Training managers? David Hardison and Phil Cowan offer ideas on how to best communicate with them while reducing their training anxiety.
What do drinking water, a comb and a blender have in common? They can all become great object lessons with training applications.
When you're attending an interactive webinar or classroom workshop like our Train-the-Trainer Boot Camp, time passes more quickly than if our trainers were just talking heads for eight hours because you're stimulated and engaged. The Bob Pike Group has created an Instructional Design workshop based on how we design our workshops to help you integrate participant-centered interaction from the ground up.
The Bob Pike Group believes that just because you've put the information out there, in a somewhat formidable method, doesn't mean your trainees have learned it. Just like face-to-face, classroom-based learning, webinars should be interactive. And studies show, it needs to be twice as participative.
Can technical information really be interesting? Yes! An accounting professor made profit and loss fascinating by talking about the early days of the Wells Fargo company, complete with cowboys, Indians, gunfights, and desperate men riding their horses past human and equine endurance to get to safety. There was plenty of passion, and interest, and I learned something about double entry bookkeeping.
It can be done. It's not easy, I'll grant you that. But it is possible.
Here's how you do it...
Traditional pedagogical methods encourage revealing theory and perhaps then attempting to bring awareness as to why you're learning the information. However, a much more effective method most of the time-and one that meshes better with how the brain works and assimilates information-is to have learners EAT.
Just because you've said it doesn't mean your "learners" learned it. One validated teaching philosophy shows that content must be revisited at least six times for the information to be moved from short term into long term memory. Of course this is critical if you want your learners to actually transfer what they learned back to the job!
Another classroom technique that can increase retention significantly is...
Stephen Hudak, one of our ezine readers, submitted this simple idea which works to accelerate learning.
Your mission, whether you would like to accept or reject it, is to create a training program for workers who are paid hourly. Focus groups are one of the simplest and safest ways to do a needs analysis, yet so many trainers...
In the last few years, we in the U.S. have all heard a lot about "trillion dollar" problems - health care reform, bank bailouts, automaker rescues, etc. However, not much is being said about the trillion dollar training problem.
Last year, organizations spent $134 billion dollars on training in the U.S, according to the American Society for Training and Development. However, only 15-30 percent of learning transfers into actual use on the job to improve performance. That means that somewhere around $100 billion of it was wasted! And that is only the direct cost of training - not the salaries of the people who sat in the classroom. That alone is a huge and alarming number.
But it gets worse.
