The Total Learner Experience

5 Steps for Rapid Needs Analysis

In today's world it's almost impossible to carve out enough time in a project schedule to perform a comperehensive needs analysis. Many people are forced to perform iterative analysis as they deliver. To help ensure the effectiveness of your learning experience, consider this 5-step rapid needs analysis process when you find time is of the essence:

1. Identify the improvement opportunity.
   • Identify and clearly state the issue or improvement opportunity, and the desired organizational outcome. It's easy to assume that all the key stakeholders know what the issue or opportunity is, but there can be significant variations in people's viewpoints. Many times stakeholders have general expectations in their heads (such as "our managers need to be more professional") that require you to drill down to specific behaviors. Performance issues or opportunities need to be clearly stated in terms of measurable behaviors, and agreed upon by all the stakeholders.
2.     Collect the performance data.
   • There are a variety of methods available for data collection, including interviews, observation, surveys and other source documents. Select the best methods for the particular organization and situation. Whenever possible, conduct interviews because they enable you to ask follow-up questions and provide richer data. The key is to gather just enough needed data. Gather information from a variety of sources, including managers, supervisors, accomplished performers, and typical performers. Relying solely on the performers themselves can lead to major gaps because people can't easily articulate why they do what they do, and they make assumptions about what they know versus what a newcomer to the job would know.
3. Analyze the data.
   • Once you have documented the data, look for consistencies and inconsistencies within the findings and avoid jumping to conclusions. Next, identify the performance gaps by comparing what people are doing to what they should be doing.
4. Conduct a cause analysis.
   • Before you select solutions for closing the performance gap, identify the causes for the gap. Consider whether the cause is due to a lack of skill or knowledge, or if there are motivational or other workplace obstacles to achieving desired performance.
5. Recommend the solution.
   • Based on the causes for the performance gap, identify appropriate solutions. Keep in mind how the performance issue links back to organizational results and needs to ensure you propose solutions that are both realistic and relevant. You should almost always recommend multiple solutions, because there are usually multiple causes for the performance gap.

Going Blended: Questions to Help Define Your Learning Strategy

I often work with clients who have questions and are interested in blended learning solutions. Here, I've outlined what I believe are a few positives and challenges for going blended, and then I leave you with questions you can ask yourself to help determine the best path to follow.

Classroom Training Positives:

• Face to face. The Instructor can see/recognize when a student is understanding the material or not, and offer a personal touch.
• Classroom training is the current comfort zone in many organizations. Students may be more accustomed to it, and may not feel comfortable with online training.
• Classroom training often comes with a manual that students can use to refer to after the class is over.

Classroom Training Challenges:

• Time away from the office.
• Travel expenses when necessary.
• Training is more generalized in order to reach a broader audience. A student may find it necessary to sit through half the class before the Instructor hits upon what they really came to learn.
• The cost involved in creating a classroom course can be absorbent. Time spent on development, cost of materials, etc.
• The cost involved in contracting an outside vendor to teach specific classes can have a large impact on a training budget.
• Deciding what courses to develop and train in-house is often limited due to budget constraints, which means you will need to choose wisely where/when to allocate resources.

Virtual, CBT, or Online Training Positives:

• Typically these courses are offered anytime, anywhere, so scheduling is not a problem.
• The cost involved in contracting with an outside vendor for online courses is often volumetric driven. This means you can often offer hundreds of courses per user for often the same price you pay for one course offered via classroom taught by an outside vendor. 
• Broader selection also means that you can use online courses to supplement classroom training.
• Online courses often allow the student to take an assessment, which enables them to hone in on the specific lessons they really need to learn while by-passing the lessons they already have sufficient knowledge within.

Virtual, CBT, or Online Training Challenges:

• Online learning sometimes means learning a new technology. This can cause some to see it as a stumbling block rather than a building block.
• Students may feel online learning is not personal enough.
• Students may lack the discipline to work through online courses on a regular basis. Sometimes they are challenged to find the time to dedicate.

So here are a few questions I would suggest you ask yourself in order to better understand how you may want to build your training program:

1. What is your current budget?
2. Can you afford classroom training?
3. If yes, how many and which classes would you have resources to create and offer? 
4. For those classes you are not able to offer, what virtual or online courses can help supplement your classroom training?
5. Are there any virtual or online courses that would complement your classroom training? For example, would they make good pre-requisites or post follow-up reference material?
6. How many students do you support? Are they global?
7. What initiatives will you need to consider in this training year/cycle? One-time (like an office upgrade), short-term (like leadership training for managers), or on-going (like those tied to job families). What courses would support those initiatives?
8. What is your organizational culture and how do they currently "like to learn"?
9. What is your vision for your training program?

Understanding the audience and plugging in the appropriate training for them is key for success.

How Effective is Your Sales Training? Really.

A 2011 Aberdeen survey on the impact of sales training shows that the firms that enjoy the most effective return on performance improvement among their salesforce share these characteristics:

• 91% focus on instructor-led training as the most effective training modality
• 85% have defined competencies and training for each sales role
• 83% use of a formal sales methodology - either homegrown or from an external provider

Salespeople drive the company’s revenue. The last thing a performance-focused learning organization should do is waste a salesperson’s time with training that is redundant, not relevant to the individual’s specific knowledge and skills, and doesn’t help them with a knowledge or skill gap they may have. My suggestion is to stop and reflect on what you’re doing with your sales training and make sure you are performance-focused and prepared to enable the salesforce you support to gain a high-impact return on the training you provide them. Ask yourself these questions:

• Are you currently working on gaining executive-level support for your sales training initiatives?
• Do you share sales performance metrics throughout your organization?
• Do you have a centralized repository for your sales training content?
• Is your sales training available in the audience’s workstream (salesforce.com, etc.)?
• Is your curriculum based on all relevant job roles?
• Does your organization support a formal “train the trainer” environment?

The basis for successful return for the business from training is to effectively partner with the salesforce (both accomplished and not-so accomplished performers, as well as leadership) so you can granularly discover the competencies of the salesforce, and react to those existing competencies so you can build the right capabilities to drive business. Anything else you’re doing is inappropriate. Your learning system needs to have accountability and responsibility built-in.

An ongoing problem with existing sales operations is often broader than what traditional “training” can solve for. Hiring, compensating, motivating and supporting the adaptability to today's highly competitive selling environment are all key to enjoying a high-performing sales culture. Maintaining these skills can be aided by training, however, ensuring the right personalities are hired that can achieve these skills is often not a function of training. Training organizations are classically in a “build” mentality. More attention needs to be spent on who the company is hiring to begin with.

To this end, many companies deploy a wide variety of sales training solutions focused on influencing the behavior of their sales force. Without appropriate competency mapping, how do you know what capabilities you have in the field? How can you afford to keep pretending you’re doing the right thing when it comes to effective support for your sales operation?

On Story

Recently, I tweeted on what I feel are five necessary elements of a disruptive learning experience:

1. Story
2. Journey
3. Failure
4. Redemption
5. Resolution

I’ll expand a bit here on what I mean by Story.

Story unlocks creative consciousness
Many of us that work on the creative side of writing and instructional design (and I argue that proper instructional design requires good writing) toil with what makes story most effective for our audiences. The very idea of story is about discovering the essence of what makes us human: good writing drops the reader directly into the heart of the matter, with tension, romanticism, impracticality, and the power of emotions guiding the journey. Good writing leaves behind a residue of memory upon which all our experiences are built.

In telling stories, we conflate passion, bring about calamity and acts of treachery and expose the tragic power of conflict and memory. Good stories induce the solitude of forgetting -- which is critical to discovering a deeper understanding of the world and our choices, problems, joys. In effect, we transfer our selves to others with effective storytelling. We play an active present-tense role in the composition of who we are and the characteristics we desire in others.

Circumstances often force a consciousness upon us. The more measures we take to understand, the more elusive understanding often becomes. Story allows us to compose our own works of philosophy. The story of you, how you come into sharper focus, comes from a play of reflections on your experiences. Those experiences subconsciously informs the very composition of every story you create.

Story opens doors
What is a story, what is it to be an integral person? What composes our self, and our own identity? There is a distressingly fragile barrier between freedom and self-censorship—it’s a constant conflict based on environment and predicament. How wide the door opens is based on a myriad of personal and professional conditions. The point, realistically, is to learn how to open the door completely.

Story advances humanity
Story delivers social interaction, knowledge and happiness. It’s immoral not to advance story, and not to use it effectively to further our human condition. Educators have a moral imperative to be precocious, brilliant, and bracingly idealistic when advancing how story can bring our audiences a broader knowledge and ability to accelerate their own advancement.

Story was used for thousands of years before it was finally invented -- and using it effectively is key to the creation of a powerful learning experience.

Instructional Design Rules to Break

The world of instructional design is overrun with endless rules. Many rules are steeped in years of research and driven by appropriate learning theory. However, we think there are some rules that are OK to be bent, twisted, or broken to fit specific needs. There’s an old saying that in order to break the rules, you need to know them. In this series, we are going to take some long-lived rules of Instructional Design and discuss the when and how to break them. Agree or disagree? Let us know!

Rule #1: “Avoid Direct Instruction”

Direct Instruction (DI), is the explicit teaching of a skill-set using lectures or demonstrations of the material, rather than exploratory models such as inquiry-based learning (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Direct_instruction&oldid=526504905). Think of the last “training class” you sat thru while a droning facilitator dumped data from a seemingly endless PowerPoint deck. Many Instructional Designers try to avoid DI at all costs because it’s seen as old-fashioned, ineffective and didactic. Exploratory learning came along in reaction to the DI “sage on the stage” model, and has been overused to such an extent that many see it as the only way to design effective instruction. However, by rejecting DI because of an assumption that it leads to a poor design, you lose out on its distinct advantages.

Research tells us that learners must construct their own understanding in order to truly learn. In the real world, learners working through exploratory models often go down rabbit holes, learning valuable information and skills, but ones that may not be relevant to the task at hand. Exploratory learning is critically important when you want learners to be invested in the topic and when skills are more important than fact. But for learning data and facts, DI cannot be beat.

DI can save time and effectively transmit data, facts and procedures. We’re not arguing that DI should be used exclusively. Many learning organizations use DI exclusively (and, in our opinion, ineffectively) in the form of PowerPoint-style data dumps with little interactivity. A better model is to create an exercise that encourages the learner to explore a relevant case study, view targeted direct instruction related to the case, conduct problem-solving and reflective group work, and then finally prepare a presentation or teach-back to their peers. Don’t think you have to avoid DI at all costs, just be sure to integrate it effectively with interactive activities and exercises.

This series is co-written with Wiggle. Check back for the next rule to break: Get Buy-in From All Your Stakeholders.