April 2008

Developing Employees

What do employees
really need to know?

Before designing and developing courseware, the question, “What do employees have to know to achieve proficiency?” needs to be answered. All too often courses are created to be information dumps, leaving employees on their own to translate the material and determine how it applies to them. The overwhelming volume of information leaves them in a daze, is quickly forgotten, and is never transferred to the workplace.

“Well-designed training efforts rely on a smooth progression of information to cross-link and reinforce concepts and build slowly toward skill development.”

Many training designs do not effectively incorporate available media such as text, graphics, audio and video clips to advance the training and reinforce critical concepts. In addition, they often fail to teach the skills required to become proficient in the subject matter.

Essentially explaining what to do, without demonstrating how to do it.

Developing and implementing well-designed training courses requires, among other things, critical thinking skills and creativity. Some key instructional design points to consider include:

Critical Skills and Concepts

The identification of the critical skills and concepts required to develop mastery and achieve proficiency is essential. Ideally, if time constraints allow, the “nice to know” secondary concepts can also be included. However, in the current fast-paced training environment, there is often no time to present these non-critical supporting elements. As such, instructional designers are best served by streamlining their efforts and focusing their full attention on the essential concepts and skills necessary to achieve the desired outcomes.

Context and Connection

Effective training needs to present the concepts and skills in a context that is easy for employees to understand. This will help them to see that the training they are receiving is important to them and provide further motivation to learn the material. If this connection is not effectively made, employees will become bored and resist the training effort.

Engage, Challenge and Involve

It is too easy to use animation, graphics, text, video and audio clips to jazz up a presentation without advancing the goal of the course. For this reason, training media must be carefully selected to engage the employee, make essential points, and reinforce concepts. Strategically placed media can be used to challenge and involve employees in the training, not merely entertain them.

Reinforce Skill Development

Well-designed training efforts rely on a smooth progression of information to cross-link and reinforce concepts and build slowly toward skill development. This creates a clear and polished flow to the training that both makes sense to the employee and allows them to understand and embrace its purpose.

Lead to a Logical Conclusion

Effective instructional training designs must be created backward from the desired outcome. This develops a well-organized step-by-step introduction of activities and exercises leading employees to a logical conclusion, mastery and proficiency of the material.

Timothy F. Bednarz, Ph.D.