We’re so glad you’ve chosen to learn more about training programs and the ways they can benefit your business. Training programs are an essential part of any successful organization, as they provide employees with the knowledge and skills needed for success. Here are five things your business needs to know about training programs: 

1. Set Clear Objectives:
Before beginning a training program, it is important that you set clear objectives for what will be accomplished during the program and how it will improve employee performance or productivity in general. This helps ensure that everyone involved understands why these efforts are being made and what goals should be achieved by completion of the program. 

2. Design Relevant Content:
When designing content for a training program, make sure that it is relevant to both current trends within your industry as well as applicable job roles within your organization itself – this way participants can apply their learning directly on-the-job rather than having theoretical knowledge without practical application opportunities.. 

3 .Choose Appropriate Delivery Methods :
There are many different delivery methods available when creating a new training course; from classroom lectures through videos or even virtual reality simulations - there's something out there suitable for every type of learner! Consider which method best suits each topic before deciding upon one specific approach..  

 4 . Measure Success :
It's not enough just running courses; measuring their success afterwards allows organizations identify areas where further improvement may be necessary such as revising existing material or introducing additional topics into future sessions if desired results have not been met after initial implementation..  

 5 . Evaluate Effectiveness :
Upon completion of the courses, evaluate effectiveness using surveys , interviews , focus groups etc., then use findings from these evaluations in order plan future initiatives accordingly - this ensures maximum return on investment (ROI) while also providing valuable insights into overall progress made thus far!.   

We hope these tips help you get started when planning out upcoming trainings at work – good luck!

​When administrators within a school district cannot produce an email that uses the correct words for the context, people lose confidence in the quality of education provided to the students.  Recently, I received an email, forwarded to me, that simply stated that they wanted to "insure" that the correct procedures were followed.   Not only is this passive voice, insure is not the correct word for the context.   If they were buying an insurance policy, then insure would work.  They were not.    
Insure = monetary value
ensure = guarantee
It may seem petty and silly to call out something like this, but, I cannot fathom how we will be able to communicate over the next 100 years if we cannot agree on some basic rules of language.   How can we continue to buy and sell and be sure (see, be sure could have a reasonable replacement word: ensure) that we are getting what we expect and that the price we pay is valid?   Language is how.

Believe me, i am not one of these 'Americans' that want to force everyone to use English or get the hell out.  I am not that arrogant.  We know that there have been all sorts of issues with meanings getting "lost in translation," such as "ich bin ein berliner."  I just want to be sure that we are using this agreed upon form of communication well enough to understand each other. 

Based on my 16 years of experience, as a trainer for software installations, vocabulary is the single worst offender toward the failure to assimilate new information.  If we aren't both talking about a pot, how can we be sure we know how to cook with it?

I know that language does morph and change over time and I certainly don't want to go back to a world where everything is so formal we are afraid to speak and share our opinions.  However, we do need to make sure our message is clear and correct as we can possibly make it.  

Springtime is a time of inspiration and for shaking off the cold of winter.  As the daffodils push up through the dirt and faces its bud to the sunlight, I am thinking about how we can find a way to change education and make it accessible to even those who may not be traditional in whatever form that may be.

I was a non-traditional student, not because I didn't go directly to college after high school, but because I discovered the lounge and my financial support dried up.  Good thing I chose to go to community college because of my unwillingness to take SATs or I would have cost my mom a mountain more money than the 18.35/credit hour and books.  After that first year, I became a non-traditional student.  I worked full time (McDonald's and as a drug treatment counselor) and started back again the following Fall taking US History with Mrs. Vines.  Then I discovered that I could succeed in college and I could even get great grades.  This was because Mrs. Vines made it clear if I put in the effort, she would work just as hard to help me succeed.

Today I was driving quite a distance and, as per usual, I was listening to podcasts and found a recurring theme of changing the education paradigm.  This American Life shared a story about the differences between poor neighborhood public schools and high dollar private schools despite their being within 3 miles of one another.  American Radio Works discussed UnRetirement where adults and seniors are continuing their educations to keep their skills, build new skills and become marketable well into retirement age.  These two podcasts got me thinking... We are missing the mark in many ways.

Problems:

• "Sticker Price" - Despite what the pundits say, I can personally say, I did indeed pay "sticker price" for my entire education.  In 1987, I could work a low paying job and pay my way to my associates degree.  When I transferred to a 4 year institution, I applied for 37 different scholarships pulling out dyslexia, adoptee, veteran's child; I qualified for exactly zero.   In the late 1990's, with some help, I was able to finish my bachelor's degree without student loans.  Master degree.... well.... I mortgaged my retirement by taking out student loans.  My income doesn't provide enough funding to pay off that loan before I am well beyond useful in the job market.
• Setting poor students up for failure - As evidenced by the statistics and the podcasts to which I have listened, many poor students, despite their potential and scholarships, often do not graduate in under six years.  
• Colleges are stand-alone entities - Many college campuses, other than the live-on-campus student population, shut down in the late afternoons.
• Traditional semester/trimester provides an unrealistic view of the "real world." - Many Americans would love to have 16 weeks on and 4 weeks off, with a break somewhere in the middle too.  
• Students told that college is their only way out. - Bunk!  Some students are well suited for all sorts of intelligent and difficult trades.  Not every person will thrive in college in its current traditional state.  What about all the skilled trades?  Not just nursing assistants.

There is so much more wrong but these are some clear examples that we might be able to fix with enough strength and courage of the right people in the right places.

Solutions

• Sticker Price - We need to find new ways to deliver education for as many as possible at the most reasonable price possible.  MOOCS have a massive failure rate and will most likely find their ways into training and other scenarios but as a pathway to a degree, there is much more to be done.  Let the research institutions continue to exist but separate from the educational institutions.  Many universities and colleges have a "publish or perish" mandate that causes professors to move away from teaching and toward publishing.  TA's can be great but really, they aren't from whom the student is paying to learn.  Let's leverage the communities more.  What sort of businesses can help educate people?  What sort of volunteer organizations can build community based learning?
• Setting up poor students for failure - Many students struggle, despite how smart they are, because they don't believe that they deserve to educate themselves into the middle class or better.  How can we build both confidence and responsibility?  The program mentioned in the This American Life episode was designed for two things, inspire poor students toward greatness through exposure, and develop empathy of the privileged students to understand that the world isn't as simple as they have it.  How do we develop these interactions more organically?  How can we encourage avoiding stereotypes and more interaction?  I doubt bussing is the answer, but we need to find a way to interact better instead of perpetuating the "other side of the tracks" attitudes that make the poor look angrily up and the rich look angrily down.
• Colleges are stand-alone entities - They don't have to be.  These classrooms could be occupied for many more hours than they are.  There are some places that senior living communities are opening apartments to college students.  If 55+ people started living on campus there could be so many positive results including the reduction of binge drinking and adults building and maintaining skills well into their senior years.  Many studies state that those who continue to educate themselves have lower instances dementia and less cognitive decline.  This could be evidence of it truly "takes a village." 
• Traditional semester/trimester - This no longer makes good sense.  It creates an unrealistic view of the world and creates breaks that cause loss of obtained knowledge.  I propose that these schools move to something similar to Colorado College and many of the on-line institutions.  Take one class at a time concentrate it and shorten the duration.  Sure, that means that people will be attending classes year round, but the flexibility it brings to everyone's lives would off set much.  Sure, there are plenty of businesses that live and die by "Spring break" but, I believe, the trade off is that we will have fewer date rape situations, fewer bouts with alcohol poisoning, and the money will find its way to other pockets. 
• Students told that college is their only path - I know that my path was non-traditional and I am still finding that I haven't yet found a way toward what I really want to do.  I was lucky, I had a mother who sent me to aptitude testing and I know where my strengths were.  Unfortunately, I made some bad decisions and paying the bills became the most important part of my life.  I was a doer and while I did finally figure out college and good grades, I would have loved to learn some specific skills as well.  America, it is time to teach programming starting in first grade.  Even if 90 percent of students do not become programmers, we all must know the concepts.  We can't just be end-users.  

I know that this turned out to be a really long blog post.  Thanks to everyone who hung with me and read the whole thing.  There are many problems to solve.  We need to refuse to accept "that is the way we have always done it" and move toward, "how can we do it better?"

Recently, I observed a friend, who is also a learning professional, training, where they exclaimed that they were on the phone/web session for well over 4 hours and it got me thinking about the concept of learner fatigue.  

As many of us know... when we teach classroom courses we, at least, vary the activities if we cannot take specific periodic breaks.  When we are conducting Web/phone based training it is easy to slip into lecture and forget that our learners probably stopped assimilating information way back in the lesson.  

I decided to do some research and was surprised to find there are very few studies published on learner fatigue through Google searching.  I even spent time within a college library site and still found very little.  However, I did find this nice gem:

These are great for classroom based learning.  I know when I get the glazed eye look, I know that the learners are not fully engaged.  When on the web, if the connection is not great and I have to demonstrate only, it is a lot harder to assess learner interaction.  

What sort of ideas do you have for synchronous web based learning?

Should we encourage self-paced learning before synchronous sessions to turn "training" into "discussion?"

What do you do today?  What do you wish you could do better?

Recently, myself included, I listened to people complaining much about their college education, for the many courses they had to "teach themselves."  So, which is it?  Critical thinking skills or paying a lot of money to read and deliver the information to ourselves.  If the latter is the case, why would we continue to pay large amounts of money to educate ourselves?

I don't have the answer.  However, let's take a look at what defines critical thinking:  
According to Critical Thinking. org:

For me it is much simpler than this long and detailed quote.  To me, Critical Thinking is taking learned information, assimilating it, and applying it to other information through intuitive leaps.

What does this have to do with education and teaching oneself?  Well, for me I think that educators often miss the mark.  If there is no base of knowledge the learner cannot make intuitive leaps.  On the other hand, many learners come to courses to be "taught" information and for many decades, that is what educators did.  Now in the world of No Child Left Behind teachers are more focused on test scores than helping students make intuitive leaps.  

As an elementary school student, I was placed in the Learning Disabilities program where I was pulled out of regular classes to attend my Resource learning class.  These teachers were tasked with finding a way that helped students, like me, find a new way to assimilating the learning in the mainstream classrooms.  What they did was teach us how to grow things, make recipes and on top of that building our reading comprehension.  I learned skills that my mainstream classmates did not... applying learning concepts to real world scenarios.  Sure, they were often simple topics like doubling or tripling a recipe using fractions and calculating the results.  But fractions were not nearly as daunting in this scenario.

How do we get people to apply critical thinking principles when the are taught to not think and relate information to other topics?  How do we get past the fear?  What do we say to students who feel they had to "teach themselves?"  

ROI (Return on Investment), ROI, ROI, that is what many training leaders, and managers, hear every day.  But what does that mean?

Training is one of the only job functions within an organization that must prove its value over and over, yet, in most cases the budget for it is >1% of the operating budget.  

Does anyone ask the marketing department how many paper sheets we print it takes to produce 1 sale?  Does any CEO ask what is the ROI of software development?  In most cases, no, they do not.  Yet training, especially when purchasing a Learning Management System (LMS), is expected to offer an immediate return.  

Organizations that sell their training to their end customers, certainly can eventually provide an ROI once an LMS is in place and quality can be measured by the overall satisfaction of the key staff, and reduction of support calls on learning topics.  The important factor here is measuring the correct parameters.  Can we reduce travel?  Maybe and maybe not; but we can improve the overall customer satisfaction with the on-site travel by making the on-site time more about practical examples and not about learning the basics.  

So what does this have to do with Learning Organizations?  A true learning organization goes beyond just offering training courses.  It is a company that realizes the following facts to be true and invests in the infrastructure to accomplish these tasks:

• Realizing that most learning is "informal" (Bersin, 2012).
• Understanding that formal training is useful but not the whole equation (Bersin, 2012).  
• Measuring the key parameters, not just the hours spent or the money made (Kelly, 2012).
• Ensures access to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) (Bersin, 2012).
• Shows through action that Learning is a company-wide priority.

A good place to start understanding if an organization is in dire need of some reevaluation, or just some tweaking, is by taking the survey provided by Clark (2010) on the Website "Big Dog and Little Dog Juxtaposition."

Training is often the black hole of intangible results.  As training leaders we can help provide answers when asking the right questions.  That only goes so far.  Generating buy-in within the organization requires an openness to new ideas, and a willingness to try action research.

References:
Bersin, J. (2012). 5 Keys to Building a Learning Organization. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2012/01/18/5-keys-to-building-a-learning-organization/

Clark, D. (2010). Learning Organization Profile. Retrieved from http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/learnorg.html 

Kelly, T. (2012, January 31). Learning Metrics: Speaking the Language of Business [Video file]. Retrieved from GoToWebinar website: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/961615464

Smith, M. K. (2001) 'The learning organization', the encyclopedia of informal education, http://www.infed.org/biblio/learning-organization.htm.

I recently found this image on Facebook, and while it is dated 1994 its message is clear, and still true today, that this teacher believes in authority over accuracy.  When I shared it I received a few stories of how some parent's own children had a similar experience.  Here is an example of the responses received:

It is very sad that even now, learners are taught to blindly accept authority and the messages delivered by them.  This is why our work force cannot make reasoned decisions; and make intuitive leaps based on the information provided.  If we want our society to grow and learn, we must, MUST, question the answers provided.  

Math teachers teach us to not only work out the problem but to test the solution.  I remember my high school algebra and geometry teachers would have us show our work as we completed a problem, or proof.  Then... they would have us plug in our solution into the original problem and see if the math actually works.  In science class we learned about the scientific method:  generating a hypothesis, planning an experiment to test the hypothesis, followed by documenting the results and determining if the results proved, disproved, or was inconclusive to either prove or disprove, the hypothesis.

So, how do we encourage critical thinking when we have so many educators institutionalized by the concept that they are to be the authority despite their accuracy?  Sure it is embarrassing to stand in front of a class and pronounce, with authority, an inaccurate statement.  But, teaching people that to question the answer is worse than having the wrong answer breeds a work force of people who will not make decisions for themselves.  

In my experience, businesses that discourage independent thought, have more issues in the long run.  

So, things we can do as leaders and educators:

• Don't be afraid to be wrong - I had a music teacher who taught me one of the best lessons in life... "If you are going to miss it... Miss it loud!"  That means sometimes we make big mistakes.  We recognize our mistakes, acknowledge them, and learn from them.
• Encourage independent thought and make mistakes learning opportunities.  My favorite acronym is PICNIC (Problem in Chair, Not in Computer).  I call it on myself often.  If learners know we too are human, our messages gain credibility and memorability.
• We are guides, not authorities - We are not the kings and queens of our classrooms, we are here to encourage the next group of great thinkers.  
• Expand your mind along with your class - Try lateral thinking puzzles.  Encourage thinking beyond the lesson.    

Respect, as the we all hear, is earned not just a fact of our position.  Forcing someone to respect us because of our position, does a disservice to those we educate and ourselves.

Leadership Freak BLOG Sourced from:  http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/popping-the-self-delusion-bubble/

My husband and I began watching the Amazing Race during its second or third season after a friend couldn't stop raving over the program.

During that season when there were six, or nine, teams left; and they were in a desert country, with a clue that told them to dig in their designated sand lots to locate a scarab to get their next clue.  Not a single team knew what a scarab was and  they were digging around the sand in the hopes they would find "something" and there weren't any other things they might find instead of a scarab.  I was astonished that not one of these teams, raised in the United States, had any concept of something I just assumed everyone knew.  This was after the movie "The Mummy" played in theaters, which made this even more incongruous to me.  It was then I realized that many Americans, older and younger, than I, did not have the same experience as I did.  

I grew up in the suburbs outside of Washington, DC and I remember learning so many things during my years in public education.  During my sixth grade year, when we were studying Greek and Roman history, we learned about how the Christians moved their holy days to coincide with the Pagan holy days in order to convert them to Christianity.  I don't know anyone who learned this sort of concept in elementary school.  

This experience created an "ah-ha" moment in my life.  It was then I understood that there are gaps in everyone's experiences and knowledge base.  That means we as trainers and educators, we must find a way to bridge the gap between our assumptions and others experiences.  

There are many ways to work toward this understanding and bridge the gap between ourselves and those we want to educate.  Here are a few things I have found from my experience:

• Acronyms have no place in the classroom.  No matter what acronyms mean in your business or any other, they can cause a great deal of confusion.  REM could mean Rapid Eye Movement to one person and a rock band to another.
• Never assume.  I work in an industry that, while there are standards, each site does their own thing based on their impression of the industry standards.  I cannot assume the words I use for one company will even make sense to another.  
• Be clear and diversify delivery.  I keep an eye on those I train and do my best to explain topics in more than one way.  Not only is variety the spice of life but it helps us speak to everyone's experiences and learning styles.  

We all come to our interactions with others with our own experiences and perceptions. As trainers and educators, we need to be cognizant that our experiences and base of knowledge come from our life experiences and others may not share the same.