What is it that trainers, learning designers and facilitators, coaches, mentors and all the other people responsible for designing, delivering, assessing and reporting on learning interventions really need to know? They are often told about the politics, problems and personalities in the teams, divisions and organisations they work with, or the desired content of the learning intervention… and that is all very interesting, but it is not vital.
It is vital that trainers etc. get to know:
1. the learning objectives of their learners, long enough in advance for them to plan interventions that actually deliver on those objectives.
2. who those learners are, in terms of their seniority and past work and learning experience.
This usually means that learners and the people who manage them need to discuss, agree and record the learners’ objectives well ahead of the learning event, and pass them to HR and/or L&D who in turn need to pass them (with details such as job titles and brief business biographies) to the trainers. So HR and L&D play an essential policing role: setting deadlines for such discussions and checking both that they happen and that the output is passed on.
So what do learning objectives look like? Remember the acronym SMART helps us to remember the qualities that objectives need to have: they need to be Specific, Measurable, Agreed and Action-orientated, Realistic and Relevant, and Time-scaled. A simple structure is ‘By deadline date the learner will be able to demonstrate their learning through a defined behaviour’.
So an actual learning objective might look like:
By Monday 3 January 2011 Jasmine will be able to chair the monthly department meeting. In particular she will be able to:
• create and distribute the agenda (with timings and objectives for each item) and any supporting reports or other material to the correct recipients at least two working days ahead of the meeting
• manage the content of the meeting and the discussions of the participants in the time available
• ensure that the meeting makes the decisions and takes the actions necessary, allocating responsibility and setting deadlines where appropriate
• record accurate minutes and agree them with the meetings’ participants
• distribute minutes to participants and stakeholders no more than two working days after the meeting
• inform and update meeting participants and stakeholders about the actions arising from the meeting until all such actions are completed
Trainers and other learning professionals LOVE learning objectives like this. It focuses all their efforts in designing, delivering, assessing and reporting on the learning that learners actually need. All the other stuff – who said what to whom, why previous attempts at learning interventions haven’t worked, what the content could be – is great fun but nowhere near as useful.
Remember: learning objectives and learners’ status. That’s the best place to start.
It is a common sense to identify the learning objectives and learners' status prior to design. In relaity, however, with big companies of thousands and thousands staff and thousands and thousands of trainings to be delivered every year, learning objectives are the number one priority while learners' status seem to be skipped by the trainers. Reasons are related to the shortage or lack of the admin support that can facilitate such a task, especially for the overseas trainers who do not know the culture nor the structure of the company to be able to adjust the training content. That said, I have seen programs with mixed level of seniority that work even better than single job/ salary level.
ReplyDeleteGood points. Sounds like a solid argument for Learning Needs Analysis, and for passing the results of such analysis on to the people who design, deliver and evaluate learning interventions.
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