In my organisation systems training is being delivered in a way that means that staff may be in the company one day, one week, or even over one month before they are officially trained on the in-house systems.
This brings up it's own problems and as part of my CIPD studies I am looking into the impact of having this mixed level of "pre-understanding" in participants before training happens.
I would be interested to hear from anyone that has come across this situation in training before; what problems did you discover; how do you deal with these problems?
Many thanks
David
David McCrone
3 Responses
Use small groups
Mixed prio-learning can be partially addressed by forming the learners into small groups that consist of a mix of abilities, knowledge, expererience. Then learners whose priolearning is weak can learn from those who have considerable priolearning – helping both. However, beware, allowing the people without the prior learning to defer to the others.
Help me out, Jeremy
Jeremy
What is “priolearning”?
You use this term beside “prior learning”, suggesting that it isn’t the same thing.
I’m not being awkward, this is a genuine search for knowledge!
Rus
PS David, I’ll also provide an answer to your question under a different cover
benefits of mixed groups
David
You seem to see this solely as a source of “problems”…as Michael Caine says, “Use the difficulty”
So long as your trainers are competent and confident they can extract great value from mixed groups:
1. You have a mixture of conscious incompetence and conscious competence amongst your delegates, this means both these groups are working hard to get it right, the former to learn the skill, the latter to prove that they already have.
2. You can use the experience of the “old hands”, even if they have been doing it only a week; What did they find difficult? What was easy etc (if the trainer is unconciously competent this is often harder WITHOUT their input)
3. You can test the group and split them by competence and concentrate on the needs of each group seperately rather than going for the one size fits all approach.
4. If you have some really good experienced delegates you can pair them with the less able or even get them to manage a group for you. This benefits them as well as making your job easier.
Rus