Easy Research Changes Things

I remember the old days when people argued a lot about facts and figures.  Who did what in the world series of 57 or what’s the tallest building and so on.  What’s changed today is that it takes seconds to find this answers so we have to find other things to argue about. 
Take the issue [...]

Read Full Post »

Change Management Tools

With any change 15% will readily accept it.  15% will reject it and fight you and 70% will do nothing and hope it goes away.  Since training really requires that people change what they do, you always have the 70% to worry about.  Ever wonder why you put on some great training and nothing happened.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Analogies

Storytelling and analogies are proven to improve retention and understanding.  So here’s one I like.  I had an interview with a world class luger.  Luge is the sport where you go down something like a bobsled run but on a your back and on a tiny sled.
Do you know how to learn to luge?  Well, [...]

Read Full Post »

A Quick Word on Role Plays

I think we over estimate the amount of practice or learning that goes on in a role play.  While it is a good learning situation, it has it limits.  Take learning how to make a cold call.  One role play teaches at best how to handle one situation.  While in real life, all of the [...]

Read Full Post »

New Hire Orientation??

You’ll like this video.  I shows what happens when you assign someone to train the new guy in.  This happens all the time.
 

Read Full Post »

How Did You Learn? A Key to Improvement

Think of anything that you do well, maybe a sport or hobby.  Maybe selling or teaching.
 Now think about the difference between how you were taught versus how you learned.  Using the teaching is much shorter and condensed and the learning was much longer and involved. 
So if you were to build training, which would you choose.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Workforce integration post merger/acquisition

This is an article written by Ed Robbins on Learning Paths Applications.
If you are or will be in the midst of a merger or acquisition and have read the research on how high the failure rate is for success you can take a sigh of relief.  One of the results of any major change especially [...]

Read Full Post »

Trunk Monkey

Did have much time for a post this morning so I thought everyone would like to spend some time with the trunk monkey!

Read Full Post »

Ending the Hard Skills – Soft Skills Divide

Traditionally we’ve separated hard skills or technical skills and soft skills.  What we hope is that if we teach them separately people will figure out how to use them together.  Unfortunately, this seldom happens.
I had a long discussion with a technical college that is well known for their competency based education.  What they say is that [...]

Read Full Post »

Why It’s Really So Hard to Improve Public Education

Consider this … the student experience in every classroom in America is different.  If you have 50,000 different 3rd grade history classes, that’s a tremendous amount of variation.  Even with the same textbooks or lesson plans they still have a lot of difference.  It’s virtually impossible to make improvements that have much of an effect.  [...]

Read Full Post »