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THE FIVE STEPS TO TRAINING SUCCESS

If you developed a skills inventory and matched these skills to employees according to need, you have a good start on developing an effective training program. You might deliver this training yourself, or you might hire others to deliver it. Regardless of how the training is delivered, the sequence in which your employees are taught new skills will have much to do with the success of the training. Therefore, it is not sufficient to just identify the skills your employees require, and match people to these skills. You have to make sure they are trained in the right way.

Of all the discussions on training we have seen, perhaps the best was presented by Thomas F. Gilbert in his book, Human Competence:  Engineering Worthy Performance. Gilbert suggests a sequence of five steps you should follow that are most likely to lead to training success. In summary, here are Gilbert's five steps.

Step 1: Motivate and Familiarize
Unfortunately, we often begin the process of teaching people a new skill with the assumption that they are interested in learning the skill, and see the need for the skill to the same extent as we do.  We are often wrong in this assumption. Therefore Gilbert suggests that your first step in teaching a new skill is to create "need to know."

Why is the skill important? What difference does it make whether or not one possesses the skill? For most people, the acquisition of a new skill requires time, effort, and expenditure of energy. Old, comfortable modes of behavior may have to be put aside so that new behavior can be learned. New methods, new techniques, and new modes of behavior are required. At first, these new methods, new techniques, and new methods of behavior are uncomfortable and unnatural. Learning a new skill requires change, and change is difficult. None of us will change until we see a reason to do so. Your first step in teaching a new skill should then be to create that need for change.

In our consulting business, we spend most of our time teaching executives, managers, and supervisors new management skills.  We teach participative management, where the manager/supervisor acts as a coach and facilitator rather than decision maker and problem solver. For most of the people we train, this new style of management is significantly different from any they have practiced or experienced before. Adapting to this new style requires a drastic change for most of them; therefore we begin our training with an exercise to help them reach their own conclusions about the need to change - the need to learn those new management skills. Our exercise is simple. We ask managers and supervisors to compare and contrast the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in areas such as politics, economics, family life, competitiveness, and work force.  The new management style we teach is designed to address the needs of the business climate of the 1980s and 1990s. Upon completion of our exercise, most of our trainees have confirmed for themselves what they already knew - the world of work, the world of business is drastically different from the world of three decades ago, or even two decades ago. New styles of management are required to meet the economic, social, political, environmental,
and other changes that have occurred. There is a need to change the way we manage. The purpose of our exercise is to allow the managers and supervisors we train to reach their own conclusions about their need to learn new skills.

Regardless of what skill you wish your employees to acquire from the training you offer, like ours, your first task is to enable them to see a need to change - a need to learn and apply the new skills. Start your training with the consequences of failing to possess the skill. Make sure you have a good answer to the question any person you train is likely to ask (or think of asking): "Why do I need to know this?" If possible, arrange for those you are training to arrive at the conclusion that they "need to know" themselves.

Step 2: Check People Out on the Basic Skill Required for Learning the New Skill
Certain basic skills are a prerequisite to learning other skills.  For example, unless I know how to add and subtract, I cannot learn how to balance a checkbook. Unless I have basic knowledge about the operation of an internal combustion engine, I cannot be taught to make repairs to that engine.  In your screening of applicants, you should have checked for basic knowledge and skills employees brought to the job as a result of prior education, training, or experience. They should know the basics, but check them out anyway. Maybe a brief refresher is in order.

Step 3: Teach the Specific Skills of the Task
With mastery of the basic skills, your employees are now ready to learn specific skills. Here, we refer to the normal, usual, or typical. How does an employee fill the typical order? What steps should be followed in making common repairs? What is the one way that works most of the time? For example, 90 percent of the time, customers order standard quantities of items from the standard catalog. First, teach employees how to fill that standard order.

Step 4: Teach Mastery Skills
Once your employees have learned to fill the standard or typical order, they are ready to progress to the atypical or complex - the exception to the rule. Once they learn to make he common type of repair, they are now ready to advance to the more complex.

Step 5: Provide an Opportunity for Immediate Application
Finally, whatever skill you teach, arrange for your employees to apply/use the new skill on the job immediately after the completion of training. Of all our suggestions about how to make training effective, application - immediate application - is probably most important. You can run exercises during training. You can try to create realistic scenarios.  But nothing is as effective to cement what people have learned as to send them out of the training into the store - or office - to apply the skill in a real life - real customer - situation. In our own training programs, we provide immediate follow-up application of all we teach. It is perhaps the most important thing we do in teaching new skills.

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