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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New Learning Paths International Website

We’ve been playing around with a new look for the LPI website.  We’re also thinking about adding some webinars on some Learning Paths related topics such as applying quality tools to the learning process, using Learning Paths in strategic planning and using Learning Paths to facilitate mergers and acquistions.  Take a look and send me any suggestions.  Learningpathsinternational.com

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Blogging a New Book

I’ve decide to draft out my new book on my blog.  The book is about how to you can shorten your own learning time as a student or shorten the learning curve for others if your a teacher, trainer or instructional designer.  I’m going to write this for everyone who is involved in any kind of learning. 

As a starting point, we’re going to assume that there are tremendous benefits in being able to learn faster.  This doesn’t mean taking short cuts or skipping things.  It means that if you have a choice of learning exactly the same thing to the same level of competence, you would almost always choice the one that gets you there faster. 

If you think that learning needs to be like fine wine that needs to be savoired, this book is not for you.  However, if you’re someone who thinks that the faster you learn, the more you have time to learn, you’re going to see some interesting thoughts and techniques.

I’m going to start the next post out with idea #1 and continue until I get to #101.  When I finally write the book, I’ll add more content and arrange the ideas into a logical sequence.  I’ll also take into account the feedback in the comments area.

copyright LPI 2008, all rights reserved

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Why Soft Skills Training Often Fails

Uploaded by criscollrj

This picture has nothing to do with the topic but misery loves company. 

Anyway, a lot of emphasis is placed on soft skills training.  Sometimes referred to as people skills or non-technical skills.  This includes things like, listening, presentations, team building, sales, etc.  All good skills to have.

The problem is that they take a long time and a lot of practice to master.  If you go to a presentations course, you learn about how to make effective presentations and if you’re lucky you get to practice one or two times.

People who make presentations for a living tell me it takes about 200 times through to really make a great presentation.  So without that extensive practice what tends to happen is that people think they’ve developed the skills but really haven’t. 

Can you learn to be a good listener in 30 minutes?  That’s part of a lot of curriculums.  I think it might take a little more practice.

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