Train Managers? Naw, they don't need it.

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.

Some survey highlights include:

• 32% of respondents don't feel their company views managers as critical to success (who DO they think is critical, would be The Training Doctor's next question)

• Reducing overhead and making technology upgrades are prioritized over manager training investments (57%, 48% and 28% respectively)

• 69% of respondents believe their organization's senior leaders don't believe there is a strong link between effective manager training and business performance

• 83% of respondents report that less than ¼ of their training budget (if any!) is allocated to manager training

How to Improve Training Recall? S P A C E O U T Learning

Long-term recall is far better when we learn information over several sittings, and any amount of spacing appears to help a lot. The longer we need to remember information, the more the learning should be spaced out.

Source: Chief Learning Officer Magazine, May 2015, Your Brain on Learning

Successful Virtually Delivered Training Is Dependent On...

Many organizations are using virtually delivered training programs due to companies’ widespread geographic locations and the just-in-time nature of delivery that the synchronous platforms allow. Unfortunately, not many organizations are doing it well. 

At a minimum, there are three key components for successful virtually delivered training.  None is more important than another – all must be created, tested, and executed to perfection.  The good news is: all are completely within your control.

Content

Many organizations are moving what used to be delivered in a classroom to an online format.  This requires translating concepts and content into a new format.  The face-to-face class simply cannot be replicated in the online environment, so it is important to make critical decisions about what to keep, what to distribute in another way (such as reading or an e-learning module), and what to deliver in another way (such as on-the-job coaching).

Virtually delivered training, by default, is blended learning.  There is no way around it.  Not everything can be delivered successfully in a synchronous online environment, nor should it be.  For example, reading a case study might be done during 5 minutes in the face to face class, but it is not a good use of online time. Therefore the case study should be read at another time (what to distribute in another way).   Doing some work asynchronously (independently) and some work together, during the online session, is the very definition of blended learning.

Materials

Materials are critical in the online environment.  This include slides, because it is a very visually-oriented delivery medium; Participant Guides, because very often a learner will be the sole individual enrolled in a class at his/her location, and the learner needs some sort of reference material or supporting documentation in order to follow along in the class; and scripted Facilitator Guides to ensure the training achieves the intended learning outcomes while ending in the allotted time (virtual, online training is very tightly timed).

Most especially, when it comes to slides, get rid of the PPT templates, get rid of the bullets, and create visual, engaging “canvases” for creating.

Mastering Technology

Luckily, technology is rather fool-proof these days unless something is done that purposefully interferes with its operation.  Like most physical skills, using technology only gets better with practice.  A best-practice is to always rehearse the delivery one or two days in advance of the scheduled class.  No matter how many times a facilitator has delivered the same session, it’s always a good idea to practice it –in the synchronous environment – to be comfortable with the tools, their location, their execution, and their results (e.g.  does it look better to highlight a particular piece of text, or underline it?).

Creating and re-designing training to be delivered via a virtual technology can be a daunting task. 

There are many details to be aware of and manage.  If you find yourself being overwhelmed, concentrate on these three things and you will more than ensure your success.

Why We Should Ban Cell Phones During Training Classes

Gloria Mark, of the University of California, Irvine, has shown that workers typically attend to a task for about three minutes before switching to something else (usually an electronic communication) and that it takes about 20 minutes to return to the previous task.

Source: Harvard Business Review, June 2015, Conquering Digital Distraction

No, You Cannot Replicate Your F2F Class Online...

What most organizations don't appreciate is that it is impossible to take a classroom-based class and replicate it online as it currently exists. They are two different delivery mediums which require two different instructional design techniques.

Too often organizations simply strive to replicate the classroom experience; so they use the same participant guides, the same slides and the same activities, which fall flat and/or fail to support the learning experience in an online class.

The 4 Learning Outcomes all Training is Trying to Achieve

The Four Levels of Learning

While this month's topic is not directly related to adult learning theory, it is important to understand in terms of designing learning for adults.

Learning progresses "up a ladder" of difficulty from knowledge -which is the easiest way to design and transmit learning - to changed behavior on the job, which is the hardest to achieve through a learning process.

Knowledge is firmly rooted in education.  It involves reading, lectures, and rote memorization.  It is helpful for providing baseline information, such as facts and rules, and is easy to design because it is simply a collection of information. A learner often can partake of knowledge without any professional intervention.

Psychomotor skills are a bit more complex because they involve teaching someone to physically manipulate something such as a cash register or a fork lift.  This type of instruction requires hands-on practice and a skilled instructor to demonstrate or coach appropriate behavior.  This type of training takes longer to design because it includes both information and skill, and it takes longer to teach because an instructor is often required, and practice time should be included.

Proceeding up the ladder of difficulty, critical thinking skills are significantly harder to teach because they require teaching someone to think in a different way. For instance, teaching a loan officer how to determine if someone is eligible for a loan, includes both facts and rules (knowledge) - and applying those to some type of standard -in order to make a decision.  Often, when teaching critical thinking, numerous scenarios must being practiced in order to have confidence that the learner will make the right decision no matter the variable stimuli.

Teaching critical thinking - within itself, can have many degrees of difficulty; from "easy" decision making  - such as whether or not to grant a loan, to life or death decision making such as performing surgery.  This type of learning process requires multiple exposures to information and situations (in other words, it takes longer to teach thinking skills) and is difficult to design in order to ensure that the trainee changes their thinking process permanently.

Finally, ultimately, the goal of training in the workplace is to get people to change their behavior on the job.  This requires actually leaving the training and helping people to transition their new knowledge and skills to their on-the-job responsibilities. That can take a few days to a few months - especially if you're organization intends to do a level three evaluation in order to determine if changed behavior actually has occurred.

Before designing any training program, assess what your desired outcome is (from the four categories above) and invest the appropriate amount of time necessary for both the design and the successful completion of the training.

Free Podcasts Related to Workforce Development!

Looking to expand your horizons and gain some knowledge in the management arena? The AMA (American Marketing Association) is a great resource for free podcasts. You can find short audios from industry leaders such as Dan Pink, Marcus Buckingham, and Alexandra Levit on such topics as Collaborative Methods for Moving Forward, Why Technology is Doing More Harm Than Good, and Harnessing the Next Generation Workforce. 

Learn more here! 

Training Tailored to Millennials? Really?

Here is an excerpt from a recent TrainingIndustry.com blog article which suggests ways to “empower Millennials to succeed” in the workplace.

Our question: How is this specific to Millennials? This is simply a list of best-practices for quality training….The millennial generation is focused on people and professional development. They want to learn and feel empowered to lead and help others.

Kyle Borchardt of Virtuali and PJ Neal of Harvard Business Publishing offer the following suggestions on how organizations can empower millennials to succeed:

• Instill leadership capabilities and a leadership mindset in millennials early in their careers, so they are ready to transition into more senior roles sooner.

• Deliver small, continuous learning experiences over a longer timespan to ensure the learning sticks.

• Have employees practice new skills on the job in combination with formal training programs.

• Encourage employees to reflect on learning experiences to increase knowledge retention and improve behavior change.

• Provide career coaching and mentorship opportunities customized to individuals.

How Organizations Set Themselves Up for Training to Fail

In the past year (2014), companies that wanted to do business with us asked us to do the following egregious activities in order to sabotage their own training effectiveness. These are the types of situations we don't want to be a part of:

Cutting time from the delivery process in order to save time and money. 

Many organizations think that the same learning outcomes can be achieved in less time if we could just whittle this class down by 3 hours.  In their minds, saving training time equates to saving money when organization's figure they are taking people away from their "real work" in order to attend training. But by not providing adequate time for training (and practice and coaching), people will inevitably make mistakes on the job which will cost money.

Cutting practice time out of the learning process so that participants are simply subjected to new content but have no ability to work with that content. 

Most individuals do not make the 'transfer of training' on their own. And in many cases it is impossible to go from learning-to-doing without a period of practice. How did you learn to drive a car? Classroom only? Did you watch a video? I remember helping my niece learn to drive; she had a "habit" of braking right at the stop sign rather than slowing down as she approached it. When I asked her why she said, "That's how I learned - you can't crash the simulator."

No interaction or collaboration.

Companies often rely solely on the delivery of information without any activity or collaboration among the learners, even though we know that adults learn best through collaboration and application of their learning with others. Yes, it might only take 25 minutes to teach the information / skill, but it takes another 60 minutes to "get it" while working with others in order to hear their perspective, practice, get feedback, etc. Try brainstorming as many uses for a brick as you can - by yourself; now try it with 3 other people. Point made.

No time for reflection.

Organizations that want their training delivered in one shot, by default exclude time for observation and reflection which is a key adult learning principle

Adults have a lot of "rules" in their heads and a lot of learned behaviors in terms of how they conduct their job. If we ask them to change those "rules", they need time to reflect on the ramifications of those changes - what's in it for me? is this a good thing or a bad thing? Will I have a better outcome in the long-run? etc.  A one-time training session does not allow for this critical need for processing information.

Happy with mediocre designs that sort-of get at the necessary learning. 

One client asked us to create "the best design possible," and then, during the design review said "This learning process is too long and we will never get participants to do the pre-work or on-the-job assignments, so cut out the parts that aren't critical" (if this was the best design possible, exactly what parts would not be critical?).

Cut topics to save time.

When redesigning training to accommodate less training time and people's busy schedules, organizations often cut topics or content from their training programs. Our question is: at what point did that particular piece of content become unnecessary? If it was relevant in the original design, how did it become irrelevant in the redesign?

Cut feedback.

One of our clients has an independent assignment which learners have a month to complete. In its original incarnation, that assignment was then graded by an expert and feedback was provided to the participants. It was entirely possible to fail and be requested to re-work the assignment.

In an attempt to save money the grading of the assignment was eliminated, which of course, trickled down to the learners asking, "Then what is the point of doing the assignment?" or "Why do a quality job?"

Training is both an art and a science. It is much more than providing information and saying "good luck with that!"  Transmission of information is only half the battle; in fact, it may only be 1/3 of the battle (with the other two-thirds being practice/collaboration and on-the-job application/coaching)!

If you want your organizational training efforts to succeed, please, don't fall victim to the missteps just discussed!

Tell us YOUR "fail" story here !https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XXMBCZX

Training Design with Adults in Mind

There are a few techniques you can use to make learning easier on your workplace learners:

Structure - helps learners to keep track of detail; give them an agenda to follow-along

• Known to unknown - Flying a plane to flying a helicopter

• Easy to difficult - Painting with a brush to painting with a roller to painting with a power painter

• Problem to solution - Getting lost to learning to read a map or compass

• Frequent to infrequent - Running weekly payroll to running monthly invoices to running yearly W-2's*

• Overview to detail - This is how government works to this is how an election is conducted

• Theoretical to practical (big picture to doing your job) - The importance of eating right to planning menus

• Order of importance or performance - Checking safety of machinery before operating it

• Steps in a sequence (chronological) - Filling out a form; validating customer information

• How participants would most likely interact with material - Teach blackjack by sitting at a blackjack  table, not reading a manual

Exercises - are very effective, unless...

• "Unusual" or complex exercises interfere with learning - learners may miss the point

• Adults don't like far-fetched or artificial exercises - respect their maturity

• Need some challenge (but not too much) - remember to keep the environment safe

• Stories-are "sticky" - stories help learners to remember. Anytime you are about to go in to lecture mode, ask yourself, "Is there a story I could tell that would illustrate this just as well?" and then, at the end of the story, ask your learners "So what is the moral of this story?" THAT is when the true learning comes about; give the audience time to process the point of the story and draw a conclusion - otherwise it was an interesting story that happened to somebody else.

Keep 'em active! - nobody sits for hours on end at the job - don't expect it in training either.

Quotable: Jay Titus

Millennials will account for close to 50 percent of the workforce within the next five years. Corporate learning leaders need to be the champion for making professional development an organizational priority. We need to be taking educational benefits out of the last page of the employee handbook and shining a spotlight on it. In the next five to 10 years it’s going to be a key differentiator for employers who do it well.

Jay Titus, EdAssist

Excerpted from: http://www.clomedia.com/blogs/1-ask-a-gen-y/post/6303-millennials-will-work-for-knowledge

Collective Differences equal Better Learning Outcomes

Research now tells us that what makes a group truly intelligent and innovative is the combination of different ages, skills, disciplines, and working and thinking styles that members bring to the table.

Scott E Page, professor and director of the center of the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan has demonstrated that groups displaying a range of perspectives and skill levels outperform like-minded experts. He concludes that "progress depends as much on our collective differences as it does on our individual IQ scores."

Source: Institute for the Future for the University of Phoenix Research Instituted and Scott E Page, "The Difference," published by Princeton Press

Guest Blog: 3 Ideas for Leadership Development Outside the Classroom

By Halelly Azulay, TalentGrow LLC

Your current leader population wants to grow and needs to continue to improve their leadership competencies. You have Baby Boomer leaders set to retire, but many of those 'on the bench' to succeed them are not quite promotion-ready. Millennials are chomping at the bit for ongoing leadership development opportunities.

You need to create 'bench strength' in the form of a pool of ready-to-lead talent .Does this sound familiar? Don't despair. Hope awaits...When we deploy a wide variety of development methods to get our leaders to the next level, everyone benefits. It is not merely a training issue, either. It's bigger than that. Here are three ideas to help you approach leadership development in a broad, and inclusive way that doesn't require developing coursework or having people attend classes!

Rotation/stretch assignments

A job rotation means that the leader is temporarily assigned to a different job, usually laterally, in another role in the same organization, for an agreed-upon period of time. A stretch assignment is a task or project that these leaders perform usually within their current role but beyond their job description that challenges and broadens (stretches) their current skills and capabilities.

In leadership workshops or seminars, leaders are usually isolated and focused on learning outside the context of their workday. But when they are strategically working in a job rotation or stretch assignment with a developmental lens, leaders learn new skills in the context of their daily work experience and apply their lessons immediately, continually.

These kinds of assignments, when coupled with specific development goals, are a rich growth opportunity that yields many benefits to the leader as learner. They are a wonderful platform for leadership development that is readily available and completely scalable to the specifics of the leader, team, and organization.

Volunteering in a leadership role

How can your future and current leaders practice new leadership skills on-the-job without any downside for your organization whatsoever? By practicing on someone else's turf as a volunteer.

Volunteer jobs in leadership positions provide a great opportunity for leaders to 'get their feet wet', try new approaches, and practice skills they haven't yet mastered. And they do this all away from work where their mistakes don't affect your organization directly or cause any hardship.

There are endless leadership positions in non-profit and community-based organizations that need volunteers to serve their constituents. Leaders can craft a development strategy for leveraging a volunteer job for their own learning and growth, then deploy the plan and bring back the newly developed skills back to your organization. It's a win-win-win.

Mentor/protégé

Do your current or high potential future leaders have a mentor? And, are they mentoring someone themselves?

Lots of employers already have, or are considering adding, a mentoring program. Often, we view these opportunities as intended to benefit the newest members of the workforce. Yet, the potential developmental benefits of mentoring and being mentored can be equally valuable to those in leadership positions.

When in the role of protégé (aka mentee), leaders can gain insights from those who are a few steps ahead of them on a similar leadership journey. Even the most experienced and successful executive coaches have an executive coach of their own.

Leaders of all levels should also keep their skills sharp by getting a mentor. These leader mentors create value for their protégés, but don't they also grow their own skills as a result of mentoring others? Yes! For example, they may develop patience or empathy, or gain a new perspective on organizational challenges and trends, or enhance their coaching skills while playing the role of a mentor. These new skills can then be leveraged back on the job. This is leadership development at its best. There is dual-value delivered to the organization as a result of both parties developing.

Developing leaders is an ongoing challenge many organizations face, and by expanding the idea of "development" to include non-training-related methods, we can all benefit richly. Whether by completing a stretch or rotational assignment, volunteering in a leadership capacity, mentoring or being mentored, current and future leaders can grow their skills, stretch outside their comfort zone, and bring the benefits of  their expanded skillsets to their organization without ever stepping foot in a leadership development workshop.

Look for these and many more non-training employee development ideas in Halelly's book, Employee Development on a Shoestring published by ATD Press. 

About Halelly Azulay, TalentGrow LLC

Halelly Azulay is an author, speaker, facilitator, and leadership development strategist, as well as an expert in communication skills and emotional intelligence. She is the founder of TalentGrow LLC.a consulting company that develops leaders and teams experiencing explosive growth. TalentGrow specializes in people leadership skills, which include communication skills, teambuilding, coaching and emotional intelligence. TalentGrow works with all organizational levels, including C-level leaders, frontline managers and individuals.

Halelly is the author of two books, Employee Development on a Shoestring  and Strengths Can Help You Lead a MoreFulfilling Life .She also hosts The TalentGrow Show, a leadership development podcast. She brings 20 years of professional experience in workplace learning and leadership development to her work with corporate, government, nonprofit, and academic organizations.

You May Go Out of Business in the Next Five Years....

There is no lack of chatter in business and human resource journal's these days regarding the imminent brain drain as the Baby Boomers retire at a rate of 6,000 to 10,000 per day, depending on the source of your information.  By 2030 all of the Baby Boomers will be over age 65.  This means that the next generation(s) need to be ready willing and able and to fill critical roles.  The problem is-they are not ready. 

Your lack of a skilled workforce may cause you to go out of business in the next 5 to 10 years.  What are your options?

Plan A - Hire skilled workers

While the younger generation cohort (those born in the 1980s and 1990s) is actually the largest cohort in history, they've had a tough time securing employment while the Baby Boomers have been in place.  Therefore, while there are a lot of them, they often lack skills.

Plan B - Promote from within

Many employee satisfaction surveys over the years have revealed that the most frequent cause of an employee leaving his current employer is because they see a lack of career advancement.  This is often coupled with a lack of training which would enable that career advancement.  Therefore, without a concerted plan to develop incumbent workers (see plan D), this is not a realistic option for most organizations.

Plan C - Hire from the competition

While this a somewhat logical short-term solution, the reality is you're simply exchanging the current talent pool.  At some point in their tenure with you, an employee will leave for your competition because they don't see career advancement with you.

Plan D - Grow your own

College graduates may demonstrate an ability to learn but have few-to-zero skills.  While this might seem like a challenge, it is actually a wonderful opportunity for you to be the first employer to shape the way in which they work.  Since they will not have preconceived notions about how work is done or their roles and responsibilities, you can " design" the ideal employee with the future in mind.  If you have a well thought out career / curriculum path, you not only will "build" the perfect employee but they will stay with you for many years to come as well.

Employee's aren't so satisfied with their career advancement opportunities

This year marks the greatest increase in the number of employees satisfied with their current job since SHRM began administering the Employee Job Satisfaction Survey in 2002.

However, they appear to be least satisfied with their ability to advance in their careers. The satisfaction levels that relate to training and development include:

• Organization's commitment to professional development - 23%

• Job specific training - 22%

• Career development opportunities - 21%

• Company paid general training - 24%