Think of the last time you wanted to learn a skill. How did you do it? You probably sought out information, spent your free time learning, and found ways to practice. In other words, you pulled the knowledge to you. Contrast that with your most recent training experience. Did someone push knowledge onto you, perhaps with a lecture or PowerPoint? Learning science says one of these approaches is much more effective than the other.
You can learn a lot by just looking at your training. These are some warning signs that your training might be ineffective.
When you were learning to ride a bike, did you use training wheels? This is called scaffolding, and it’s a well-known aspect of how humans learn. Scaffolding is breaking skills up into smaller, interlocking chunks that build on each other.
When you were learning to ride a bike, did you watch a quick video, answer some multiple choice questions, and call it good? Obviously not, but that’s how a lot of “video learning” is done.
Your training probably isn’t working. 70% of employees say they don’t have the mastery needed to do their jobs1. What’s more, you probably know that your training isn’t working, because according to McKinsey only 25% managers think that training measurably improves performance2.
Are you CPR certified? If someone needed CPR right now, would you know what to do? If so, awesome! But if you’re like most of us who are CPR certified, it’s strange that despite being “certified”, we probably couldn’t do CPR correctly. That’s because we’ve equated competency with a checkbox. But competency is much more than that.
Every firm wants competent employees. And if you listen to any earnings call, you’ll likely hear a CEO say that their workforce is a competitive advantage. But how do they know?
So the multiple choice question is in the middle of the video instead of the end. Now the user is interacting with the video, right? So this training is interactive… right?
We’ve all endured the bloodborne pathogen video. The one where you hit play before stepping away to do laundry. And then you guess on a bunch of multiple choice questions until you get them all right.