MindLeaders: Fueling the Learning Revolution

Is Boomer retirement as scary as it seems?

To go with my previous article about Baby Boomer retirement, here's the monkey wrench I'm going to toss at Conventional Wisdom: is the sky really falling? Is a massive Baby Boomer retirement really about to cause a huge gap in workers? According to the US Census Bureau, here are the 2006 percentages of population by age group:

Birth Years	%age of population
1991-1987	7.2%
1986-1982	7%
1981-1977	6.8%
1976-1972	7.1%
1966-1962	7.6%
1961-1957	7.6%
1956-1952	6.8%
1951-1947	6%
1946-1942	4.5%

Baby Boomers, from 1946-1964, account for about 28.7% of the population
Generation X, from 1965-1982, are 17.7% of the population
Generation Y, from 1980-1994, hold at least 14.2% of the population, with more yet to count

That does look panic-inducing-ly out of balance on the face of it. But this was the first time I really paid attention to the years. The exact years that define "generations" are constantly being debated, but taking these as approximates, boomers span 18 years, X covers 7 years, Ys 14 years. Boomers cover many more years, so it's almost expected that there's more of them.

Broken into five-year pieces like this chart, the rate of workers reaching retirement age twitches up 1.5% between the 64-year-olds (1946-1942) and the 59-year-olds (1951-1947), and then holds fairly steady. It's an increase, but is it really that much?

I'm not suggesting that many organizations won't see a lot of retirements in the next few years. But I am suggesting that boomers are going to retire gradually, over that same 18-year-span (and more!) that they entered the workforce, and that we have adequate incoming people to cover those retirements. What I'm suggesting is that we clarify the focus of the baby boomer retirement discussion: is the problem less in the number of workers that we have, and more about the change in mindsets and experiences of the workers? I think the departure of the Baby Boomers and the arrival of Generation Y don't require radical changes in our knowledge management and training programs, but it will put more focus on them than there used to be and make us all sharpen up our game.

Who will work after the Baby Boomers?

Much kerfuffle is going on these days about the baby boomer retirement, and how we will fill those positions. The LA Times put this on the front page today with a story about the upcoming needs for skilled workers.

Generation Y is usually mentioned hand-in-hand with the baby boomer retirement, the baby boomer echo that is bringing lots of new people into the workforce. This LA Times article focused on a point I hadn't considered before, that the influx of immigrants can also serve as a new pool of workers to fill in as the baby boomers retire.

In either case, the main point for the training community is the same: lots of new workers are coming, whether young or from other countries (or both!), that are looking to join the workforce and build careers. Their needs will be slightly different, but with the same focus on building up the business skills they'll need to hit the workforce running. Maybe instead of focusing on retirements, as trainers, we should be focused on the orientations and office skills we'll be teaching.

Doing some research for this blog post stirred up some interesting statistics - I'll share those in my next post.

How to implement 360-degree training evaluation

I was reading articles today, including one about handling receiving 360-degree feedback. I started thinking about how that would apply to training programs.

In training, our feedback is usually done through evaluations. Most often, we use smile sheets/end-of-course forms to get immediate feedback.

According to the principles of 360-degree feedback, in order to get a complete picture of our training program's performance, we must widen that scope. We need feedback from the students, but we also need feedback from:

• The students' managers, to asses impact on the job
• The students' subordinates (if the class was about leadership or management)
• Other trainers in the company, to get some peer review

The best way to do this is to do an initial survey after the class, and then to also follow up, just like you do with the student, a month or two down the road to see the effects that the training program has had once it's gone into the wild.

The biggest challenge with ideal feedback/evaluation implementation is follow-through, keeping up with all the different surveys and follow-ups that need to be done on all the different training programs that are running.

An annual or semi-annual survey might be the simplest way to cover all those bases. The survey could ask some evergreen questions about training needs within your audience, and then also follow up on each of the training programs that have been run since the last survey to ask for feedback from anyone who has seen an impact or has thoughts/suggestions about them.

What do you do to help keep the evaluation ball rolling? Who else could you involve in your evaluations to wide the angle closer to 360 degrees?

Presentraining - The Blending of Presenting and Training

Last week was occupied in these parts by our all-company meeting. The two days of meetings and conferences brought up something I've been batting around in my head for a few weeks now: the gray, fuzzy line between presentations and training.

I'm defining a "presentation" as any talk that seeks to persuade its listeners about an opinion or fact, and "training" as any meeting that wants to teach its attendees something. Frequently, presentations also seek to teach. And more often than not, training must convince the student to care enough to learn. There are exceptions to the rule, as I've listed in the diagram below, but in reality, most times we stand up in front of a group, it's a presentraining. We have to convince and we have to teach.

This is why Presentation Zen has been on my must-read RSS feed for a while now. Black-and-white bullet points, whether in instructor-led training or e-learning, don't cut it. And in presentations, focusing on the two or three nuggets you want your listeners to walk away with is critical.

I live with one foot in each of these worlds, and I see instructional design and presentation design heading in convergent directions. I think they'll both make much faster headway the more they borrow from each other. What do you think - where do you see these two fields coming together, and where do you see them standing apart?

Is Learning 2.0 a long tail?

Tony Karrer has posted a very thought-provoking article about the Corporate Learning Long Tail and Attention Crisis. It's an interesting corollary to the impact that Web 2.0 and Learning 2.0 has on our learning audiences. Tony says, in part:

The list of issues [in this article] represent what can truly be considered a crisis for corporate learning organizations.  It's a crisis born of the Long Tail and the Attention Economy. ... Corporate learning functions will either continue to focus on the front of the tail and an ever smaller portion of the total information needs of knowledge workers or will look to expand into the long tail.

I agree with what Tony is saying about the deep impact that today's attention requirements is having on training. Today's learner expects on-demand, the whole on-demand, and nothing but the on-demand training resources.

This means that today's training needs are spread out more - there's less need than ever for long training that covers everything and more and more need for short bursts of information that meet the learner's requirements at the moment.

But is that really a long tail? I know that Chris Anderson would argue that everything in a marketplace has a long tail, but I think that the office organization creates a limited marketplace. The tail is lengthening and flattening - as trainers, we're under demand to produce more and more training pieces that are faster and meet more specific needs - but I don't think that the tail is infinite. We've gone from a hamster tail to a mouse tail, but there's still an end to the tail. Our learners need training that meets their needs quickly and helps them in their job. But it's limited by the needs of their job, so I think there's a limit to those needs.

Just a small addendum (and I'm open to hearing otherwise if people think it's wrong) to a main point that I heartily agree with: The learning market is changing, and all of us are facing the challenge of meeting those changes or becoming irrelevant to our audience.

Is "Human Resources" an out-of-date name?

Recently, I and other bloggers have questioned recently whether we should use the term "human capital," or whether it's a de-humanizing term. Today, Seth Godin talks about "Marketing HR" and makes a similar case for the term "Human Resources."

He links the name "Human Resources" back to the factory days when people were just another cog in the machines and, therefore, needed to managed as such. He proposes that HR departments should be called "Talent" departments instead, and notes that some companies are already making such moves. (And my personal favorite, departments of "People.")

I had never made such a connection to the term "Human Resources" before. Maybe it's because the term "resources" can also be about the things that are being made available to us employees, not just how to use what we have to offer. Maybe it's because it feels much more natural, like - well, "natural resources" - than "human capital."

But on the other hand, names have power, and I'm all for anything that shakes up our assumptions a bit and puts our focus squarely on how we're impacting (and hopefully improving) the people in our organizations. Even if you don't want to go through the redtape of a department name change, maybe just a campaign reminder that "HR (or training) is about talent" will serve a suitable pants-kicking to wake people up a bit.

What's your company's training or HR department done lately to remind them and everyone else that they're there for the people and the talent in their organization?

A great way to celebrate Valentine's Day - and not just because it involves a Mr. Rogers reference

I wasn't planning to write anything Valentine's Day-specific today, but then Janet Clarey posted this excellent VDay thought. Check it out for a warm fuzzy and a great way to remember the important people:

Educators you’ve loved - on Valentine’s Day

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?

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.

Writing learning objectives for the right audience

I read today a long, well-researched, well-thought-out post from from Sims Learning Connections about Writing Learning Objectives. It reminded me of a conversation I had at Learning 2007 with a small group of workplace trainers. We were discussing a completely different topic, but it turned out that 2 or 3 of them had surveyed their audiences about their training and had hit the same surprising theme: one of the things that learners panned most universally were learning objectives. They said that the learning objectives did them as students no good at all; they seemed to be there for the sake of the teacher, not the learner.

So are learning objectives worth our time and effort?

I think the article by Will at Work on the New Taxonomy for Learning Objectives is headed in the right direction. We're making a mistake when we try to write singular objectives for our training. Our objectives as trainers and instructional designers are different than our objectives as CLOs or front-line managers and are different than our objectives as learners. We should never present an objective written for one listener to another - they won't care.

• Trainers and instructional designers need objectives to tell them what the training must cover.
• Managers and executives need objectives to tell them what business purpose and strategy the training is going to help fulfill.
• Learners need objectives to tell them why this applies to their jobs and what they should be looking to take away from the training session.
• And those of us who are building the training programs have to keep all three of these sewn together like battle plans.

What would you like to see in the learning objectives of the next training program you're involved in?