Chico the Dog Goes to School

Well it’s time for puppy school.  He seems to like recess the best.  He didn’t do his homework.  I had to use the excuse that he ate his own homework.

It’s interesting to see the different ways people train dogs.  A lot of behaviorism, but there’s also a lot of treating them the way other dogs treat each other.  It’s sort of Pavlov meets the dog whisperer.  I let everyone now if he finally gets his PH.D. in rolling over.

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Measuring Behavioral Change – Level 3

Just continuing to look at the different ways people measure training.  Measuring behavioral change isn’t a bad one.  If you really know what to do look for, you should start to see changes being made after training.  Often creating  behavioral checklists and doing direct observation is a popular way of measuring at level 3. 

Here are the pitfalls.  First, when you divide things into behaviors you can loose how they work together.  You can do all the new behaviors but miss all the connections.  More than likely, participants begin to get better at these behaviors but haven’t yet reached a level of proficiency or mastery.  That takes a lot of time, practice and feedback.

Look at the example of learning to do great presentations.  You can train to a set of new behaviors in front of others during a presentation.  You can then look to see if those behaviors are starting to appear.  You should see some change.  This is a good thing.  However, to continue on to a higher level of proficiency won’t happen immediately.  In fact, the new behaviors can quickly dissappear under the pressure of doing things for real.

The solution is to look at how you can continue to build those behaviors and work on all the subtleties that may not be on the checklist.

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Does Training Evaluation Work?

by FernandoLins.com

This is a very popular discussion question.  It goes along with how do you actually measure training.  This is the first of a series of posts on the topic.  In this posts, I want to talk about the evaluation sheets that are passed out after every seminar, lecture or course.  It includes questions such as:

• How did you like the workshop?
• Did you get anything out of it?
• How did the instructor do?
• Did you like the lunch?

It’s a lot like a customer satisfaction survey.  It’s never a bad idea to ask customers what they think. 

However, I think the value of these evaluations is very limited.  Just liking something doesn’t necessarily lead to learning, skill building or real change.  This evaluation really won’t tell you if anything will have a lasting effect a day, a week or a month later.  Here’s an example,

One of the training programs that always gets great reviews is style training.  Style training comes in lots of different varieties and people like them.  Everyone likes to here good things about themselves.  However, being able to actually use this information to do anything significant on the job seldom happens.  In fact, it’s more likely to be misused.

So, the point is..it’s nice to have happy participants.  Much better than unhappy participants.  However, don’t confuse happiness with learning.

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Training Scorecard

Uploaded on June 12, 2005
by Hysterical Bertha

If you were to create a scorecard for senior executives relating to training, what would you put on it?  Let’s make it harder and limit you to five or less items.  Remember if it’s on the scorecard it needs to be measurable.

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Starting From Scratch..What would you do?

One of the short falls of today’s education and training is that is built on old ideas and an older way of doing things.  I’d like to put out the question.  If you could start with a clean slate and design education any way you wanted what would it look like?

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Webinar for Learning Leaders

We are launching some new webinars for Learning Paths.  The first one is going to be about Learning Paths for Learning Leaders.  Let me know if you want an invite.

Here’s a quick overview:

Learning Paths for Learning Leaders

A Strategic Approach to Driving Business Results

In this webinar, we are going to be discussing the role of the Strategic Learning Leader and how Learning Paths can support any successful Learning Leader.  

The role of a Strategic Learning Leader is to align the current workforce with the strategic objectives of the organization.  In other words, being able to answer the questions:

·       What are we capable of doing today?

·       How can we change to meet future objectives?

·       What are the costs and risks for making the change?

Learning Paths is a proven methodology for driving business results through dramatically improving proficiency throughout the organization.  It provides Chief Learning Officers and other learning leaders with:

·       A comprehensive approach to workforce development

·       A better way to link training to business goals and objectives

·       Real measurement data that links directly to the bottom line

·       Learning principles and change management strategies that help build a learning organization

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Training for the Uninvolved

Building Learning Paths has many of the same challenges that building any training has.  One in particular is how to you get those who were not involved in the building of training up-to-speed on what’s happening and willing to help implement the program.

A formal train-the-trainer program is often the answer.  This is a session for those who will be implementing the training.  It guides them through what they need to do plus it goes back to the beginning and sells these individuals on what’s happening and why.  Going back to your stakeholder analysis, you might find some critical people to invite to your train-the-trainer.

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Learning Paths Upgrades 2008

I’ve been unsually business doing Learning Paths projects.  Each time I learn something new and the process gets better.  I guess that’s the goal of process improvement.  For those of you who have read the book or have done initiatives on your own, I’m going to do some blog posts on what we’ve learned and changed.

One of the things we know like to do at the end of the first phase is do a formall stakeholder analysis as a way of building a communication and implementation plan.  This helps us identify those who were not on the team that might be major allies or obstacles.  While it takes some time to do, it’s worth it.

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Light Speed Idea #8: Eliminate Waste

Uploaded by Malingering

One of the key activities in improving quality is to eliminate waste.  You may have been part of a Kaizen event that did this.  Waste can be anything that isn’t necessary and in particular in speeding up learning, you’re looking for things that are a waste of time.

So where is the waste in education and training.  One major source of waste is everything that is taught one day and forgotten the next.  Think about your K-12 years and even your college years.  How much were you taught that you no longer remember.  For most people it’s a staggering amount.  I took three different languages in school and today I can’t speak or translate any of them.  While I might have had a good time in class, I consider it a waste.  I guess I could have been wasting my time with something else.

But there’s more..books than noone reads, DVDs that noone watches and lectures that noone stays awake for. 

Speeding up learning requires looking at each course or training event and looking at the retention rate.  If it’s low, you need to toss it out or try something else.

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Light Speed Idea #2: Minimize Trial and Error Learning

Uploaded by imapix

It’s true we do learn most of what we know from experience.  However, we tend to learn a mixture of the right way and wrong way to do things.  I mispent a lot of my youth skating down at the lake.  What you saw was a lot of different skating styles and different levels of success learning to skate.  You also see some good skaters who have overcome bad technique to be able to skate really fast. 

Now image that instead of everyone learning to skate by trial and error, they had some early instruction and disciplined practice.  What you’d see is that almost everyone was skating with good form and probably learned how to skate well very quickly.  What you’d also notice is that the best skaters would look like they were skating effortlessly rather than the self-taught skater who learned to skate fast but with arms and legs flayling everywhere.

From a learner’s standpoint, it’s critical to be able to learn from others.  It’s also accepting the some techniques are better than others and that you don’t have to make every mistake yourself before you learn.

Copyright LPI 2/07                        2 of 101

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