Five Fantastic Ways to Follow Up on Training

Ask each attendee to email you a brief summary of the two most important points they took away from the training. Gather the feedback together and post the responses in a central location. Take the list down after two weeks.  Let a few weeks go by and then mail or email the responses to the group, along with any additional feedback that has occurred in the meantime. This will give you an opportunity to reinforce what was learned a second time. When appropriate, post statistics related to the training after it occurs. For instance, if your training was on reducing customer call complaints, report complaint statistics at set intervals so attendees can see their progress. Send out a quiz related to the training’s content several weeks after the initial session. Post the responses and award a prize for the “best” answers. The quiz can be either multiple choice or free answer. For instance, if the program was about time management, you might have attendees submit the longest list they can about ways to conquer procrastination. A week after the training, ask attendees what new skill or technique they have tried based on the materials covered in the program. When appropriate, post the anecdotes in a public place or mass email. Be sure to solicit feedback as to what worked well, what didn’t go as smoothly, and what additional training is needed. At the close of the training, ask each attendee to commit to trying 1-3 new skills from the program. Ask them to write them down, and let them know that the group will get back together to follow up and discuss techniques tried. Next, schedule a follow-up session. You may want to facilitate this meeting yourself or bring back the program’s trainer. Be an active partner in the training process. Remember, people gain new skills when they see others doing the same, when they see value in those skills, and when motivated with incentives to do so.

 

Source: businesstrainingworks.com 

Five Step Model for Structuring Training

 

In designing, developing, and delivering training, the following outline can be useful to make sure that your training will be effective:

1. RATIONALE: Why Learn This? Explain to the learners why the learning is important, and how it specifically applies to their work (What’s in it for me?).
   
2. OBJECTIVES: What Will You Learn to Do? Explain the objectives of the training, in the form of “When you are finished with this training program, you will be able to do these things ….” Put the objectives in terms that are significant, specific, and meaningful.
   
3. ACTIVITIES: Design activities into the training that give the learners interesting, active, and fun things to do.
   
4. EVALUATION: Use an evaluation of some kind so that learners can check their understanding of the concepts that are in the objectives. Make it non-threatening and part of the learning process.
   
5. FEEDBACK: If the evaluation confirmed that the learner understands the concepts and/or can perform according to the objectives then provide Confirming Feedback. If the evaluation showed that the learner did not understand the concepts, or the learner can’t perform according to the objectives, then Corrective Feedback can be given, and an opportunity for continued learning, and re-evaluate, can be given.
   

 

SOURCE: Telling Ain’t Training

Guiding Principles of “Telling Ain’t Training”

1. Start with the learner and never lose focus.
2. Present principles that apply to all types of learning
   1. Mental (cognitive)
   2. Physical (psychomotor)
   3. Emotional (affective)
3. Provide a training session structure you can apply universally and that is based on learning research.
4. Include learning strategies and activities, complete with examples, that you can apply and adapt right away.
5. Lay out practical tools for designing your next training session – with a very high probability of success.
6. Present helpful ways to evaluate your training effectiveness.
7. Present both myths and truths about training and learning so that you can separate ineffective lore from what science has shown leads to a high probability of learning success.
8. Conclude with some practical wisdom and thoughts about applying and maintaining what you gain from the reading and practice.

Source: Telling Ain’t Training, ASTD

“The purpose of training, instruction, and education is…

 

“The purpose of training, instruction, and education is…to enable people to learn. Your mission is not to transmit information but to transform your learners.”

 

Source: Telling Ain’t Training, ASTD

 

Is it Instruction, Training, or Education?

With training our objective is to create a change in our learners that they can consistently reproduce without variation.

With instruction, as in training, we build new skills and knowledge. However, while training has the objective of reproducing exactly what has been taught, with instruction we learn to generalize beyond what was taught, act thoughtfully, and adapt what we learn to the situation.

Education is longer-term and broader, and is more implicit than training or instruction.

Learning is Change.

 
 

Source: Telling Ain’t Training, ASTD

4 Disciplines of Training Execution

Just finished listening to the audiobook by Steven R. Covey and some other guys, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: The Secret to Getting Things Done, On Time, With Excellence

 

As always, anything from Covey makes sense in an “I already knew that: I should be doing that” kind of way. The four disciplines are:

 

 

1.      Focus on the Wildly Important. Shift through urgent priorities and define what’s most important to the organization.

2.      Act on the Lead Measures. Identify key actions that help goal accomplishment.

3.      Keep A Compelling Scorecard. Track key measures of success.

4.      Create a Cadence of Accountability. Build an individual planning-and-accounting system to get the most important work done.

 

How would this relate to training and development?

1. Focus on the Wildly Important. Shift through urgent priorities and define what’s most important to the organization.
   
   1. Implications: Keep the training focused on what’s important. Remember Knowles theory of adult learning: adults are eager to learn what’s important to them.
      
2. Act on the Lead Measures. Identify key actions that help goal accomplishment.
   
   1. Implications: Identify behaviors (actions) that will give business results. Identify the behaviors upfront in the design phase, and let your learners know about them in when you tell them the training objectives.
      
3. Keep A Compelling Scorecard. Track key measures of success.
   
   1. Implications: Have a way to measure the success of your training. Often our training scorecards are boring… not many people find an ROI analysis very compelling. Think of better ways to measure training success (hint: understand what your sponsors think is compelling, and frame your training scorecard around that. Could be as simple as lowering the cost of training, or as complex as making your training available to a global audience).
      
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability. Build an individual planning-and-accounting system to get the most important work done.
   
   1. Implications: Build accountability into your training. The instructor is accountable for what? The learner is accountable for what? The boss of the learner is accountable for what? The sponsor of your learning program is responsible for what? Clarify this upfront in the design phase, and follow-up on it. Sometimes people think only the instructor is accountable, but we all know that it goes far beyond that… make it clear in the design, development, and the delivery.
      

Don’t make it hard to learn!

Even the easiest things to learn can be made TOO COMPLICATED!   Think of ways to make your training follow a natural organizational flow:

Organize your presentation in a way that’s easy to follow:

• Topically
• Problem –to- Solution
• Most Critical – to – least critical
• Past – Present- Future
• Big Picture – to – Small Picture
• etc.

Broadband Talent Management Plans

Not all development plans are alike. Based on your situation and career objectives, you may find one of these plans helps you improve your performance.

 

1. Development Plan Focus on development of weak areas to bring them up to an acceptable level.
   
2. Enhancement Plan Focus on development of average areas to bring them to an above average level.
   
3. Good to Great Plan Take a strength and build it to an exceptional level of expertise.
   
4. Workaround Plan Recognize a weakness and create a plan on how to achieve good results anyway.
   
5. Substitution Plan Recognize a weakness, and create a plan to use a strength to overcome the weakness.
   
6. Redeployment Plan Use strengths in assignments/projects that play to that strength.
   
7. Capitulation Plan Choice to give up trying to improve a weakness.
   
8. Compensation Plan Plan to dampen the effect of overuse of a skill by using other compensating skills.
   
9. Rerailment Plan Brings people back into line that have fallen off the career track.
   
10. Marketing Plan Plan to inform others of the individual’s talents.
    
11. Skills Transfer Plan Focus on using strengths the individual has in one job, to a new job.
    
12. Exposure Plan Give opportunities to try untested skills in challenging new assignments.
    
13. Confidence Plan Increase confidence and self-esteem by playing to unrecognized strengths
    
14. Insight Plan. Help individual understand their blind spots
    
15. Diagnostic Plan Clarify confusion that exists around strengths/weaknesses through assessments, ratings, evaluations, etc.
    
16. Assessment Plan Discover deep underlying problems that affect performance and behavior.
    

 

 

Based on the book “Broadband Talent Management, 16 Paths to Improvement” by Robert Eichinger, Michael Lombardo, and Alex Stibler