MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Employee orientation: Your most important training program

First impressions are quick to form and have a lasting, sometimes permanent, impact. That's why employee orientation is so important: it's not only the most important factor to get your newest paid resource up and running in all the right directions, it has a huge effect on the motivation and engagement of that new arrival.

Ask a Manager has posted a fantastic rundown of their new employee orientation program, including what information they cover. It's a set plan for every new arrival. Orientation doesn't have to be rebuilt from scratch every time - it should be a set schedule that's ready to be pulled out whenever a new person comes on board.

At MindLeaders, we use courses and time with managers and peers to create a blended orientation program. Some of the things that I'd add to this list:

• A tour of the offices, especially where to find goodies in the kitchens
• An overview of our product, including time to use it - regardless of what position they're starting in
• Information about our industry and competition
• How to get MIS help and other company communications

What other topics do you cover in your orientations? Is it time to dust off the orientation schedules within each department - or to build them?

Putting Second Life/virtual environments to good use

Virtual environments are an up-and-coming learning tool. And like all learning tools, they'll be invaluable in some training applications, best used with a blend of other tools to cover all of a topic's training needs.

Most of those applications are just beginning to be discovered or be feasible, but Tom Werner at Brandon Hall Research found an excellent example of using a virtual environment for a valuable training lesson. Even more surprising to me is that they found a great use of Second Life in particular, which  I think is even harder to pull off.

The training is for health care professionals who work with older patients. The virtual environment (this part is not Second Life-specific) simulates for the player the effects of aging, such as slower mobility and reduced eyesight, hearing, and dexterity. These kinds of lessons are perfect for virtual environments.

I think the Second Life-specific/public playing field part of this training is brilliant: the players experience Second Life with an elderly person avatar, to see how people treat them differently and how many objects are not made for someone of their age and build. It uses the larger game as a living social experiment.

Great thinking here! What training needs do you have that could be met by a Second Life or other virtual simulation?

One basic rule to making your training program successful

Overdeliver.

There are a few sites I really dig that speak well to training, even though they're not training-specific sites, like Presentation Zen for learning to build great training programs, and marketing sites for the crucial-but-sometimes-overlooked task of marketing training and training programs to their audiences, their audiences' managers, and the executive suite.

Seth Godin's post about Making Promises nearly made me shout "Amen!" at my desk. And even though he's talking about sales and marketing, try substituting a few words about the training program you're currently working on:

If you need to overpromise to make [people attend or managers/executives believe in the importance of the training], don't bother. It's not worth it.

The best way to generate word of mouth [about the new training program or knowledge management tool] is simple: overdeliver.

What's the most basic, business-strategy-centric need that this training program is going to meet? Tell your audiences about that. And then deliver it AND - deliver it AND make it easy, or AND show new ways you can put it use, or AND give the attendees something to take back to their desks that makes their days a little bit easier.

I think this is a great truism for life in general, not even just marketing: Make your promises carefully, and then overdeliver on them.