Effective training is intentionally designed:
- knowing people can perform their jobs well,
- knowing people can learn new skills and ideas,
- knowing people can learn how to improve processes and procedures in their work,
- knowing people can learn how to solve new problems,
- knowing people can apply the skills and ideas to new applications.
Have you ever participated in a training program that enabled you to perform the skills and ideas as advertised in the brochure?
Have you ever participated in a training class that enabled you to solve new problems, that taught you how to apply skills and ideas to new applications?
Have you ever participated in a training program that designed continued training within your job for weeks after the training?
Training:
Learning experiences are designed to improve employees’ skills, knowledge, and job performance.
The immediate goal of training is to improve competency or to acquire new job skills. Training should take place before it’s needed. Or, at the very least, as it’s needed…. Companies may often discover that they their employees need training, based on employee mistakes and errors. If an error rate is too high, a human performance analysis may discover that the employees’ job responsibilities are too demanding for the number of employees responsible for the task.
The challenge…
The challenge is to design training that includes the correct and necessary skills and ideas, and then effectively delivers these skills and ideas: “what to teach and how to teach.” Training that honors people for their current abilities, and builds on their ability to learn new skills and ideas is a minimal expectation.
If an employee’s job responsibilities are more than is reasonable for one person, then training would be a waste of resources. The solution would be designing and presenting a human performance solution that focuses on the department’s ability to measure its own effectiveness and efficiency.
So, you can see that the challenge is to design training that includes the correct and necessary skills and ideas, and then effectively delivers these skills and ideas: “what to teach and how to teach,” or “what is the problem and what is the solution.”
Best practices produce the best results…
Why risk wasting money and peoples’ time with poorly designed training?
The need…
In our modern workforce, all jobs require specific skills and knowledge, often unique to that discipline or skill-set.
The need to design training programs that enable people to perform the skills and acquire the knowledge unique to that job is urgent.
Training can be described from two perspectives:
“Performance training”
“Transfer training”
Enables people to reason, or think through the mental steps of their work. Transfer training teaches people how to solve new problems in their work, and how to apply their skills and knowledge to new applications.
…the design of training requires the intentional use of mental models (how we think or reason, and how we learn most efficiently, and how we intentionally avoid the mistakes of poorly designed training…
Kennedy’s Instructional Design, LLC
KID LLC and UMBEPM LLC