She Has Arrived

This is a quick post and more of a historical note than a dissertation on the Training industry.  My daughter was born November 7th 2009 at 8:35pm.  Her name is Harper and she weighed in at 8lbs 1 ounce.

She is not my first however you can never be prepared for the feeling of welcoming a child of your own.  I have been steeped in emotions ranging from pride to happiness to expectation.  Some of the expected nervousness at caring for a newborn is in there too.

I have not posted in a couple of weeks as I settle into a life that includes caring for a helpless beauty.  It’s a huge responsibility and one that is completely welcome and rewarding.

The past two weeks have given me the opportunity to reflect on the direction of Trainers are Learners Too.  The basic premise of the blog has been to discuss the many workplace learning related problems and challenges I encounter on a regular basis while building my team of WLP all stars at Dealer.com.  It has occurred to me that the best resource of information and blog content is my team.  They put their hearts into our projects and find solutions to problems that have no precedent in our young organization.  The next post will serve to introduce the purpose of this blog as a repository for information from the Dealer.com Training Team.

So check back soon and you will be introduced to Jillian Werle Torres and Cameron Bradley, my left and right hands in the execution of a training effort that touches over 20,000 individuals annually.

Being a Trainer is Like Being a Parent

I am about to be a Dad for the second time.  Right about….now.  My lady is full term and 5 days from the due date.  We will be having a girl, the first girl in our family.  Having this baby is of course very exciting.  As I was working away today on the communication plan for our organization-wide training effort that will take place over the next couple of months, it occurred to me that being a trainer, at least a successful one, can at times be much like being a parent.  This post will explore that idea and share ways to ensure your success in the field of workplace learning.

What can you do to be a successful workplace learning professional?:

1.  Love Your Content as You Would Your Children

If you are like most trainers, you spend a considerable amount of time developing content of some type.  Whether its agendas, speaking notes, activities, evaluations, simulations or CBT’s, you are knee deep in the process of content creation.  Want good content?  Take pride in and ownership of your content.  After all, the content can make or break the learning experience.  Once the content is complete and out there in the world, reactions to your content, whether good or bad, should have a personal affect on you.  If it doesn’t, you don’t have pride in or ownership of the content.

2.  Learners:  Give Them Your All

Training Professionals all talk about “that one class” or experience they had when the learning environment was perfect, the learners were engaged and the training was truly absorbed. This happens when you treat your learners as you would your children.  Your investment in the effective delivery of the content and the success of the learner will determine the success of the entire training effort.  Even with the best content, if your delivery is flat and lacks energy and excitement, your learners will not be provided with the learning opportunity they came for.  Over a long period of time this type of uninspired performance can be responsible for an overall negative attitude towards training.  This can be a nightmare to overcome.

3.  Set Your Expectations Higher

Have you ever heard parents of a toddler say “We’re hoping that [child's name] graduates from high school some day.”?  This is as absurd as a training organization saying “We’re hoping that people will pass”, yet I here this time and time again.  Whether or not a training objective is realized as a success or learners are able to demonstrate their knowledge is a direct reflection of the amount of effort put in to shape the experience.  As mentioned above, OWN the content and the delivery, take pride in the success of your trainees and you’ll never worry about the outcome again.

4.  Get Involved in Your Learners Lives or Lose Touch With Them

Classic scenario:  Child hits teenage years and the parents pull their hair out.  There’s fighting, hurt feelings and distance between parent and child.  One way to prevent this is to stay involved in the child’s everyday life.  The same goes within the organization.  If your learning or training department is cordoned off from the front lines where skills, knowledge and attitudes are paramount, how will they know how to assist the learner?  It makes no sense for a training department to be sitting and waiting for someone to point out a training opportunity.  This only leads to a reactive department that cannot relate to the learner.  This is also the type of situation that breeds contempt for training amongst employees.  Constantly providing employees with training when upper management feels that they are not performing as well as they could will do nothing to endear the training team to the rest of the organization and even less content will be absorbed.

Follow these simple guidelines and you will find success.  Whether you are a seasoned learning professional or just entering the field, devoting yourself to your product  is a sure-fire way to ensure engaged learners, valuable training sessions and job satisfaction and security.

If you’re a regular reader be sure to check back, there’s going to be a baby announcement soon, I can feel it!

Too Much Information? Try These.

The sheer amount of information that can be found online relative to any subject can be extremely overwhelming.  Where do you start?  What is credible?  I suffered from this very problem for a solid year or two after deciding to get more involved in the leaning industry at large.

So what can you do?  There are only so many hours in a day and no one really wants to sacrifice all of their free time sifting through mountains of urls’s and Google Search results pages.

Well, it takes one person giving you that one resource that always seems to make the difference.  Below I am going to list a few of my favorite resources for you to do with as you will:

• http://lrnchat.wordpress.com/

- lrchat is my favorite resource.  It a group of Learning Professionals who all huddle around their monitors from 8:30-10:00pm EST every Thursday night to discuss questions selected by a group of moderators.  The discussion takes place on Twitter using the hashtag #lrnchat.  Go get yourself a Twitter account and check it out.  These can be the best way to make great professional contacts and grab a hold of interesting links and ideas.  Caution:  Twitter.com is not the place to try to participate in an event of this nature.  There are hundreds of tweets in this hour and a half.  Using a service like tweetchat.com is greatly recommended.

• http://www.elearninglearning.com/

- eLearningLearning describes itself as: “A Community Collecting and Organizing the Best Information on the Web About eLearning”.  What will you get?  Access to all of the best resources in one place.  It can be a little dauting when you first look at the site.  There a lot going on.  I suggest focusing on the bottom of the main portion of the page where it says “The Latest From the eLearning Community”.  There is bound to be an article, post or discussion that will spark your interest.  This project was started by Tony Karrer, CEO/CTO of TechEmpower.

• http://michaelhanley.ie/elearningcurve/

- This will help fire up the technologist in you.  The “headier” of the these three resources, Michael Hanley’s site will connect you with thoughts and ideas for your next training development project or platform.  An excellent writer who knows how to use his resources, Hanley clearly spends a large portion of his time doing research, a fact that we all get to benefit from.

• http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/

- Another great resource for the developer, Articulate’s Rapid eLearning blog will expose you to new ideas and resources for your next big project.  Admittedly I am more of an Adobe Captivate man to date, but I can definitely get into any discussion around the use of new tools.  Tom Kuhlmann manages the user community at Articulate and is great about discussing the use of many different types of tools to engage the learner and provide a stronger learning experience.

• http://ryan2point0.wordpress.com/

- Ryan Tracey’s blog may be the least recognizable of the list in this post but it’s very promising.  He caught my eye when a co-worker of mine sent over a link to his post on Adult Learning Schminciples.  He’s in the thick of things day-to-day.  Developing eLearning and constantly trying to improve his team’s offering.  I find that many times the folks who spend the most time talking about a topic are the ones who no longer practice or improve those skills, they are riding experience and “resting on their laurels”.  Ryan is involved and pushing the envelope.

Hope these are helpful for all.

Building A Training Organization (Communicating Change)

Growth.  It’s great.  It can push us to our limits and beyond.  It requires strategic thought and vision and excellent communication skills.

You might be saying, “Communication skills?  I would have listed many other things before I got to communication skills.”, so let’s explore that a bit.

Think of a start-up.  There might be 2-3-4 people all working together towards a common goal: profitability.  When you are that size, roles and responsibilities are pretty clear.  If one person isn’t sure who is going to take care of that next task, or whether it falls into their realm of responsibility, they can ask.  Easy.

Fast forward a couple hundred employees or more.  Now you should see some pretty good structure and defined roles.  People should be able to clearly identify where the lines are drawn between themselves and the next person.  But wait, is this really true?  Let’s remember that within that 250+ person organization there are a multitude of start-ups or small, developing departments.  A training department is a great example of an organization within an organization.  In most cases, when the company has a relatively small number of employees, the training organization is likely to be very small.  Small like less than 5 people, the same size as the original start-up.

When the training organization or any organization is growing, it’s generally because there is a workload or process that is being divided among multiple members of the group that could be more effectively handled, developed and realized with the addition of man power.  That’s a widely accepted point.  However, back to the original statement that communication skills are essential in a growing organization, if lines of responsibility are not clearly drawn in the sand, as can be the case in an open and collaborative work environment, people may feel a bit threatened by the addition of a new team member.  This new team member will be taking on some of the responsibilities that were previously handled by others and in some cases these may be responsibilities that the existing team members truly enjoyed.  This has some inherent risk associated with it.  This is where the hiring manager will find out if they did a good job at communicating with their team.  Were they prepared?  Did they express concerns at the change or excitement at the new possibilities?  The quality of the communication between the hiring manager and the existing team members will have a great impact on their perception of the change.

Alright alright.  This happened to me today.  I played the part of the hiring manager and found out that I had not clearly shared my vision of where the department was headed with my team.  We have had an open position for several months, I found a candidate and had them in for first and second round interviews.  After the second round, I realized that the candidate was potentially a great fit, if I modified the job description slightly.  The offer letter has been sent and I am awaiting a response from the candidate.  I was asked by a member of my team how the process was gong and I proudly announced that I had extended an offer, but had modified the job description.  Based on the new title, this member of my team had some immediate concerns.  All is well now, but I realized that I had not done things in the correct order this time around, thus this post.

So how do you go about managing growth and ensuring security at the same time?  Communication.  Team meetings that discuss vision and strategy.  Open idea sessions that allow all members of the team to express where they think your department is going.  These are essential.  Everyone own a little bit of your start-up.  No one person can wield a command and control gavel.  It just won’t work.

In a brand spanking new training department there are many challenges to face and overcome.  Unlike many departments in an organization, the training department serves EVERYONE.  They are responsible for training the clients and the employees.  Once the company gets wind of their valuable skills and resources, requests start pouring in for training support and development in every corner of the business.  Prioritization becomes key as well as the idea of image.  The members of the department must always be on their toes and ready for questions, comments and complaints from anyone in the company at any time.  If you are a learning professional you can relate to this.  Your lunch time or break time or trip to the bathroom can easily become a 30 minute conversation on a product and how to better train it or about how an individual feels training efforts are falling short in a specific area.  What a responsibility.  This calls for some talented folks with great listening skills and the ability to think on their feet.

I could discuss the reach and responsibility of a training or learning department for an entire post, so I think I’ll save it for later.  As with all of my posts, I will end this one with some questions I hope people you will take the time to answer:

1.  Do you have stories about how you handled growth in your department?

2.  Examples of the right and wrong ways to communicate change and share vision?

Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation

So 3 or 4 times last week I heard Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation mentioned.  I remember when I first learned of the four and how much I appreciated the straightforward approach to measurement.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I get a little tired of hearing about how people are on a constant search for how to measure training.  Training professionals measure their results.  They have to.  They always have.

In this post I will review the four levels and provide insight on their potential use and ways in which they are misinterpreted and even manipulated. Let’s jump right in:

Level 1 Evaluation: Reactions

The Encyclopedia of Education describes the first level as follows:

• “Just as the word implies, evaluation at this level measures how participants in a training program react to it. It attempts to answer questions regarding the participants’ perceptions – Did they like it? Was the material relevant to their work? This type of evaluation is often called a “smilesheet.” According to Kirkpatrick, every program should at least be evaluated at this level to provide for the improvement of a training program. In addition, the participants’ reactions have important consequences for learning (level two). Although a positive reaction does not guarantee learning, a negative reaction almost certainly reduces its possibility.”

My Take: This is the most arbitrary of the evaluations.  These “smilesheets” and surveys are extremely subjective.  Many training organizations put such an emphasis on the smilesheet that they even use the number of smilesheets collected as a metric in evaluating the trainers themselves.  The #1 issue here is that an improperly prepared smilesheet or survey will serve only to evaluate whether the trainees “liked” their trainer.  I have taken many classes where I wouldn’t say that I necessarily liked the trainer/instructor/professor or their delivery style but I had a personal investment in absorbing the material and so made it a priority and was able to find success.  In a corporate environment, I find this level serves to measure an organization’s attitude toward training as a whole.

Level 2 Evaluation: Learning

The Encyclopedia of Education describes the second level as follows:

• “Assessing at this level moves the evaluation beyond learner satisfaction and attempts to assess the extent students have advanced in skills, knowledge, or attitude. Measurement at this level is more difficult and laborious than level one. Methods range from formal to informal testing to team assessment and self-assessment. If possible, participants take the test or assessment before the training (pretest) and after training (post test) to determine the amount of learning that has occurred.”

My Take: I understand the need for pre and post tests.  The problem is when to apply the post test.  The standard practice is to apply the post test immediately after the completion of a set agenda or curriculum.  This will undoubtedly provide the largest gain in average score and thus give an inflated measure of the program’s success.  The purpose of training is not to test short term memory but to get a sense of actual content absorption.  Here is where Levels 2 and 3 may sometimes run into each other.  It is my feeling that the post assessment should be delivered after a period of time has elapsed.  I am not saying that we should wait a month to test trainees but I do think there is value in providing study aids and resources immediately after a training, allowing a week to elapse, then bringing the class back together for a final assessment and Q&A session.  If the right training is provided to the right people, they will presumably have had time to study and practice some of the the things they have learned, will be able to discuss the topics more eloquently and their assessment will provide a better view of how much content was absorbed (notice I didn’t say transferred) .

Level 3 Evaluation: Transfer

The Encyclopedia of Education describes the third level as follows:

• “This level measures the transfer that has occurred in learners’ behavior due to the training program. Evaluating at this level attempts to answer the question – Are the newly acquired skills, knowledge, or attitude being used in the everyday environment of the learner? For many trainers this level represents the truest assessment of a program’s effectiveness. However, measuring at this level is difficult as it is often impossible to predict when the change in behavior will occur, and thus requires important decisions in terms of when to evaluate, how often to evaluate, and how to evaluate.”

My Take: I have a hard time with the statement that “it is often impossible to predict when the change in behavior will occur”.  We don’t provide training to individuals so that they will apply the new KSA’a a year from now.  We expect results.  In many cases if a person has not shown some type of improvement in their performance or consistently asks questions of their co-workers that should have been covered in the training, they would be re-trained or perhaps given a formal performance evaluation.  It costs too much money to provide training that will not be used.  I should say here that this is my favorite of the levels as it proves the need for training.  The majority of training professionals have no need to look past Level 3 or they rely on their manager to determine whether a training was of any measurable business value.  That being said, an organization that keys all of it’s employees in on the idea of measuring business results is the one that will heavily reduce wasted resources.

Level 4 Evaluation: Results

The Encyclopedia of Education describes the fourth level as follows:

• “Frequently thought of as the bottom line, this level measures the success of the program in terms that managers and executives can understand -increased production, improved quality, decreased costs, reduced frequency of accidents, increased sales, and even higher profits or return on investment. From a business and organizational perspective, this is the overall reason for a training program, yet level four results are not typically addressed. Determining results in financial terms is difficult to measure, and is hard to link directly with training.”

My Take: If it is difficult to link business results directly to training, then are your objectives too lofty?  A well thought out and pointed training session focuses on a measurable objective.  Instead of objectives like “We will see increased sales”, an objective should read “Over the next x months, we will see increased sales of product x”.

Training should be tied to an initiative.  Often times corporate initiatives are very focused, attempting to sure up a soft spot in business performance.  It’s my feeling that training should be deployed at the beginning of any new initiative with the soul purpose of bolstering its overall effectiveness.  This Level is where I have heard the most conversation over the last couple of years.   Most of these conversations have been centered around finding new ways to measure training’s impact on the business.  If training is planned and deployed thoughtfully then measurement of it’s effectiveness should be pretty simple.  All parties should be looking at training as the foundation of the initiative, therefore automatically linking it to success.  Be careful though, if the initiative is not successful training may also own a piece of that negative pie as well.

These are my thoughts, please take some time to provide yours!

Webinars: To Train or To Sell?

Webinars webinars webinars….

Everyone wants me and you and all of our friends to go to their webinar or web conference or whatever they are calling it.  I get so many of these invites from partners that I work with or lists I am on or product manufacturers that I had discussions with years ago that the novelty has long worn off.  However, there are some really great reasons to hold webinars.  In fact, my Training Team delivers over 5 hours of free webinar training per week and we’ll be bumping that up to ten November 1st.

Why?

Becuse our training is aligned with our business strategies.  The two main business strategies or goals that we support with this offering are:

1. To provide the highest evel of customer satisfaction possible (well trained customer’s tend to be more supportive of the product they are using).
2. To train our clients to effectively use our tools, thus reducing call flow to our support team (a large % of calls to technical support centers are how-to questions).

This s great.  It works well.  It works so well that our interactive, modular training embedded in the software we offer is also free.  With a large customer base such as ours, training gets a lot of exposure.

It didn’t take long before we realized the hidden potential of Training webinars: If you show or “train” the entire tool over the hour that you have the customer captive, in some cases you will introduce them to functionality that is foreign to them.  Perhaps functionality that the customer did not request during their initial contract deliberation or simply have not seen/heard of.  What an opportunity.  At that moment, you have connected a potential buyer with an individual who can answer all of their questions, give them a solid front to back tour and explain the benefits and use cases for that tool.  Great.

Problem:  If you are training software in any major industry such as the medical, financial, legal or in our case the automotive digital marketing field, your software is likely far too complex to be effectively trained in a one hour overview.  Unless all of your customers are Global Learners (find out if you’re a global learner here) then you’re not really giving them what they need to pick up and start using the tool after your session.

Solution:  Competency based webinar training.  As with classroom training, any time the goal is to give the audience a set of new skills, it’s best to break those skills down into their unique parts, train directly to each skill then show the big picutre.  This is a sequential approach.  It also allows the learner to choose the skill that they need most and receive training that is more focused and in-depth.

Knowing that we started this post by describing my angst with the sheer number of webinars available today, I want to make sure I offer the advice that I feel is necessary to any would-be webinar organizer:  Be upfront in the marketing message around your webinar.  Don’t try to lure attendees in with the promise of some great training or exploration and discussion of a current hot topic, only to end the webinar with a shameless sales pitch on some product that you believe will solve everyone’s problem.  Give it to us straight.  I am a buyer at times, for sure.  Let me know you’re selling something that will solve my problem, then invite me in.  The last second sales pitch serves to turn me off to the product all together and can in fact damage the presenter’s credibility after what may have been a very informative session. 

I would like to hear from others about their approach to webinar training.  What are you doing to ensure that the training you provide via webinar is valuable to the learner?  Do you agree or disagree with the approach outlined above?  General thoughts?

Measuring Performance: A Recession Buzz-Topic?

Last night I participated in a great group discussion through Twitter with some learning professionals from around the country.  The group uses the hashtag #lrnchat to have real time discussions of topics selected by a group of moderators.  Last night’s discussion was centered around all things measurement.  From company culture to the impact of specific training events, we touched it all.

I didn’t find any ground breaking way to measure training last night.  In fact, this served more as a review of all that learning professionals have been focused on for years.  The basics will always remain the same:

• Align your training with business strategies
• Form clear objectives
• When necessary, make an initial measurement of skills and knowledge
• Measure post-event to ensure retention
• Analyze the entire process for possible improvements or opportunities for follow-up training

We do these all the time, almost subconsciously.  They are necessary.  The metrics that have become more important to me as I build out my organizations training function are pretty simple:

• How do I measure an individual trainer or designers performance (beyond smile sheets)
• What are acceptable development times for ANY content (Not just interactive CBT’s)
• What is the correct number of hours of training per employee for my organization? (Assuming that the law of diminishing return will apply here)

This second bullet is an extremely difficult one to measure for sure.  I read articles like Time to Develop One Hour of Training and am a little uneasy with their numbers.  It should not take 43-185 hours of preparation to deliver one hour of instructor-led classroom-based training.  That’s a bit high in my opinion.  So I search for my own measurement.

Measurement of a training’s effectiveness is fairly easy when you don’t have to justify your existence within an organization.  I certainly understand that many of my peers have been thrust under a microscope with a message of “prove it or else….”,  I don’t feel that this is the norm.

Training for training’s sake is a long deceased model for sure.   However it’s much more important that we focus on the doing, the act of training, instead of spending all of our time focusing on building far reaching, life changing metrics models.

Thoughts?  How are you measuring your training staff?

Dealing With Tough Trainees

So this second post is not really pointed at the topic of eLearning but is a subject that’s fresh in my mind so I thought I would give it it’s due. Here goes:

I completed a 40+ hour classroom-based, instructor-led training last week. This is not the norm for me these days as most of the learning in my organization has taken on a much more asynchronous approach to accommodate busy schedules and so forth. That being said, I truly enjoy classes of learners who are sent to me presumably for the single purpose of on-boarding knowledge or skills needed in their day-to-day. In this case I was facilitating a course on the software that my company produces. These individuals need to be experts in the software in order to provide consultative services to the ultimate end user.

I was very excited starting the week. I have some pre-existing relationships with the folks who attended and assumed that this would be an easy week of exploration and excersise. For the most part, this was the case. Predictably however, there was a personality or two who made my job a bit challenging.

As Trainers, Facilitators and Instructors we’re asked to step into a room of people and deliver an opportunity for learning to take place. The success of a sesison or course is measured by what the participants come away with and how effectively they use their new-found knowledge. There are times however when participants themselves can be roadblocks to successful learning. Some of the common behaviors/personalities that present these types of challenges are:

1. The Know-it-All: This person disrupts in many ways. They may disagree with points delivered, add their point of view to every section, (adding points of view is really good for adult learners by the way, just not every 5 minutes) devalue the training with their negativity (“No way, that’s not how ____ works”) and even openly challenge the Trainer/Facilitator in front of the group. I had the Add-On type, with a touch of the Devaluer to boot.
2. The Monopolizer: This person shows up in every class. They seem to be under the impression that their questions are the MOST important and regardless of whether or not they are inline with the current content, they will ask. These people draw the class off topic very easily and test the Trainer/Facilitators ability to control the room without seeming overbearing. This is why experienced Trainers have a “Parking Lot”. This is generally a flip-chart where you can park questions until later. Yes this person was in attendance.
3. The Conversationalist: The most loquacious socialite you’ve ever met. Whether it’s the game they watched Sunday or the trip they’re planning for next summer, every person within earshot will hear about it. They don’t seem interested in the class unless it serves to provide them with the opportunity to take the floor and discuss….well to discuss whatever. They can detract from the overall experience by leading the room down irrelevant paths and generally are well liked enough that any rough handling by the Trainer is apt to turn off several participants at once. Tread lightly!

I had some combination of these three main types of personality challenges at different points in the week. Generally speaking if you’re conducting a session that is less than a half day long, some peoples bad habits don’t have the chance to show themselves. With a full week however, everyone was extremely comfortable with each other and I got to see all of their true colors shine through.

I am interested in anecdotal evidence of other peoples experiences in the classroom. Whether you’re the Trainer/Facilitator or the participant, you get to observe some of these types of situations first hand. Let’s talk about a few things:

• What can be done to control these personalities? Are there truly creative approaches that have worked for you?
• What other personalities might be missing from this list?
• What stories do you have to illustrate these personalities?

Looking for some good feedback on a topic that we can all relate to.

- Till next time

Goals

Why does anyone start a blog?

I guess the answer to that is pretty simple. To share thoughts and ideas, as well as start conversations around topics of interest. I have some pretty specific goals for this blog which I hope to work toward accomplishing in the coming months and years:

• Successfully manage the blog

I myself have visited too many “blogs” owned by friends of mine that haven’t been updated in months/years. What’s the point?

• Learn from my peers

The Training Industry faces very unique challenges in a tough economic environment. The ability to show value and have a strong impact on the business as a whole is a basic requirement of training anytime the money gets tight. If you are anything like me, you have learned a lot about how to measure your efforts and ensure that your projects are in line with the goals and vision of your company over the past few years. By creating a space where training professionals can share their thoughts and ideas, I hope to accelerate my own learning curve, as well as the learning curve of my readers.

• Foster ingenuity and creativity in eLearning development

With so many tools being offered in the arena of eLearning, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose site of the goal; providing high-impact, successful training opportunities for learners. Does it really matter if Articulate offers that one little interaction that Adobe Captivate doesn’t? Is that the be-all, end-all in the grand scheme of things? Will the individual learner show a marked score improvement as a result of that interaction? I think not. High-impact eLearning allows for faster transfer of learning. The goal should be how to properly structure information in order to allow for that transfer.

This is the basic premise of what I hope will be a successful attempt at gathering my peers to a central meeting place for meaningful discussion. Please feel free to offer thoughts on the potential scope of this effort. I am always looking for passionate Learning professionals to be regular contributors to this space as well.