PREPARATION FOR SUCCESS
Today, many would-be instructional designers attend colleges and universities in order to attain their Bachelors and/or Masters degrees in that field.
Of course, higher education has a place in preparing our next generation of trainers and instructional designers. Theoretical understanding is important.
However, when it comes to teaching “templates of learning design,” higher education seriously misdirects the student.
Cookie-cutter solutions are never the answer. Every training initiative undertaken has specific — not, generic — solutions. Templating (either by the organization itself or by the purchase of a vendor’s templated creation) will not work. You may create, or purchase, such a course — but, you will not provide a solution.
Why?
Because each training initiative you undertake must be tailored to the specific skills necessary to adequately perform a specific task! And, that means knowing your workforce demographics; the specific jobs assigned; and, the specific skills required to perform those jobs.
Therefore, it is critical to focus training where it will have the greatest effect on performance. Using needs assessment and task analysis techniques, you can identify the greatest opportunities to improve performance through training.
Today, rich on-line skills assessment tests are readily available which will help you specifically target the “learning gaps” within your employee population, making it possible for you to design specific solutions while, at the same time, eliminating much of the waste in traditional “one size fits all” training.
In order to be successful, a training initiative must become a specific solution that can be successfully implemented within the existing challenges of your organization.
The bottom line is that you need to design your training initiative from the ground up. And that includes a skills gap analysis of the population to-be-trained; the specific tasks that must be accomplished; and, the specific skills required to perform those tasks.
If you will follow that process, everybody wins!
More on Monday – – –
— Bill Walton, co-Founder, ITC Learning
February 20, 2019
www.itclearning.com/blog/ (Mondays & Wednesdays)
“THE WORLD RELIES ON THE HANDS OF ITS MEN AND WOMEN”