This is a more tricky discussion than it may seem at the outset. What are the methods of training? Which are most effective? How is ‘effective’ defined anyway?
So let’s start at the start – or rather at the end! To define ‘effective’, you need to first consider why the training is needed in the first place. This means you need to establish what outcome you want to achieve from the training and work backward from there.
Here is how an effective training program should work:
1. Why is the Training Needed?
Why are you considering spending your money on employee training? What do you want the training to do for you? Obviously, there is no use educating your staff if it does not ultimately benefit you.
A few examples of objectives for training are: employees produce results (whether they are widgets, documents, programs, etc.) that have too many defects, and you want to reduce those defects; or they take too long to produce the results and you’d like them to be more effective and efficient; or they don’t know or forget how to do certain tasks, you’d like to teach them or refresh a prior training so they can perform those tasks without fail every time.
It is a good idea to define objective metrics (aka, key performance indices, KPIs) to assess any improvement, rather than subjectively guessing if there was any positive change. For instance, a maximum of one defective widget out of every thousand produced. Lacking objective measures makes it possible for the person authorizing the training expense to either purposefully or unintentionally overestimate the effectiveness of the results.
2. What Skills are Required
Decide what skills are needed to achieve the results you established in Step 1. You should be able to list those skills without thinking about the people you wish to train. You may, and should consider your best employee who is performing the job well, and who you would like to utilize as a model.
For instance, you could decide that all programmers working for your firm must be able to use the Python programming language, adhere to the coding standards you’ve established for your business, and utilize the libraries you’ve created.
3. What Skills Exist
This is where you evaluate the potential training candidates. Find out what abilities they already possess that are compatible with what you want them to achieve.
In keeping with the example above, a candidate might be familiar with Python.
4. What to Teach
This is a matter of simple gap analysis between the desired skills (step 2 above) and the skills the candidate already possesses (step 3 above).
In the example above, the candidate is already proficient in Python programming skills but does not know the company’s programming standards nor the libraries that are specific to your team. So that is what they need to be trained on.
5. Create or Select Training Material
You have a variety of options for how to train your staff, including face-to-face instruction, online instruction, computer-based instruction, etc. Depending on how you intend to carry out the training, how you develop that material will vary. How you want the training to be carried out subsequently should also be taken into account at this point.
You get more bang for your buck if the material can be prepared such that it may be used in several forms of training. In some cases, you may be able to acquire that training material if the topics are generic enough.
In the example above, both your programming standards and your libraries are specific to your organizations and you’ll have to choose how to create the training material. It could be as simple as opening up a document and going through it with the trainees, could be a PowerPoint-like presentation led by an instructor, or could be elaborate eLearning material you had someone prepare, with simulations, examples and practice runs.
If the training was generic enough, for example, how to use Microsoft Excel better, you can either acquire the training material or even purchase the training or get a third-party instructor to deliver the training to your team.
6. Teach
This is the delivery of the training to the trainees. This is in line with how the training material was developed in the step above.
There is a lot to be said about how training is delivered and what methods are more efficient for delivering different training sessions We’ll cover that in a future blog.
7. Communicate
This is not a discrete step in the training process. It’s listed here because this is where the control of this whole process shifts from the trainer to the trainee. Even if well-defined objectives are finally translated into effective training materials, the message will be lost before it reaches the trainee’s mind if the instruction is poorly delivered.
Stating the obvious here, but the training material needs to be communicated in a way that the trainees readily receive and understand it.
8. Learn
Just like there are various ways of ‘teaching’, there are multiple ways people learn. The easiest of these categorizations are: visual, audio, and kinesthetic. A vast majority of people are visual learners. You should constantly try to make your training sessions visually engaging and effective.
The learning process will be improved, though, if you can appeal to your trainees’ several senses. For instance, incorporating all of the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic senses can enhance learning. In his book Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina makes the case that adding fragrances to the learning process could enhance it even more.
9. Retain
Of course, it’s not much use if the trainees walk off the training session and forget majority of the training. Unfortunately, this is what happens with most training sessions that focus on just delivering the information, also called ‘information dumping’. Studies suggest that 50 – 80% of all information is forgotten within 24 hours of a ‘lecture’ and 97% by day 30! (https://uwaterloo.ca/campus-wellness/curve-forgetting).
There are numerous techniques to improve information retention after delivery. We’ll talk about that in detail in a future blog.
In the example, we’ve been building, what good is it if trainee programmers sit in a training session on the company programming standards on a Friday, and when they return on Monday to start to program, they’ve already forgotten three out of every four rules they learned!
10. Use
Even if the trainees remember an optimistic 50% of what they learned the previous day, there is no guarantee they’ll use that new information.
They may not use it because they don’t like the new way of doing it, just continue to do the work as they’ve always done out of habit, may not fully understand how to put the new knowledge into practice, may not have the right tools to do so, or even if they have the right tools, they may not always be able to connect the dots between the new knowledge and how the tools work, or a variety of other reason.
The question then becomes: how do you ensure that the information transferred during the training session is not only properly transferred (communicated), received (learned), and retained but is also put to use?
11. Evaluate Results
This is the ultimate closure of the loop. You started off with some objectives you wanted to get from your training, this final step evaluates if those results were actually achieved.
This step is needed so that you can assess the effectiveness of the training, but also to be able to fix any issues with the whole training process if it did not get you what you wanted. Training is important but it can be expensive; you need to ensure that it is effective and gets you a high return on your investment.
This step will either establish that your investment was useful, or at least point towards issues in the training process so you can improve it for the next time around.
At least steps 7 through 10 are in your control. Would it not be wonderful if the training was designed in such a way to take all these phases into account? So that at the end of the training, ‘use’ was guaranteed, and evaluation showed a high ROI?
It’s possible. More on how to achieve this in a future blog.
