Lesson 2 – Training Employees for Success

Training Employees for Success

In an ideal world, employees would come to us knowing absolutely everything they need in order to do their job. Life isn’t like that, but we can certainly find people who are capable and motivated to learn.

In this session, you’ll learn about the value of learning and consider what it means for the success of your business.

Why Continuous Learning?

You might be of the opinion that you have a business to run, and people need to take responsibility for their own learning and do it outside of work. There is merit in that argument, but we want to share the idea of learning organizations, as written about by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline. In it, he writes that one of the most compelling factors in support of continuous learning is the rapid pace of change we face today. Technology is evolving continually, corporate structures are frequently reshaped, and job responsibilities are always shifting.

Translating learning into productivity involves several steps:

• Understand how learning takes place, so that you can understand the most effective ways to learn.
• Identify critical areas of responsibility.
• Develop goals.
• Intentionally transfer skills and tools learned back to your workplace in a relevant and meaningful way.

Learning involves two important factors: willingness and ability. If you have boundless opportunities but no desire to assimilate the information, real learning won’t take place. Similarly, you can be eager but lacking in the appropriate skills; again, the opportunity will be lost.

Your success at learning depends on attitudes and experience, too. Is continuous learning marked by opportunities or obstacles for you? If learning is not a priority for you, it likely is not going to be a priority for your people either.

While many people say that they learned most or much of what they needed from a mentor or a good boss, there is also value in a solid education that helps us to separate what’s good from what’s not so good. If the only managers you ever worked with had no interest in helping you develop your skills, you learn nothing.

Instead of thinking of training as taking you away from your work for two or three days at a time, we are going to challenge you to see training as a way to look at your workplace through a different lens, and to see learning as a way that people experience other points of view. We’re not suggesting that you have to apply every theory that you learn, but we do know that adults learn in predictable ways, and that the way you train them (or hire a trainer to provide training) has a big impact on what they retain.

Steps in the Learning Process

When you are learning, the process can seem complicated and confusing, but there are really only four basic steps in learning. These four steps occur time after time, each one building on the earlier ones. If you understand these four steps, you control one of the basic keys to increasing your ability to learn, both in workshops and in real life.