D Foster Associates

As the year comes to an end, I always start thinking about where I am with my current goals, and what goals I will set for the upcoming year. This is always a good time for you and your company to look at their training and performance goals and make sure they are properly aligned. So, in that spirit, over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some customer examples of training and performance goals.

When I was working on an assessment project for a large aerospace company, I started off with what seemed like a simple question to the Director of Training, “What is your group’s primary mission?” To which I got a quick and definitive answer, “To deliver 834,000 hours of training.” After digging some more, I was relieved to find out that there were secondary goals that defined the quality of training and satisfaction of the learners, which was good. When interviewing other people in the Training department, they were all able to immediately repeat their mission exactly, “To deliver 834,000 hours of training.”

So, what’s wrong with that you say? Well, none of them could provide me with specific information on how deliverying 834,000 hours of training would improve the performance of the company. To make things even better, when I suggested that by using a combination of blended learning, competency development, and targeted performance goals and measurement, they could deliver the same effective amount training in less than 600,000 hours, they were very concerned. “But we won’t deliver 834,000 hours of training, we won’t get our bonuses!” was the loud response. The core problem was that the training department was measured and compensated soley on their ability to deliver hours of “butts-in-seats,” with no measurement or tracking of the impact that had on the company.

So, before you get all excited that your department has solid, well-defined training goals for the next year, make sure you can also explain how those goals will drive the performance of the company. If you can’t explain it, and have no process to measure that impact, your goal setting is not done.

I was reading a recent Will Thallheimer post about conversational writing where he referenced a great post by Kathy Sierra that says exactly what I’ve been feeling for a long time:

If you want people to learn and remember what you write, say it conversationally.

She actually references a 2000 study from the Journal of Educational Psychology that showed:

“In five out of five studies, students who learned with personalized text performed better on subsequent transfer tests than students who learned with formal text. Overall, participants in the personalized group produced between 20 to 46 percent more solutions to transfer problems than the formal group.”

This has been something that I have believed in for many years, but because I don’t have a formal Instructional Design background, I never said it very loud. When I worked on developing learning content we preferred doing scenario based learning, which placed the learner in a situation that was relevant to their jobs. Because this was usually done through a story, it would take on a conversational tone. The goal was to involve the learner and make them understand how the information was relevant to them, and what difference it would make on the job. Now at least I have some solid data to defend my position.

This is one of the reasons I like reading Will’s blog, because he focuses on research that provides actual data to back up his thoughts and opinions. While I was looking around his Work-Learning Research site I was horrified to find his article on the bogus learning chart that has been circulating, and realized that… I had used it myself!

I do believe in the basic concept of the graph, but now that I think about it, it is really odd that the numbers come out evenly. That should have been a tip off. I can’t even find the talk where I used it, but I know I was part of the problem.

So, to sum up: Informal Writing is Good, Informal Data is Bad.

Using an informal or conversational tone is effective for learning, but becoming so informal that you never bother to validate your data or sources needs to be avoided.