are many problems with this style of training. If you have more than one person who is “Joe,” in this case, the training can be different from individual to individual because every trainer is going to emphasize what they think is important or perhaps show shortcuts, or “their way” of doing things which may not be the prescribed way of doing things. So while it is efficient and it doesn't take a formal training process, in the end you can actually have some pretty poorly trained new hires.
One of the things you can do to keep that process in place while making it a little more formal is to create check lists of training so that you have some kind of assurance that everybody's getting the same training process. For instance, in the retail industry there's a lot of turnover. Organizations tend to hire clerks on an individual basis. If you had a new hire training checklist you could at least ensure that everybody was getting the same training on the cash register. For instance you’d show them how to ring a cash sale, how to ring a charge sale, how to run a coupon, how to process a refund – these are a the topics any new hire would need to know, but you could “formalize” the training by prescribing the order of learning from easiest (cash sale) to hardest (refund).
Another way to formalize the training would be to recruit individuals who are interested in training. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people in organizations who love to transmit their knowledge to others and would be happy to do it for free. Recruit those people to serve as mentors or coaches for everybody, not just new hires, but everybody. They can be the go-to person when a new process needs to be created or a process runs into a problem; this person can be the one who figures it out and then trains everyone else in the “new way.”
Another idea would be to make training the responsibility of everybody in the organization. Require everyone to take on new learning and then share it with others. What we often do, as individuals, is figure something out on our own and say, “Oh cool, now I know how to do that,” and we don't ever share it with anybody else. I remember reading about a software company that made it everybody's responsibility to take on new learning to the point where it was in their performance review every year. What did you learn this year and how did you disseminate it to the rest of the organization? So, the employee might run a lunch and learn or they might write something up in the company newsletter.The point is that everyone is learning all the time, and we should formalize a way to share that learning.
T/D: Thank you Dr. Miner, those are great tips in making it everyone's responsibility and sharing the knowledge. Next month we will finalize this interview by focusing on Accessing Employee Training through your local College or University.
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Dr Nanette Miner has been an instructional designer for over two decades. She is President and Managing Consultant for The Training Doctor which specializes in working with subject matter experts to take the knowledge from their heads and design learning in such a way that others can adopt and implement the training immediately. She is also the author of The Accidental Trainer and co-author of Tailored Learning: Designing a Blend that Fits.
Informal Learning comes from ... whom?
Where do you fall?
The 90:9:1 rule suggests that only one in a hundred will start up a blog, create a new thread on a forum or put a video on YouTube. We're not going to see people do things like this at work unless they are seriously incentivized.
On the other hand, nine in every hundred will keep the conversation going and contribute in some way with a comment or refinement. That is more realistically where we should expect to see user-generated content emerging in the workplace - as thousands of short contributions to hundreds of conversations. With powerful search facilities on a corporate intranet, these can provide the answers to the everyday questions of the remaining 90%.
Excerpted from Clive on Learning blog
http://tinyurl.com/cc9kwhn
Training Triage
One of the three things that The Training Doctor specializes in is TRAINING TRIAGE; that is, figuring out what is "wrong" with a training program that is currently in place, but does not accomplish its intended goals, and then developing a 'treatment plan' to make return the training program to health.
Bob Pike, in a recent Training Magazine article, noted one of the key elements for why training fails:
"There should be a proper blend of content and process. Too many trainers I've observed focus on one or the other. The key is to focus on both. It is not either content (the right stuff) or process (the right delivery method) - it is both content and process.
Too much information in too short a time equals information overload. As trainers, we may be covering the content but delivering it so fast that it doesn't allow our participants to capture much of it in a useful way. We all need time to process, integrate and apply what we learned. On the other hand, too much focus on process leaves people wondering, 'Where's the beef?' There just isn't enough practical take away value to justify the time and energy each participant is expending - let alone the money the organization is investing in making the training possible."
Much ado about Leadership, er, Management, no, Leadership - what's the difference?
We've seen three articles recently that have taken up the "leadership" vs. "management" controversy and, in particular, the role that training plays in this "battle."
According to Paul Glover, in The Changing Face of Training,
"Statistics show that 50% of all front line managers who are promoted to the next level fail at that new job, and some even return to their previous lower-level positions. They fail because they don't have the training to be a manager instead of a worker. Sure, they may receive training on machinery or processes, but soft skills - the ability to communicate, supervise, and work in a team - get overlooked."
And Sebastian Bailey, President of Mind Gym Inc., says,
"Businesses tend to over-invest in leadership and concentrate on developing leaders but not managers."(HR Magazine, August 2012)
Finally, Michael Leimbach and Barb Taruscio of Wilson Learning, state,
"What's the difference between consistently successful companies and those that fail? To sustain success through good times and bad takes more than good products and marketing and finances - these are necessary but not sufficient. To pull these elements together and outperform the competition year after year requires great leadership. This is the one asset that makes all the difference: leaders with imagination, know-how, and highly effective management skills to encourage, inspire, and elicit high performance from a well-trained workforce." (Training Magazine, July / August 2012)
These authors go on to describe successful companies as driven by leaders "who have both Form (the skill and knowledge to produce results) and Essence (character to inspire and lead with values and clarity of purpose).
Perhaps it's time to assess your management (or leadership) development curriculum and see which way you lean? It seems it is not simply a matter of semantics. Each of the quoted authors makes a distinct point that management and leadership require different skills. Does one encompass the other? Can one learn one without the other? Is it possible to be a successful company with one set of skills but lacking in the other? All good questions to ask of your organization's current leadership and to contemplate when dissecting your current management / leadership curriculum.
This just in!
Recent findings released by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in the United Kingdom reveal that three-quarters of employers report a lack of leadership and management skills in their organizations. Bill Willmott, head of public policy at CIPD states, as a potential cause, "Too many employees are promoted into people management roles because they have good technical skills, then receive inadequate training and have little idea of how their behavior affects others."
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.
Training for the Taking
It's odd, really, for an instructional design firm, we are all-for not reinventing the wheel. If there is training already "out there" and it fufills your need - even if you need to augment it a bit - why not take advantage of someone else's hard (and brilliant) work?
Here are some websites we've sourced recently, where you can find training offerings from A (Audacity) to Z (Zbrush).
Educator.com - From physics to music theory, Educator bills itself as having the most comprehensive math and science content on the web. Pay monthly or annually for discount.
Edudemic.com - Lots of free resources and links to free resources. Geared toward teachers but their ideas and findings are really universal to anyone trying to be the best educator they can be.
Lynda.com - A video-based, on-demand, portal for software and business skills. Pay monthly or annually for discount. Free trial.
KhanAcademy.org - Their tag line says it all, "Learn almost anything for free." The topics are more academically inclined and so would be ideal for assisting your workers with basic skills such as mathematics or sciences. Also video based in a really engaging delivery format.
And for some interesting factoids that you can use as icebreakers, energizers or to amuse, check out the Smithsonian's new website: www.SeriouslyAmazing.com.
Quotable: Sebastian Bailey
Businesses tend to over-invest in leadership and concentrate on developing leaders but not managers.
Quotable: Sebastian Bailey, President, The Mind Gym, Inc.
Quotable: Jessica Matthews
You are only done learning when you've decided that you're done learning.
Quotable: Jessica Mathews, CEO and co-founder of SOccket
US Government helping young people get prepared with employable skills
The US Department of Labor will award a total of $2 billion over the next four years through the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program. Grants will support the development and improvement of post-secondary programs of two years or less that use evidence-based or innovative strategies to prepare students for successful careers in growing and emerging industries.
Textbooks reduced to 140 characters (kidding, but interesting article)
A study released this month from Michigan State University discovered that courses that engage students on Twitter may actually see higher interaction and better grades. In the report, "Twitteracy: Tweeting as a New Literary Practice," Christine Greenhow, a Michigan State professor and co-author of the study, found that students who were actively engaging with classmates and the instructor on Twitter were more interested in the course material-and ultimately received higher grades.
“The students get more engaged because they feel it is connected to something real, that it's not just learning for the sake of learning," Greenhow said in a press release. "It feels authentic to them."
By integrating Twitter in her English courses, and through her research, Greenhow, and her collaborator, Michigan State professor Benjamin Gleason, found that students seemed to engage more with one another on Twitter than in the classroom. Greenhow and Gleason concluded in the study that students who use Twitter for academic reasons gain the ability to write succinctly, stay up to date on current research, and also benefit from connecting with academic experts directly.
"Our synthesis suggests that students and teachers might benefit when Twitter is used as a 'backchannel' for communication within or between classes," the authors wrote. "Instructors and students can use Twitter to ask and answer questions, brainstorm, focus or extend in-class discussions, help students connect, collaboratively generate information, and learn concise writing styles."
See the whole article here.
Spicing Up Your Classroom Training - an interview with Matthea Marquart
T/D: We're very excited to talk to you about Spicing Up Your Classroom Training - what is the rationale for spicing up classroom training with interactive activities?
Marquart: The ultimate goal of training is to change behavior. In order to change behavior you need to give your learners an understanding of what new skills you want them to apply. Then you want to support them in being able to practice applying those new skills. Just knowing information is not enough. For example, I know that I need to exercise several times a week, but that doesn't translate into my always doing it.
When you think about that concept with classroom training you know that you really need to support the learner and appeal to all the different learning styles because not everyone learns the same way. When you want to spice up classroom training you want to increase their motivation to learn and their engagement. You want to make sure that they're actually awake, you want to make sure they're paying attention and really support the learners by chunking information into manageable pieces that they can get their heads around. All of that makes spicing up classroom training with interactive activities really important rather than something that's kind of fun to do.
T/D: Well said!. For the trainers who don't have a lot of time to re-write their workshops, could you share some quick ways to spice up training? Usually they use a basic PowerPoint presentation - how can they spice those up?
Marquart: That’s a great question. There’s nothing wrong with a PowerPoint presentation as a supplemental aid to training.. But when that's the whole training - you lower the lights for a long PowerPoint presentation and suddenly everyone goes to sleep or zones out, they're not going to learn the information that you want them to learn.
If you don’t have a lot of time to completely change the whole thing, work with those PowerPoint presentations and print out the slides. If you create several sets of them, you can do a number of different interactive activities. For example, you could take the slides, tape them up to the walls and put blank flip chart paper underneath the slides. Then just let everyone go ahead and read the slides on their own and react by writing questions or comments underneath the flipchart paper. Then you as a facilitator can go work with those comments and questions and that really gets people a little bit more in-depth into the content.
You could also break into groups and give each of them a set of the slides along with a question sheet so that they can do a scavenger hunt for information within the slides. Or you could give sections of the presentation to different groups so that they can teach parts of the presentation to the whole group. Another option would be to give them sections that are jumbled and ask them to put them in order. That really gets folks focusing on new information and really paying attention to the content, rather than just zoning out while someone in the front of the room goes through the material for them.
T/D: They get active instead of passive - that's great.
Marquart: Exactly, we want them to apply the content on the job so getting them to physically work with the ideas and process them cognitively is really important
T/D: When management or subject matter experts insist on giving lectures rather than facilitating they just want to get up there and talk. What are some quick and easy ways that we can help them to get their lectures more interactive?
Marquart: Great question. Sometimes people really believe in lectures, but we've got the same risks where people stop paying attention. That means we're not meeting our goals of changing behavior. What you can do is work with that subject matter, expert or management to turn a giant lecture into a series of mini-lectures by building in pauses for discussion.
If you build in pauses for discussion you can do things such as a “think, pair, share” where you ask a question and have everyone think about the answer silently for 30 seconds or 60 seconds. Then have them partner with someone next to them and discuss it. Then you've got two points where people are thinking about the question. Then if you have a couple of people share it with the large group you've got three points at which people think about the question and they're actively working with the information rather than passively sitting there.
When you break those large lectures into a series of very short lectures you can create visual aids for the main points in those chunks. For example, simple things are if you come up with three main points for a section of a lecture just do a quick triangle and write those three points at the points of the triangle. Or, if it's five points you could do a star or a hand, four points you could do a box sectioned into four. If it's points that build on each other you could draw a little staircase so you can see that they build on each other. That helps people who need a visual aid understand the concept a little bit better and it'll also increase the likelihood that they can retain the information. If they remember what the information is – then we increase the likelihood that they can apply it.
If you're already doing a good job of building interactions, but the monotony starts to creep in, you run the risk of people not paying attention. You can use movement to get the energy up.
Play games to get people into pairs. For example, if they have cards that have a match somewhere in the room then they have to mingle and talk to other people in order to find their partner to discuss a question with. If you want to do something pretty quick, you could say, stand up and find a partner who's on the opposite side of the room from you..
One thing that I like to do is have people stand back-to-back rather than facing each other so they don't have the distraction of looking at another person just yet. They’re standing back to back when I ask a question, then I have them take a couple of deep breaths and think about the answer and only turn around when they're ready to answer the question and discuss it with their partner. That serves the purpose of getting people up and moving, getting them actually thinking about the question. Sometimes people just need to breathe a little bit to get their energy up. That is a very quick and easy way to get people doing the same pair discussion but in a way that adds a little bit of variety.
If it's group discussions that are getting a little bit monotonous, write flip charts with questions ahead of time and place them around the room so they're already posted. If they're placed around the room away from where people are sitting then people actually have to stand up and move over to where the flip charts are to do the question discussion. That is going to make them get their blood going, shake them up a little bit so that they're not just sitting there. That also adds a little bit of variety as well, even if it's still the same concept of pair or group discussions. Changing up a little bit will give it a feel of having a lot of variety.
T/D: These are wonderful, easy ideas to implement without having to change your design at all. Thank you so much! Do you have any last tidbits you'd like to share to help us spice up classroom training?
Marquart: I definitely want to encourage people to keep their eyes on the ultimate goal of changing behavior. So any kind of spicing up that we do shouldn't be just for laughs or just to have a little bit of fun, we've got to keep in mind that we want people to apply their new skills on the job. Everything should be related to doing that. There really is a strong rationale and purpose to spicing up those classroom trainings.
Matthea Marquart is the Director of Training from BELL - Building Educated Leaders for Life. She has written many training-related articles and a dozen have been published in T&D Magazine, Training Magazine's web edition and Learn Magazine. She has been recognized by Training Magazine as a young trainer to watch - an honor recognizing accomplished leaders in the training field. Along with being a member of the American Society of Training and Development she was also a past President of the National Organization for Women and has been a volunteer teacher in the New York school system. You can contact her mattheamarquart@gmail.com.
Tips for online learning
A recent Edudemic article titled 20+ Tips from the Most Effective Online Teachers provides a wealth of good information, not only for those who are teaching online, but also for those organizations that are considering offering courses online. For all the business factors that make distance learning or virtual learning a plus - there are some weighty considerations as well.
We highly recommend reading the full article - it will really give you something to think about. If you don't have time - here are a few of the things we consider to be "gems" in the article:
What the students can teach each other is just as important as what the instructor teaches
Online does not mean easy
Online courses take much more time to develop and facilitate than classroom courses
Being an online educator is more a life style than an occupation
Be proactive about course management
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
Quotable: Michael Rosenthal
For the most part, adults learn skills through action and reflection. One can't learn to swim by simply reading a book or attending a lecture, despite the presenter's mastery of language, PowerPoint, or multimedia. Instead, the learner has to get in the water and practice. They refine their breathing and strokes by experiencing and correcting for coughing, sinking, and inefficiency. The same holds true for amost any skill improvement - it's how we learn.
Quotable: Michael Rosenthal, Managing Partner of Consensus
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.
Don't forget to cut of the ends of the ham!
Are you familiar with the story of the woman who, for years, cut off the ends of her ham before baking? When her daughter asked her why, she replied, "That's what MY mother always did." When the granddaughter asked the grandmother why she cut the ends off the ham, the grandmother replied, "Because my pan was too small to fit a large ham." <insert chuckle here>
Seems we have experienced the same phenomenon in e-Learning. We've been forced, all these decades, to create "click next to continue" e-Learning because of constraints of Flash and the fact that the scroll wheel on the mouse had not yet been invented.
Now, with the advent of "drag your finger down," technology, the format of e-Learning is ready to be set free from its 800 x 600 box.I
nteresting insight here - quick read.
Educational achievement in the US goes down
The US ranked fourth-worst among 29 developed countries for children obtaining a higher level of education than their parents, According to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
In the US, only 21.6% of those 25 - 34 years old achieved a higher level of education than their parents. That compares to the OECD average of 36.8%.
Source: WSJ.com
We are obsessed with time - let's embrace that
Apparently we are obsessed with time - how to save it, how not to waste it.
Just this week we saw two new book titles:T weet this! Manage your Twitter account in 30 minutes a day or less, and Learn Marketing with Social Media in 7 Days
Both books immediately grabbed our attention. Wow! That sounds easy! quick! do-able!
Sooooo what's the lesson we can learn from this?
Answer: What a great way to market our training! Don't just title your class "PowerPoint for Beginners," name it "Be a PowerPoint Pro by Tomorrow!" Instead of "Executive Coaching Conversations," name it "Quick Hit Feedback Tips for Unbeatable Performance."