Training Design for Speed to Proficiency: 4 Pitfalls to Avoid

WHY SHORTEN TIME TO PROFICIENCY?

A key stage in the development of an employee is becoming proficient in their job. At this stage, their performance is consistent, reliable, repeatable, and above acceptable standards, in every situation, they might face in that job role. They can perform their function or job to established standards; they are independently productive and require little supervision.

However, the term proficiency is largely misunderstood in the sense of business and academic literature. Proficiency is measured at a job role level. That means it is not measured at the task or skill level. When your house is on fire, you don’t care if the firefighters are good at individual tasks like holding the hose or breaking the door. As a customer, the only thing you expect is their ability to put off the fire consistently and reliably as they would have done in other places. Being good at individual activities does not relate directly to producing the desired performance. Thus, job proficiency is less about the activities, tasks, and skills, but more about the ability to produce noteworthy outcomes.

That’s the performance organizations need from their employees in every job role. However, when it takes a long time to achieve that state, organizations must spend numerous dollars on employees’ training or lose dollars while compensating for the mistakes they make in the meantime. This could also mean the loss of revenue opportunities. By shortening that time, an organization can shorten the time to market for the products or services and improve customer satisfaction.

TRAINING AS THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE

In one of the project cases the author researched, a large tech corporation in the US hired several financial analysts for various business groups. The job description stated that the individuals would design, prepare, and distribute weekly dashboard reports on financial trends to various business groups to the stakeholders’ satisfaction. The individuals in that position would need to use Excel software and build automated dashboards. The proficiency of the individuals in this job is determined by the readiness of dashboards by the target date each week, followed by maintaining a customer feedback score of at least 4.6/5.0 for consecutive six weeks. Thus, the management expected baseline time to proficiency in the span of 2 months.

Upon joining, the new hires were given some introductory web-based training courses. Then they were required to attend a formal 5-day long training class to learn the functions and tricks of creating business dashboards using Excel software. They also received a 400-page manual, a certificate of attendance, job aids, and online resources during the training. The following week, they were assigned to the job. Many of them were given a mantra – ‘in case of any problem, approach Joe.’

One of the financial analysts failed to deliver her dashboard reports by the deadline for the first several weeks. Even when she did, several of those did not meet stakeholders’ requirements. She had difficulties presenting and communicating it to executives. As a result, she only hit the required 4.6 score for the first time three months into the job, but the scores dropped the next time. It took her four months to reach a steady stage, achieving 4.6 scores consistently.

The average time to proficiency across the entire group of newly hired turned out to be five months. Why did it take them that much time to achieve desired proficiency in almost double the expected time despite getting the required training and support?

In today’s world, where training and learning are a foundational line of defense, several organizations are finding it hard to digest why their best possible training design and other mechanisms are not helping to shorten the time taken by their employees to attain the required proficiency.

HOW CAN TRAINING BE A SPEED BLOCKER?

This scenario described above is not uncommon across the board. Across a large spectrum of 70 best-in-class organizations in 42 industries, the author found that even the best-in-class organizations struggle to get the training right when the goal is speed. The majority of the organizations expressed that as opposed to the usual expectation that training would speed up proficiency, they also noticed the training itself hampered speeding up proficiency across the board. The issue is the poor training and learning design practices coupled with a poorly implemented support structure.

There are four critical areas of inefficiencies that inadvertently get introduced into training design practices, eventually leading to slower proficiency acquisition.

1. Content-heavy inefficient training design

The first set of pitfalls is related to inefficient training design, which is mainly seen as a content-heavy, instructor-centric, and topic-focused framework.

In several corporate settings, even in contemporary times, the training continued to be lecture style, classroom style, or instructor centric. The entire focus is on just delivering the content. Even if an increasing number of organizations are using learner-centric approaches, they still depend heavily on traditional instructors to run the show. In most cases, it is assumed that the training has met its objectives when the instructor is done with covering the entire binder.

This flaw arises because most corporate training structures have been copied from academic institutions for lack of a better mechanism. On those lines, the design usually starts with a massive task analysis that defines performance objectives in terms of mere activities and tasks. The result is primarily topic-based or task-based training. Much of this gigantic content is stuffed with ‘just-in-case’ content rather than bringing in the essential content.

The result of such pitfalls is that these programs are content-heavy and context-light. The result is that learners take longer to master the skills required to produce better outcomes even though they performed very well in training. Thus, training creates inherent inertia in the development process.

All in all, training simply wastes time or slows down the learners as opposed to speeding up the learner’s proficiency.

2. Out-of-context skills delivery

The second set of pitfalls is related to the nature of skills covered in a training intervention, lack of real job skills, out-of-context delivery, limited focus on practice, and poor mechanism for assessment.

When training solutions take people away from the job and the context in which they are supposed to work, they take much longer to become proficient at what they do. For instance, in actual settings, the financial analyst was supported to work with a team of peers and stakeholders while handling several conflicts and defending arguments. But they were trained in a supposedly safe environment in front of a computer screen, away from team interactions, inevitable pressure from stakeholders, and far from the real expectations of their actual job. While the financial analysts were given all skills and content to do individual tasks on excel software, they were not imparted the most crucial survival skill: how to present and explain the dashboard to business leaders. That’s the fundamental reason why any learning in the training intervention does not translate to proficiency in the job.

Attaining proficiency in anything requires repetition across varied situations. When the training programs are content-heavy and context-light, there is hardly much time to practice the skills that matter. Instead, the focus gets shifted to memorizing rules and practicing on a limited set of worked-out case studies or scenarios. This is driven by the short-term goals to be achieved during the training program. What the organizations fail to realize is that mastering this content may not assure job-specific skills.

To make matters worse, the learners are assessed using some hypothetical examples or paper-pen-type assessments. They may pass the training with flying colors. But that does not assure their proficiency in delivering outcomes in actual settings. There was no assessment done to test her ability to explain the expenses with regard to the impact on the business and the decisions that can be derived. Unless we measure proficiency in training intervention the same way as in real life, any amount of training will not help accelerate proficiency.

When training programs cover out-of-context skills or content, mastering which does not link up towards the ultimate proficiency goals, we make the learners’ journey to proficiency much slower.

3. Poor post-training support mechanisms

The third set of pitfalls is related to the minimal level of managers’ involvement before and after training and ineffective coaching arrangements.

The time to proficiency suffers hugely when managers don’t take full involvement in employee training before and after. Their involvement has a vast influence on the curriculum being covered in training. That involvement also helps managers decide how they should deploy the individuals post-training to speed up the proficiency rate in what they learned in training. But ironically, most managers leave it out to their training department and hardly spend time specifying the measurable job proficiency expectations to the learning designers.

In the absence of their involvement, the training department delivers the skills to their best abilities lined up with their course or learning objectives and not to the much-needed proficiency objectives. Such a design leads to the pitfalls highlighted in the first set.

Training inefficiency is not always the speed blocker. Employees might get excellent training but very poor post-training mentoring. When managers tell them, “Go and sit with Joe. And if Joe is not available, then sit with Jim,” they are setting their employees to go slow rather than getting on an accelerated path. Employees become proficient faster only when they work on the assignments that lead up to those proficiency goals while being supported by their managers on their journey.

4. Unclear or poorly defined job expectations

The last set of pitfalls is related to poorly defined job expectations, lack of definition of proficiency for job roles and the vague or non-existent proficiency baseline, and the absence of any firm target to reduce time to proficiency.

The critical gap is that the learning designers are typically not given the proficiency metrics of the roles for which a certain level of proficiency is desired. Because of that, most training programs are designed to deliver a preset body of information, constituent skills, specific behaviors, tasks, or activities. Because of that focus, training programs lead to all the pitfalls mentioned in the earlier three sets. These programs fail the mark on making the employees proficient in delivering the actual job outcomes.

On top of that, most training program designs start out with no explicit goal to reduce overall time to proficiency to a certain number. Rather, they are told to shorten the training program duration. On the surface, a shorter training program might help put the person on the desk sooner, but they may not be there in terms of proficiency where he/she can deliver the required customer satisfaction from the transactions.

While it may not be a universal gap, there are scenarios when training is developed by people who don’t have relevant experience. For instance, the financial analyst training was created by people who were Excel-geek but never stepped inside the boardroom and had no expertise in presenting, explaining, and defending dashboards to high-level executives amidst a high-pressure situation. Lack of such relevant experience shows up in how the training program is designed and ultimately leads to a much more sluggish time to proficiency.

HOW TO GET THE TRAINING DESIGN RIGHT FOR SPEED?

What could we do differently to make sure the training contributes toward speeding up time to proficiency? The models like 70:20:10 argue that people learn only a tiny part of the job from formal interventions like classroom training. In contrast, most of their learning either comes through social interactions or by practically experiencing it. Several studies also showed that the performance achieved in training is usually not a reflection of the job performance and probably won’t match it to any extent.

A few things to keep in mind are:

1. Focus on the entire journey

The goal of training or learning is not completed until someone reaches the desired proficiency. Thus, you need to focus on the entire journey of a learner and keep your eyes on the desired proficiency, no matter how much effort it takes to get to that level.

Proficiency can be achieved through formal training, informal training, or social learning, on-the-job interventions, or other performance support tools. When you design training programs for acceleration, you need to think of what comes before, during, and after the formal training and at various points in the entire trajectory of an employee.

You need to decide what you could make a learner do before they get a chance to do formal training. Then you need to make sure your design, delivery, and support processes avoid the pitfalls mentioned above.

2. Design for on-the-job performance beyond training

As a designer, you must look at ways to provide an efficacious performance support system, OJT checklists, and other tools that allow them to experience the job at an accelerated rate. This is where it is vital to make sure managers and learning designers work in unison to design assignments or projects that take learners towards a shorter time to proficiency. One of several ways you could do so is to make sure the training is designed around actual job scenarios and problems rather than pure content.

ENDNOTE

Rosenbaum and Williams, authors of Leaning Paths, argue that time is a single universal commodity for businesses to establish a competitive edge. So, the goal of training should be to reduce that time. If training does not help with accelerating that effort to prepare employees to do their job, then we need to think about whether or not training is essential in those circumstances. The moment we rethink the goal of training and learning is not simply to provide knowledge, content, and skills but is to prepare employees/learners at a faster rate, a lot of mindset changes toward what really should happen for the business.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Design training to be context-heavy and content-light
2. Deliver skills within the context of the job
3. Implement proper post-training support mechanisms
4. Define the job expectations accurately
5. Consider the entire journey of the employees
6. Design for on-the-job performance beyond training

RESOURCES

Designing Training to Shorten Time to Proficiency: Online, Classroom and On-the-job Learning Strategies from Research by Dr Raman K Attri https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9811406456/

Accelerated Proficiency for Accelerated Times: A review of key concepts and methods to speed up performance by Dr Raman K Attri https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9811462747/

Speed Matters: Why Best in Class Business Leaders Prioritize Workforce Time to Proficiency Metrics by Dr Raman K Attri https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9811805342/

Accelerating Complex Problem-Solving Skills: Problem-centered Training Design Methods by Dr Raman K Attri https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9811417660/

This article first appeared in a condensed version in Training Industry Magazine, Winter 2022 issue. A PDF version of the same can be accessed here. Download PDF version of this article only from our store.