February 5, 2014 Training initiatives are designed to facilitate long term retention of new information and/or engender behavioral modification. When it comes to “industrial skills training,” what do you want to accomplish with your own training initiatives? Will your initiatives focus on minimizing downtime, reducing scrap, cross-training your workforce? Or, are those objectives tied to a “CYA” strategy? In other words, are you simply going to justify your training initiatives by showing...
February 3, 2014 Let’s face it. Sometimes you are unable to find a generic product that fits your needs — even after examining many vendor catalogs of courseware titles. And, occasionally you might even have need for a technology-based course that addresses a particular process or procedure that is specific to your plant. What should you look for? Well, unless the workers-to-be-trained are highly educated, you’re going to want to find a...
January 29, 2014 The Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act defines vocational-technical education as organized educational programs offering sequences of courses directly related to preparing individuals for paid or unpaid employment in current or emerging occupations requiring other than a baccalaureate or advanced degree. Programs include competency-based applied learning which contributes to an individual’s academic knowledge, higher-order reasoning, problem solving skills, and the occupational-specific skills necessary for economic independence as...
January 27, 2014 Wikipedia defines, “Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path or pace.[1] While still attending a “brick-and-mortar” school structure, face-to-face classroom methods are combined with computer-mediated activities. [2] A similar definition can apply to training in a plant or office setting. Two introductory points...
January 22, 2014 “He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” (Harold Wilson, former British prime minister) “Successful businesses have always adapted readily to change, but at no time in living memory — and likely at no point in history — has adaptability been a more desirable business trait than it is today. Given our recent economic difficulties, in combination with...
January 20, 2014 Laying the groundwork for this blog was a recent article (“What’s the Matter with Kansas Schools” by David Sciarra and Wade Henderson) that appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES and from which I include only the opening paragraphs: KANSAS, like every state, explicitly guarantees a free public education in its Constitution, affirming America’s founding belief that only an educated citizenry can preserve democracy and safeguard individual liberty and freedom....
January 15, 2014 (continuing from the January 6th, 8th, and 13th blogs) The fifth essential quality for truly effective e-Learning is a course design that exhibits “Efficient Sentence Use per Screen” — composed with reading-level-appropriate vocabulary. If longer term retention is the ultimate aim of your training program, the emphasis of individual teaching screens should be on the visuals while the sentences/phrases may be included as an enhancement. These visuals should be...
January 13, 2014 Training Challenge Number Six: “the failure to recognize effective e-Learning (specifics)” Recognizing that “Content Accuracy and Completeness” plus “A Real-time Environment” are the universal requirements of any valid training program, “Full Motion Video” (or animated graphics, as found in the best of gaming programs) plus “Optional Word-for-Word Audio Capability” are the first essential qualities that make up effective e-Learning. You want your people to learn, retain, and apply the...
January 8, 2014 Training Challenge Number Four: “the failure to measure longer term retention” The only training initiatives that have positive impacts on an organization’s performance and future are those programs that generate longer-term retention and positive applications of the initial training. Almost every vendor of training software or standup instruction refers to the wonderful statistics that trumpet the improvement made by most participants in their proprietary solutions. They claim that the...
January 6, 2014 Four years ago, I wrote a lengthy series of blogs intended to help the trainer sift through the noise and settle on an understanding of what training choices succeed and those choices that fail to deliver the desired results. So, for the first two weeks of 2014, I’m going to revisit, refine and edit those blogs, broken into four parts, as their message is as true today as it...
December 23, 2013 This will be my final blog of 2013 and, therefore, it seems fitting to reflect one more time on the educational differences between testing and the SOLs held in the one hand while the other hand holds out the promises of questioning and learning. The “Great Books of the Western World” and its companion collection, “The Great Ideas Today,” were published more than a half-century ago. Their introduction was...
December 18, 2013 What are the true “reading literacy” facts today? Only 24 percent of this nation’s 4th graders are able to form opinions from what they read, and only 34 percent of our high school seniors can. The majority of our working adult population cannot comprehend beyond a fourth- or fifth-grade reading level. Opportunity knocks! And that knocking your imagination should hear is for the full-motion, optional word-for-word audio, fully branched,...
December 16, 2013 A while ago I received two newsletters advocating the same thing: On-The-Job (OTJ) Training. One newsletter pointed out, “. . . you can learn about forklift safety, but eventually learners will need to drive one before true learning takes place.” The other observed, “. . . when you ask a dozen workers in almost any organization about how they learned their job — most will point to On The...
December 11, 2013 An article by Greg Toppo in the October 6 USA TODAY underscores a problem we have seen developing for the past decade: “A first-ever international comparison of the labor force in 23 industrialized nations shows that Americans ages 16 to 65 fall below international averages in basic problem-solving, reading and math skills, with gaps between the more- and less-educated in the USA larger than those of many other countries....
