Just in Time: Training Needs Analysis

We chatted with some training professionals and I also came across an article on changing trend in TNA, which I wanted to share.

  

The article discussed abt how the old methods of doing TNA, where we developed and implemented a survey, put the questions in a computer program, and ran analyses on demographic information we collected,  is changing. These TNA’s are ineffective. The new trend is to do Just in Time TNA. The article suggests that TNA should be live, for example, call the employees and ask them, Over the next week what would you like to learn ? or where do you get stuck at your job?

This training needs assessment works best in small to mid-sized organizations. It gives a quick assessment of the training needs of an employee group. This training needs assessment helps find common training programs for a group of employees.

Time Required: Approximately 1-2 hours

Here's How:

1.     The facilitator gathers all employees who have the same job in a conference room with a white board or flip charts and markers.

2.     Ask each employee to write down their ten most important training needs. Emphasize that the employees should write specific needs. Communication or team building are such broad training needs, as an example, that you would need to do a second training needs assessment on each of these topics. How to give feedback to colleagues or how to resolve a conflict with a coworker are more specific training needs.

3.     Then, ask each person to list their ten training needs. As they list the training needs, the facilitator captures the training needs on the white board or flip chart. Don't write down duplicates but do confirm by questioning that the training need that on the surface appears to be a duplicate, really is an exact duplicate.

4.     When all training needs have been listed, use a weighted voting process to prioritize the training needs across the group. In a weighted voting process, you use sticky dots or numbers written in magic marker (not as much fun) to vote on and prioritize the list of training needs. Assign a large dot 25 points and smaller dots five points each. Distribute as many dots as you like. Tell needs assessment participants to place their dots on the chart to vote on their priorities.

5.     List the training needs in order of importance, with the number of points assigned as votes determining priority, as determined by the sticky dot voting process. Make sure you have notes (best taken by someone on their laptop while the process is underway) or the flip chart pages to maintain a record of the training needs assessment session.

6.     Take time, or schedule another session, to brainstorm the needed outcomes or goals from the first 3-5 training sessions identified in the needs assessment process. This will help as you seek and schedule training to meet the employees' needs. You can schedule more brainstorming later, but I generally find that you need to redo the needs assessment process after the first few training sessions.

7.     Note the number one or two needs of each employee, that may not have become the priorities for the group. Try to build that training opportunity into employee dev plan

Tips:

1.     Training Needs Assessment can be, and often needs to be, much more complicated than this. But, this is a terrific process for a simple training needs assessment.

2.     Make sure you keep the commitments generated by the training needs assessment process. Employees will expect to receive their key identified training sessions with the brainstormed objectives met.

Solve a Business Problem or Create a WBT?

I had an interesting chat conversation over the weekend with a budding instructional designer.

ID: I wanted to discuss about Instructional approaches

ID: Suppose there's a client who says " they have been using ILT that has not been successful, their mentors are not motivating enough& nw wants to change it to a WBT.......and target audience are senior &middle level managers well versed with sales, dealing with retailers etc.....

And I've to give them 2 approaches.....do u hv any ideas?

Me: why is their ILT not successful?

ID: their mentors are not motivating enough

Me: why do you believe wbt will be motivating?

ID: hmm.....It would give them the space of doing the training at their own pace and on their own

after all they are senior managers..who might not like to be trained

I mean not support trainings

Me: basically your instructional strategies need to remove the problems they are having with ILT

so if the mentors/trainers are boring, the WBT has to far far more interesting and interactive

ID: Yep.....

Me: so you have the answer...

unless i understood the question wrong

ID: and with just this information and the fact that I've to develop 2 approached based on level 2 interactivity.....

I needed some ideas

See.......ok, can you list down types of approaches......

one can be scenario based, case study based.....

dialogue based

Me: you should know more about the users, job profile is one, what about their other characteristics -- gender, age, race etc.

Me: also what kind of industry are they in?

ID: they are in sales industry

all senior and middle level managers

pharmaceuticals

Me: basically sales guys travel a lot, they don't like to attend training

do they have PDAs etc.?

which country are we talking about?

ID: India

Me: what access do they have to computers and Internet?

ID: broadband

Me: from home?

ID: yes

everywhere

Me: so the company is expecting the sales guys to take training from home?

ID: anytime they are free.......

Me: they are never going to be free

ID: they are senior level and middle level managers!

Me: are you expected to solve the business problem or just create a WBT?

my response will be different in each case

ID: just create a WBT

Me: :-)

Now I know this person is a budding, relatively junior instructional designer and probably is just doing what she has been asked to do. There was a sense of déjà vu for me. I know many a times, the client appears to be very clear about what they want and wants the vendor to "just create a WBT". Not all clients want to have a business problem discussion with the vendor. And not all instructional designers want to solve business problems. They are happy with creating a WBT and getting on with their jobs. Unfortunately that's a lose-lose situation for both clients and instructional designers.

My advice to instructional designers is to stay focussed on solving the business problems. Sometimes creating a WBT might not be the solution, even though that's what your company may have been contracted to do. Focusing on solving the business problem will help you add value in your interaction with the client and that will in almost all cases eventually lead to more business.

And if you are a client outsourcing a learning content creation project, my suggestion would be that you work with the vendor and collaborate on solving the business problem. There is no harm in having raking up more brains to solve your business problem. And if you are sure that WBT is indeed the answer to your business problem, then provide that information to the vendor so they can do justice to your project.

What is Good Writing? - My View...

This post is written by Taruna Goel

This is my response to Manish's question posted on e3cube ponder.

Question:

Tony Karrer talks about Good Writing in his post http://elearningtech.blogspot.com/2009/02/good-writing.html. Would you like to share your experiences on eCube about this?

You can also find this response on my blog.

-----------------------------------

Tony Karrer blogs about Good Writing here. Tony has interesting views on the topic and I agree with many points. The question, 'What is good writing?' often comes up in many of my discussions with budding writers and seasoned instructional designers. There are multiple rubrics that are used to grade writing. I designed one in my current organization and used it to assess and calibrate the writing skills of all authors and designers. Automated systems are also making their presence felt. And we have rolled out a certain application too. However, if you notice the criteria across writing rubrics - many items in the list don't match. Sometimes, items contradict. Therefore, there are no fixed 'rules' about good writing. But we all recognize good writing when we see it!

In this situation, how do I define 'good writing’? I say that a piece is well-written if it meets its objective. For example, if I need to write an essay about the role of media in the world today – it should have an introduction, a few body paragraphs, and a conclusion to do justice to the nature of content. But if I need to write an ad copy about the same thing – shorter is always better!

I agree with Tony on writing for skimming. But skimming is nothing new. Since the inception of web, editors and reviewers have been stressing about brevity. And not only the web, we almost always skim through much of other material including newspapers, journals, books, and manuals. Do you remember the last time you read the manual that came with your digital camera, word-by-word? Guess not.

Therefore, if your writing is aligned to its purpose, to meet the objective, it is good. I would just look at some of the traditional principles of instructional design and use those as factors to be considered when writing anything! Two things that help me define how I want to write include:

1. who is my audience (audience analysis)
2. why should they read the piece of information/what do they want to achieve out of it? (task analysis)

When I align my writing to the specifics received by answering the questions above, I am likely to write well. Applying principles and rules of grammar and punctuation and an ability to write using Global English are things that further add clarity to my writing. But I don't believe that a grammatically-correct piece of writing is 'good' until it helps the reader achieve what it meant to! So there's my story.

But if you are interested in more...here’s an interesting link to explore on what makes good writing. This is by ‘Teaching That Makes Sense’.
What is good writing (HTML)?
What is good writing (PDF)?

How to Know your Audience

Tom Kuhlmann writes a great piece about getting to know your audience and avoiding common pitfalls. Unfortunately not all content project teams are lucky to get access to the audience to do such a meaningful analysis of audience needs. Interestingly some of the comments to Tom's post echo this point. So how can instructional designers know their audience, without always necessarily having access to them? Here are some tips to know your audience and get a better understanding of ‘why' you are developing the training.

• Connect with potential audience on professional networking sites. Lurk around to see what questions get asked and what answers the audience finds useful. Don't be afraid to ask your own questions.


• Connect with training managers and trainers and try to understand their pain areas. Build your network of training professionals in different domains. This will help you gain a better understanding of the training function and your conversations with your client stakeholders will be more meaningful if you already have some understanding of the function and pain areas.


• To better understand your audience culturally (and this is probably more relevant for Indian instructional designers and tech writers creating content for western audience) watch movies and western television, read journals and magazines, read business books. With the Internet you have access to many of these free and you should leverage these sources to better understand your audience. Investing a little in books is investing your own skills.


• Try to develop a business mindset. Remember you are developing content to solve a business problem. Try to identify what business problems your stakeholders are trying to solve.


• Develop an understanding of how the training will be delivered and build solutions that will leverage the environment in which training will be delivered. Use the Internet to stay up to date with various LMS. You don't have to know the technical details but you should develop a better understand as a user of the LMS.


• Stay up to date with technology and trends in the domain area. For example, if you are creating content on technology topics, you should be aware of the new software releases and other trends in that technology area.

Today's technology and sociological changes have made it easier for instructional designers to better engage their audience and stakeholders. Leverage these mechanisms to continually connect and network with similar audience and stakeholders even if you don't have access to specific audience for your content project.

Who is your Customer? – The Client or the End User?

Am sure as experienced instructional designers, this is one thought that may have crossed your mind more than once!

This is one of the most important thoughts that comes to my mind (since only over the last few years) while I am developing courses. Let me delve a little deeper into what I really comprehend of this thought.

In my initial years as an instructional designer, I understood that “client” is our customer. And since the customer is “always right”, we created courses based on what they said – not necessarily keeping the end user in mind.

Let me explain this to you through an example. I’ll take you back by a few years when I was working on text books for one of our very old and prestigious clients. I was part of the first team that was formed for this project, and also the first time we started with text books at NIIT. As part of the client requirements, we understood that we need to create technical books for some students. Inspite of the lack of indepth knowledge about the varied content areas (books on hacking, gaming, high-end networking, and so on) we struggled hard, very hard to write the books - this trend continued for about two years; as the number of books we delivered to the client increased, so did the error count in most of the books!!

When I look back, I clearly remember that we always worked for the “client” and didn’t have a clue about who our “end users” were!

Well, things started to change when one of the team members traveled to the client's office: attended the various classes conducted at the client's campus, met the students, understood their background and culture, and their needs and limitations; and finally shared all of his experiences, especially w.r.t the “end user” with the entire project team on his return. He shared with us how our courses taken up by the students affected their life... - the students actually banked upon these courses for their livelihood!

I personally felt..what a pity! We had never imagined how what we were doing - only as a “project”, churning out books months after months in a tight-deadline mode, is impacting someone’s life.

For the first time then, it really made me think who is our actual customer – the client who we interact with day in and day out understanding their requirements; or the end user who actually take the brunt of whatever we create and provide to them?

This brings me to another thought: how many of us actually spend time in doing a good “audience analysis”? How many times can you confidently say the following?

• I understand my end user
• I know their age and educational experience
• I understand what their current knowledge or skills are and theie confidence in the content area
• I understand their motivational levels and learning ability
• (Last but also one of the most neglected ones) - I know their attitude towards instruction

I believe doing a thorough audience analysis is one of the first steps in designing good “instruction” for the learner! Some of the other aspects it all also helps determine is the tone or language you use for the course, the content depth and complexity you need to bring in, or the examples or scenarios that you use across the course.

There is more to this.......for this time, however, if you have any experiences around doing a detailed audience analysis that impacted your course, do share!

Till then, don’t forget to analyze your end user! It'll be worth it!

Generation Gap and E-learning

Last Sunday, I was watching the Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Littl Champs TV show; I was simply amazed at these little kids ability to sing like seasoned pros, at an age when some of them are not even expected to be talk properly! Just shows how fast the new generation learns!

Somewhere down the line, doesn't the same apply to all learners? Isn’t there a considerable difference in the way people of different generations learn? Doesn't a 10th grader of today learn much faster than how a 10th grader used to learn about 10 years back?

Therefore, doesn't it mean that while creating training materials, we need to keep in mind this generation gap? A small example: The amount of content we ideally cover in a single WBT page is still based on research conducted at least a decade back. However, in this one decade, hasn’t there been a sea change in the processing power and attention span of human brain?

Although e-learning has gained tremendous acceptance in the overall training arena, there still is a vast majority of higher-ed students who can be lured into learning electronically; And for that to happen, it’s important to recognize that these learners indeed learn very differently, and much faster.