I was reading a post on linked-in on the problems with determining how to deal with problems such as leadership, miss-management and so on. This lead to me thinking that leadership and miss-management and things such as environment or ergonomics are not training problems at all they are in effect Human performance problems. Training is only a problem in about 20% of the cases, the other 80% of the time it’s a problem with management or something else.
Needs assessments are normally the first stop to determining what an organizations problem is or what they need. Trainers have to be prepared to do interviews and surveys that are effective yet brief enough for CEO’s middle managers and employees to fill out and get back to the trainer(s) in a timely fashion, I would also give the option of emailing these tools back because snail mail may be too inconvenient for all involved. Then once the interviews and surveys are in we have to do some type of analysis to determine if the majority are in agreement as to the problem and where it lays. We can then move on to check other problems and find solutions. Interview skills as well as the skill of developing surveys are essential to effective training. The next step is looking and using models to determine gaps ADDIE is one of the most frequent ISD models but what about HPT (HPI) models they are also useful.
Robert Mager has a fabulous method for determining gap analysis as well as Gilbert (The Gilbert model). These HPT models make semi-quick work of determining if the problem(s) lie with poor training, or something else, and these models are so easy to understand and follow. I am sure that Amazon or some other online bookstore has Magers books at fairly reasonable prices. As a grad student working on projects his books were invaluable tools.
I think everyone of us in this industry need a good tool box for references Friday I will have a list of items each of us might want in our tool box as TD and HPT professionals, any suggestions would be welcome.
As always happy training and comments, concerns and guests are always welcome 🙂
Leigh
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Jack Shaw is a communicator who does training and has been in the trenches as well as in management and development areas. His priority is how to communicate credibily in the workplace.