We're Doing it Wrong and We Know it

I’ll admit it, I’m a training geek. I can tell you why the analysis phase makes or breaks training. I can ramble on about adult learning theory, creating meaningful objectives, developing test questions that will tell you who really learned the material covered and so on.  

But I Won’t!

 All that stuff helps us design, develop and deliver the best training possible within our narrow constraints. It’s good enough for now. However, training professionals need to think about things further down the road then our next big deadline.

I’m not saying that we aren’t meeting the needs of our learners. All that I’m saying is that as society evolves (or devolves - for you glass half-empty types), training in general, and instructional design specifically, needs to evolve along
with it.

When we evaluate training, we have a tendency to look at the numbers from surveys, test results, and maybe how the training is applied to the job. We also look at the design and compare it to other similar training. You might hear people say, “That class was good, but when the last one that Barbara did was much better.” Or “This elearning module was good. Normally, I fall asleep around the 10 minute mark, but this one had stuff I could click on and allowed me to skip the things I already knew.” We rarely, if ever, compare what we present to our learners with anything outside the training world.

It’s something we need to more of. We spend 8-14 hours a day immersed in the world of training, asking ourselves whether this is instructionally sound, whether we are reinforcing our key points, if our learners can recognize the difference between two concepts, whether our assessments truly measure what we teach, and so on. Normal, non-training types may spend a few hours a quarter in the training world and are usually not there voluntarily. So how do we make them feel comfortable in our world? The short answer is that we need to evolve in a way that takes the best from what is outside the training realm and apply it to our existing processes and strategies. We must do so while remaining true to training’s goals to improve our learner’s knowledge, skills, behaviors and performance.

One of the ways to evolve is to explore how other industries tackle the same problems we do. To do so, we need to identify our biggest barriers to implementing solid learning. Is it keeping the audience interested? Is it that the learners don’t connect with our training? Are we not leveraging technology effectively? Are we unable to change behavior to achieve desired results? Do we have difficulty simplifying complex content? Other industries face the same problems. In the political arena, candidates and government officials attempt to use simple messages to explain their positions. TV is in the business of keeping the audience interested. Psychiatrists, sales folks, and motivational speakers are focused on changing behavior and getting people to take action. The list goes on. If we take time to think outside of the world of training and organizational development, we can move forward.