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
Look BEYOND the training - if you want it to be successful
According to Robert Brinkerhoff, training events alone typically result in only 15% of transfer of learning to on the job behavior. So if you truly want your participants to be successful on the job, after training, you need to think beyond the training event itself.
There must be processes or systems in place that reinforce, monitor, encourage , or reward the performance of those things you consider to be critical on the job behaviors. We spend much of our time as trainers, worried about Level 1 and Level 2 outcomes (did the trainees like the training in the short-term and did the trainees leave with more knowledge than they came with) but not enough time on whether or not the trainees are implementing their new skills and knowledge on the job.
Before you start any training program, start with the end in mind, because the training will only contribute 15% to the success of your initiative. Be especially analytical of what you expect to see people doing differently on the job and how you expect them to be successful on the job. Very seldom will someone have the initiative or the time or the thorough understanding to be able to transfer what they learned in a class to their real work responsibilities.
The futility of tests
Sorry - no idea where this came from. Was forwarded on to us by a colleague. 
Quotable: Dr. Roth Tartell
Clearly, much of what the leader needs to do to increase employee engagement levels can be shaped through learning.
Learning professionals have a responsibility to their organizations to ensure that perspectives and approaches critical to successful engagement are built in to curricula, incorporated into developmental plans, and then included in the talent discussions that shape the future leaders of the organization.
Quotable: Dr. Roth Tartel is Learning and Development Manager - North America for GE Capital Real Estate
Delta Takes Training Evaluation to the 4th Degree
Delta flight operations training goes through level three evaluations for "everything we do," says Scott Nutter, Flight Operations General Manager, and level four evaluation by tying training data to operational performance and safety metrics.
As a result, Delta has received several awards including Travel Weekly's Magellan Award and being named to Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies in 2011.
Delta and Northwest merged more than three years ago and had a smooth integration of their training initiatives by keeping focused on these important level 3 and level 4 outcomes.
March / April 2012 Training Magazinep. 40
Are you still using 14th century teaching techniques?
Here is a great, short(ish) video from Ted.com describing how Stanford University offered an online course in Artificial Intelligence to over 160,000 students, in 9 countries. The speaker is Peter Norvig (one of the two instructors) and some of his insight regarding student motivation, the power and necessity o f collaboration and accountability are excellent.
One of their students commented at the end, “This felt like sitting in a bar, with a really smart friend, explaining something you haven’t grasped yet, but you know you are about to.”
Highly recommended: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/1487
What you can learn about eLearning - from Engineers
Since 1980, The Society for Manufacturing Engineers – Education Foundation, has awarded over $31 million in grants, scholarships, and awards to high schoolers pursuing a degree in science, technology, engineering and math, more than any other professional engineering society.
Their website is a marvel of interactivity and engagement. It’s a wonderful model for e-learning as the ‘learner’ can pursue multiple topics and to multiple-depths, through their own decision making process. www.manufacturingiscool.com
In 20 years, trainers (that's us) will be MORE than necessary
We are always worrying about whether our profession will continue , what with the advent of e-Learning, m-Learning, social networking and the like. Well, don’t fret! The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) predicts the follow trends, as the global labor force approaches 3.5 billion in 2030. Based on current trends in population, education, and labor demand, the report projects that by 2020 the global economy could face the following hurdles:
38 million to 40 million fewer workers with tertiary education (college or postgraduate degrees) than employers will need, or 13 percent of the demand for such workers
45 million too few workers with secondary education in developing economies, or 15 percent of the demand for such workers
90 million to 95 million more low-skill workers (those without college training in advanced economies or without even secondary education in developing economies) than employers will need, or 11 percent oversupply of such workers
What does that mean for us? It means we will continue to have to train people who enter the workforce. They will need to come prepared. We will need to build curriculum and not just classes. We will need to build or revive our “corporate university” ideas, but start the learning at a much more elementary level.
It means, perhaps, that we have to broaden our focus from “training” to “education” to understand where our learners are coming from.
You can read the whole report here: http://tinyurl.com/cxyraq2 Fascinating, sobering…
Are you training for the job? Or training the person? Is there a difference?
Performance Support and Learning have the same objective: working smarter. The trade-off is whether you put the knowledge into the job (support) or into the performer’s head (learning).
So quoted: Gloria Gery
Does Size Matter?
Very often, when organizations move to virtual training, they think that the constraints of travel and space (learning space) are removed and it is now possible for a larger audience to take part in the training offering.
Not true! Compare these two simple visuals:
A circular table of 8 where everyone can see each other, hear each other and be involved with one another in an engaging and collaborative way.
A town-hall meeting in which a lot of people are in attendance, but only a few get to take the floor.
If YOU wanted your opinion heard, or you wanted to come away from the meeting having developed a relationship with the others in attendance, which meeting would you want to attend?
The circular table of 8 is the visual we need to keep in mind when designing for virtual delivery of training. Our learners are already hobbled by the fact that they cannot make eye contact with one another or read one another’s body language; but they CAN make connections with each other when there is a smaller group involved.
The real benefit of virtual delivery is that you can deliver the same topic as many times as you like, at any time that you like. So you can run 3 sessions, of 8 learners, in one week. This allows for more interaction and engagement among the learners. When the facilitator asks a question, it is quite obvious if 8 people have answered or 3 people have answered. When you poll them for their opinion, there is actually time to hear why people chose the answer they did – and allow for comparing and contrasting results.
With larger groups, we might undertake the same activities, but they will simply be ‘watched’ by some in attendance – it is not possible to involve everyone, in every activity, to the degree that they feel they are contributing to the content.
Smaller groups enhance learning outcomes, and virtual learning deliveries allow us to economically utilize smaller groups.
Be a kid again!
At The Training Doctor, we often get great training design ideas by focusing on the kid in all of us. Whether you are designing for classroom-based classes or online, you can get some great ideas from this website designed to help kids think more creatively: www.inventivekids.com.
It even has a link for Adults! For instance, we watched a speech about Divergent Thinking and Education by Sir Ken Robinson. He says that the current (K-12) education system was designed for a different age.
Education is organized like an industrialized organization – for instance we send kids through school according to their ‘date of manufacture,’ (birthdate). Schools are organized by bells, separated by function (subject), and put through education in ‘batches.’ Within schools, working with your peers to find an answer is called cheating – outside schools it’s called collaboration.
One of his interesting points is that ADHD is not really the ‘epidemic’ it is purported to be. He postulates it might be due to: Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth – they are being besieged with information everywhere they turn – from TV to computers to phones – and then we label them as deficient in some way when they get distracted.
Distracted from what, he asks? From the boring stuff delivered in the ‘standard educational system.’ He includes a map that shows that ADHD diagnoses increase as you travel East across the US. Interestingly, he also states that the increase in ADHD diagnoses correlates with the increase in standardized testing.
In addition to the interesting facts that he shares through his speech, you will be AMAZED at the e-learning / illustration / animation that accompanies the speech. It TRULY is a work of art. Check it out: http://tinyurl.com/7rupsn2
Where e-Learning went wrong (and how to fix it)
Tom Graunke, Founder and CEO, StormWindI From Training Magazine's Inside Training e-newsletter
I helped create e-Learning 1.0 and am here to tell you it has been a complete and miserable failure. This is a bold statement, I realize, so let me explain. At the time, it was edgy and innovative, this idea of using online resources to provide training to vast numbers of people spread out globally. The objective of e-Learning 1.0 was to replace classroom training that required travel with a more cost-effective worldwide deployable methodology. The promise was better learning retention.
We achieved the objective pretty easily but at a steep downside.
Jennifer Keohane
Jennifer Keohane is a business outreach librarian at the Simsbury Public Library in Simsbury Connecticut. In addition to a Masters in Library Science she also holds a Bachelor of Commerce in Marketing and International Business and has over 12 years of business experience. An enthusiastic promoter of library services, Jennifer enjoys teaching and is a certified School Library Media Specialist.
T/D: What kind of services can a library with a Business Resource Librarian provide? If a trainer comes to you and they need to start a new program, how can a business librarian help them?
Keohane: We can help by providing them with some solid books and tools. These are in the ‘how to’ department, you know ‘best practices’. We can help do a literature search. Many times when people are thrown a topic, they Google it and get all kinds of stuff but it’s not on topic. I know what a controlled language is; I know how to crack the code on how to find articles within the databases because they might use a terminology that isn’t one that we typically use as trainers or as in regular English. \
For instance, in The Library of Congress cataloguing, if you wanted to find all the cookbooks you would have to look under the term cookery. You can imagine, if you take that simple idea and expand it to some of the buzz words that are going on today, you’ve got to juggle around, squeeze and hunt to try to get articles that you know are out there.
A librarian can help with this, we can help shape your search strategy, so that you get better results. I encourage people, don’t bang your head against the wall, don’t spend a lot of time trying to find articles that you know are out there and failing. Give us a call, maybe I can suggest some terms or help refine the search strategy so that you get more targeted information.
T/D: That is such valuable information for trainers. What type of businesses do you see using the resource libraries or the resources at the library? Is there a typical kind of business?
Keohane: Traditionally I see many consultants. I see many people that are in service businesses because we’ve got a wide range of services here. People in the service industry like to come to the library. I work with businesses of all types and sizes.
T/D: Do you have any last tidbits you’d like to share with trainers on how they can utilize their local library in their training efforts?
Keohane: Yes, I think one of the first things they should do is go in and talk to the people at the reference desk at their local library. Find out who they are. You may be surprised at some of the skills sets of the people that are sitting behind the desk. In our library alone, I have a business background, we have a librarian who’s got her law degree and works full time at a law library and then works part-time here; we have someone that comes from the UCONN Health Center; someone who comes from a school setting. There are a lot of different skills sets. Librarians are very much a second career, kind of career move. So there’s possibly those who have expertise in areas that you might be able to tap into.I think people should ask what we have and how they might obtain the information..
If you don’t want to walk into a library, check out the library’s webpage. As libraries we’ve really tried to get as much of our information out there, online, to make us a 24/7 kind of information access. That being said, many libraries also have 24/7 contracted reference service. You can actually chat with a librarian 24/7. You might check to see if your library has that option. It’s a great resource to have all hours of the day or night, to be able to talk via email to a real librarian and have someone working on your question even when physically your own public library might be closed.
Are you still using 14th century teaching techniques?
Here is a great, short(ish) video from Ted.com describing how Stanford University offered an online course in Artificial Intelligence to over 160,000 students, in 9 countries. The speaker is Peter Norvig (one of the two instructors) and some of his insights regarding student motivation, the power (necessity for) of collaboration and accountability are excellent.
One of their students commented at the end, “This felt like sitting in a bar, with a really smart friend, explaining something you haven’t grasped yet, but you know you are about to.”
Highly recommended:http://www.ted.com/talks/view/lang/en//id/1487
The Training Doctor begins its 22nd year!
June marks the start of The Training Doctor's 22nd year of providing customized instructional design services. My. how times have changed...When TD first started:
We used overhead transparencies and color printers were not invented. If you wanted to really jazz up your overheads you’d color them in with markers!
The internet had barely been invented – and we surely were not teaching people “online”
Training was done in person, when you got enough people to hold a class
Trainers flew here and there to go where the students were
We wore suits when we taught (we wore suits when we went to work!)
If we wanted to bring our computer with us on a trip, we, uh, didn’t. How would you travel with a 15 pound machine?
Cell phones were called “car phones” and looked just like the phone on the wall in your kitchen – only it was attached to the console of your car! Really RICH people had one the size of a shoe that they could take anywhere
What do YOU remember from 20 years ago? Add a comment!