What are the 3 most powerful elements in a training program?
Here is a new concept called human-centered training
The individual who coined the phrase, “It’s not as easy as it looks,” may well have just finished his or her first day working solo after completing a training program that stressed proficiency, but missed three crucial elements.
This essential trifecta includes:
- Confidence-building language used by trainers
- Techniques taught for handling push-back from clients, students, or patients
- Learner skills built in successive and progressive hands-on steps
Many programs leave out these factors—producing a task-centered, rather than human-centered job preparation course.
In contrast, highly effective training addresses the needs of new staffers to have sufficient confidence to dive in, the readiness to use a diverse set of tools that help them handle unexpected snags, and a sense of mastery for the concepts, the whys, leading to success in the position. It is more important for trainees to sense they are poised and ready than simply knowing a narrow skillset to perform basic tasks.
And it’s not only the new staffers that benefit from a human-centered approach — there are also rewards for the organization’s culture, and eventually, its customers.
Confidence is factor number one
You can increase trainee confidence by phrasing suggestions as if they are beneficial and valuable tips. During the writer’s teacher training, one of the K-6 grade methods instructors spoke with an especially positive communication style which built unique self-assurance in student teachers.
Future teachers take intensive curriculum — typically four-year college bachelor’s programs, including student teaching and pre-student teaching experiences. Most of the time, a supervising teacher is in the room watching. At the post-lesson wrap-up, the way supervisors word their recommendations and corrections has a definite impact on a developing professional.
For example, the instructor helped me advance my classroom skills by phrasing a suggestion in this way: “I’m wondering if this routine that I’ll describe in a couple of easy-to-remember steps will make it easier to accomplish this lesson transition, as it’s always nice to make things easier for ourselves.”
He did not say I had done it wrong previously, or that his method was the best and proven technique that “should” be followed. Rather, his language built my confidence to try new skills, eventually leading to overall improvement. The words used by this trainer to present the suggested technique gave me the assurance that I could indeed successfully learn and master an alternate method.
Skills follow confidence.
Train what they need to know, not what you want them to know
Fellow teaching grads often talked about having challenges harnessing the attention of kids in their full and active classrooms. It is understandable that working with 30 or so individual personalities — who may at varying times need a drink of water, restroom break, feel antsy or sick, or are just not interested — and centering them on a lesson concept … is just plain tough. And after the morning lesson comes the next concept, and the next subject after that, all day long.
My own goal to get better at focusing energetic students led me to seek out additional privately-offered courses in assertive discipline. These seminars covered in-depth strategies for communicating expectations and setting up supervisory systems that worked for both teacher and students.
The training changed everything for a new teacher, and it gave me specific and constructive tools for managing large and challenging groups.
New teachers graduate with substantial expertise in their subject area, such as biology, math, or English. However, when you are starting out, it is hard to envision just how difficult it is to deliver that expertise — having tools ready to troubleshoot the unexpected, including push-back from students.
“In fact, 95% of teachers were considered ‘highly qualified’ by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards (American Institutes for Research, 2013),” wrote Jenny Grant Rankin Ph.D. on PsychologyToday.com.
That said, more than 41 percent of new teachers leave within their first five years of teaching, according to a 2014 study by Richard Ingersoll, Lisa Merrill, and Daniel Stuckey, she added. Rankin lists student behavior, including classroom management, as one of the six leading causes of teacher burnout. When assertive discipline techniques are thoroughly covered in teacher training, teachers are more ready for the unexpected.
To prepare a ready and energized staff member in any field, training needs to include an honest breakdown of the push-backs that may be encountered, and the practice of possible strategies.
Build steps into your training program
An exceptional clinical trainer mentored me when I became a technician in an allied health care job. From the first day, she asked me what I felt ready to do, as far as the beginning steps of bringing a patient to the assigned room and taking their temperature with a touch-free forehead thermometer.
At this point, I had graduated from a certificate program and completed many hours of shadowing. The opportunity to start with initial hands-on tasks positioned me for the next, more complex steps.
It was exciting to be a successful working member of the team while learning new skills in these successive, progressive steps. Each day brought more incremental learning, expanding from the day before. An easy diagnostic test supervised by the instructor was followed by perfecting the technique, then adding in a more challenging one, and fine-tuning the new competency while combining others.
This method of training was so effective that I was largely confident — in a surprisingly short period of time — to operate the clinic’s diagnostic instruments. The unfamiliarly branded machines had been daunting on the first day or two. But with this type of incremental training, my productivity rose and exceeded expectations.
This type of successive, progressive learning has been productively used in apprenticeship programs, such as Nevada’s Apprenticeship Project, Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) program — a collaboration between Truckee Meadows Community College and Renown Health. At the beginning of the apprentices’ program, each week students complete theory and lab instruction for two half-days, and they work as Patient Safety Assistants at a care facility for three full shifts.
After these first few weeks, CNA apprentices move up to the next stage of their training. Students are assigned to a unit such as oncology, medical, surgical, or others, and became Nursing Assistants in Training, wearing a student badge. They are given increased responsibilities working with patients under the supervision of a CNA, practicing skills they have learned in their classes and labs.
In the third stage of training, students take on the role of Nursing Assistant Apprentice, and their level of hands-on patient care increases with their knowledge. Students then sit for the state certification examination. Upon successful completion, they transition into a full-time CNA position.
On-the-job training sometimes misses teaching in successive steps
Less effective training programs focus on proficiency alone.
In some administrative and office job training programs, new staffers are assigned to sit and watch veteran employees. In this first training phase, learning is presented as computer clicks and rote memorization. There may be no “whys” behind the steps, icons, and directives that would make remembering processes much easier. And the quick movements of a seasoned staffer navigating around the screen is difficult to see, as many of these actions are accomplished with muscle memory that takes months to build.
The next phase of this type of task-oriented training may be placing the newbie at a station functioning alone — dealing with live clients and unexpected situations — all while being watched and evaluated for competence. Eventually the pieces do start to come together, although stress may replace an eagerness to tackle new challenges.
If instead, progressive, incremental steps are built into office (and other) training programs, learner abilities can develop naturally and more swiftly, despite appearing as a longer process at the outset.
In an incremental process, an easier skill — such as appointment making — is practiced and grasped, and then others, such as scanning and archiving are added on and mastered, and then yet another; perhaps product ordering or communicating with vendors. Training like this produces a well-equipped staff member with the drive to conquer each higher level.
After all, a considerable number of popular computer games are built on just such a model.
Employees are humans, and innately want to learn and develop competence
“I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught,” Winston S. Churchill said, according to BrainyQuote.com.
Training programs that put new professionals’ confidence and readiness first will be the ones that generate the most successful graduates. And that benefits both employees and their organizations.
When staffers are secure, aware, and prepared, both their productivity and fulfillment will be well worth the extra time spent in developing a training structure that is human-centered.
