Building a skill through baby steps

I once read a beautiful story that illustrates how a skill can be built by gradually and effortlessly, by incremental steps.

A cow gave birth to a calf in a farm. The farmer’s son was a teenage boy. He developed a fondness for the newborn calf, and would play with it everyday in the evening after school, carrying the calf around in his arms. As the days passed, the calf grew in size and weight. The farmer’s son continued his habit of carrying around the calf. As the years passed, the calf grew into a full-grown bull and the teenager grew into a strapping young man. Thanks to his daily habit of lifting the calf, the young man was able to lift a full-grown bull without even realizing the increase in his strength.

Now, don’t get fixated on the details – whether it is really possible for a man to lift a full-grown bull, etc..the point is that a skill can be built effortlessly through incremental steps.

• Learn one new word everyday and in ten years your vocabulary will have grown by over 3650 words. The average person’s total lifetime vocabulary is only about 5000-6000 words.
• If you are jogger/runner/walker, try adding just 0.1 km more every week. In one year, you will be able to cover 5 km more than what you can now.

Building a skill through small, incremental steps is a great way to develop yourself effortlessly. You will be amazed at yourself.

In this context, I am reminded of a quote I firmly believe in – Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a year.

Intangible benefits of training

In addition to imparting specific skills (technical or soft skills) to employees, corporate training has the following intangible benefits :

• Variety : Provides a refreshing break from the monotony of everyday work and gives the brain something new to feed on.

• Stress relief: For those involved in stressful jobs – for example frontline customer support – training provides a getaway (even if only for a few hours or a couple of days at the most). I am not saying training is a vacation, but it will most likely be less stressful than jobs like customer support.


• Networking: A training session can be a platform that brings together people from various teams within the same company. It can provide an opportunity for people to get to know each other better and exchange ideas.

• Team-building: Some teams are highly dispersed – for example a team of sales people who are always out of office meeting customers. For such teams, training sessions could be the only occasions when everyone comes together in one place.


• Employee reward: Providing training to employees is one of the best ways for management to communicate the message that they care about the employees’ growth. Thus, training is a performance reward. Also, if the training is at an overseas location, it is an added perk (if the employee likes to travel!)

Will instructor-led corporate training become extinct?

Until a generation ago, instructor-led training was the only form of training. Now, it is one of the many forms of training available. The other forms include a variety of methods –most of which can be encompassed by the term e-learning. With the world becoming more and more technology driven, will there be a point when instructor-led training becomes extinct ?

I firmly believe the answer is NO.

My reasoning for this conclusion:

• Some skills simply cannot be mastered by self-study or by e-learning. For example, a course of effective presentation skills would be effective only in a live, instructor led session. Trying to learn good presentation skills by watching multimedia would be no more effective than trying to learn swimming that way.

• Practically everyone has started his/her education in an instructor-led environment at school. Consequently, at a subliminal level, our mind associates learning or training with a teacher (a person as opposed to a set of CD’s or webpages). This is a very powerful association in our mind, and cannot be brushed away simply because instructor-led training could be more expensive or time-consuming. Ignoring this very real need for a live instructor will lead to ineffective training that wastes real dollars.

This white paper (web link below) has some excellent thoughts on why adopting e-learning may not be as easy as it sounds.

http://www.e-learningguru.com/articles/adopting_elearning.pdf

Language and cultural barriers in training

I had a very interesting experience in the very first training class that I taught solo. It gave me valuable insight into how language can be a barrier for training, and also gave me a practical lesson on working with people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

My class consisted of one student from Israel, two from Belgium, three from Taiwan and one from Korea. The student from Korea was very reticent and almost never opened his mouth in class, except for a very terse yes or no. He preferred to respond through barely perceptible nods. Almost throughout the duration of the training, he kept browsing through a paperback novel (atleast that’s what it looked like) and kept flipping back and forth vigorously even as I was teaching. However, when I gave the class some practical exercises to do, he demonstrated a good grasp of the subject matter.

While I was happy at his skill on the subject matter, I felt intrigued – and also a trifle irritated – at the fact that he was browsing through a book while I was teaching. I did not feel comfortable about asking him to put the book aside (this being my first class as a trainer), but nevertheless, felt very curious about what he was reading.

Once, during a break, all the students left the class and I was alone in the classroom. Prompted by curiosity, I took a peek at the paperback that absorbed the Korean student’s attention. To my complete surprise, I realized it was a English-to-Korean translation guide. As I was teaching, the student was trying to figure out what I was saying! My irritation turned to sympathy at his struggle in trying to understand English. Like many Asian students, he felt shy about asking out loud whenever he did not understand my English.

Creating the right environment !

I sometimes like to visualize the learning process as being similar to the germination of a seed. When a seed is planted in the right conditions (soil, water, manure, nutrients, weather), it germinates automatically.



(Image from http://heliosmonroe.wordpress.com/)

Similarly, when a trainee is placed in the correct learning environment, an awakening of knowledge happens in his/her mind.

Three years back, I attended a three-day training course on instructional techniques. The course was conducted by a trainer from one of the world’s leading companies in this domain. It was a very intensive course, but when I was done, I had a strong feeling of satisfaction. I really came out of the training enriched in terms of knowledge that I could apply.

A remarkable thing about this course was the manner in which the trainer (who had flown in from overseas) created the right learning environment. Well before the course started, the trainer had sent a list of specifications – about the training room, layout of desks and chairs etc. A day before the actual start of the course, the trainer came to our company and spent a few hours transforming the training room into a great learning environment. There were posters and charts all over the wall – neatly and logically organized. The manuals and handouts were distributed on the tables, so there would be no distraction during the actual class. Teaching aids were arranged at strategic locations.

During the actual course, cellphones were strictly prohibited, as were laptops. For three tightly-packed days, we lived and breathed instructional techniques. By the end of the course, our mind was on a different level. I learnt the importance of creating the right environment. In fact, I would go to the extent of saying that, in the right environment, learning happens effortlessly – even automatically – like a seed germinating.

In this context, I am reminded of a beautiful quote – “The human mind is not a vessel to be filled in, but rather, a flame to be kindled”. Trainers should bear this firmly in their minds.

Remote Training Perils - Part 2

A major problem in remote training is student evaluation.

How does the trainer know whether the student has really understood the material or ot ? It is easier to evaluate in a direct instructor-led class - by asking questions and by the trainees' responses and body language.

But in a remote training session, the trainees are thousands of miles away. Often they do not have a microphone or webcam and prefer to type their questions/responses in a chat window (atleast in my experience). And often, the trainees are sitting next to each other in an office at a faraway location. Even if they are not sitting next to each other, they probably know each others' email address and can easily communicate behind the trainer's back.

How does the trainer know if the trainees are giving individual answers or getting answers from their classmates ?

How does the trainer make sure trainees are not collaborating on the exam questions ?

Are the homework answers from one student simply copied from another student, with some cosmetic changes (font size, drawings etc) ?

It is a very convenient thing to believe in the honour system - to claim that, in a multinational company, employees are too professional to indulge in such malpractices. While this logic is politically correct, it is not foolproof.

When real business results depend on training, it is simply not practical to depend on the honour system. Let's face it - everyone has plenty of demands on their time today and the temptation to take a colleague's exam answer and pass it off as one's own could be too big to resist.

Without a foolproof method to evaluate trainees and qualify them, training is a waste of resources.

So how can students be evaluated in remote training ?

My thoughts:

1) Make it mandatory for every trainee to have a microphone and webcam - and use it in the training session. It is much easier for the trainer to evaluate the trainee by asking questions real-time and forcing the trainee to answer verbally instead of typing answers. Also, this makes it difficult for the trainee to consult with classmates before answering. I certainly concede that it is still possible for the trainee to get help from classmates, but atleast it becomes more difficult.

2) Have multiple sets of questions for evaluation, so that trainees get different questions with respect to their colleagues. Again, this will not prevent trainees from helping out each other on exams, but atleast it makes it more difficult to cheat.

3) Have a viva-voce exam with the trainer interviewing the student on a 1:1 basis. But the downside is this is very time-consuming for the trainer, and scheduling the oral exams can be a nightmare. One workaround is to have a local resource person in the same office as the trainee who can administer the oral exam and evaluate.

4) Wherever possible make the evaluation something like a case-study or an individual project, with completely different topics for individual trainees.

If you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment.

Remote Training Perils!

A couple of years back, I was training a group of students remotely using an Adobe Connect online classroom. It was a five-day class, and I was in the beginning of the third day.

As a rule, I make my classes highly interactive. I use every possible opportunity to review material I have taught earlier in my class by asking questions. Obviously this is a very effective way to reinforce learning in the minds of students. I found out that there is another benefit from this method.

One particular trainee (let me call him Mr.P) seemed completely lost about the material I had covered in the previous two days. I found it rather surprising because, over the first two days of class, he had demonstrated a good grasp of the subject matter. Also, he seemed very reluctant to participate in the class discussions - a total deviation from his behaviour over the first two days. In fact even my direct questions to Mr.P elicited nothing beyond stony silence.

As the class progressed, I felt very uncomfortable about Mr.P's silence and lack of participation. Finally, I sent him a private message enquiring whether everything was OK, or if he had any problems with the network or audio. This brought a response that had me completely by surprise.

Mr.P sent me a private reply confessing that, in reality he was not Mr.P, but his friend Mr.Q. Mr.P had simply connected up to the online classroom and had asked Mr.Q to sit in front of the computer while attending to some of his personal business!

Now this is a grave issue..a student being AWOL and asking someone else to be his/her proxy without informing the instructor. An even more serious issue is intellectual property being at stake. How would I know if Mr.Q was actually from our competitor, trying to steal our company's IP.

What I learnt was that, it is imperative to engage students intensely in a remote class even more than a direct class.