OJT is usually quite cost-effective, because it focuses on the tasks at hand, and requires no equipment beyond what the company already provides.  It’s also much less disruptive than other forms of training, because employees aren’t removed from their duties, but are instead trained for their work while doing it.

The actual training is usually done by a manager or supervisor who is coaching employees while they work.  Supervisor feedback tends to be immediate, and trainees often improve their job performance quickly.  Employees also feel more confident about their job performance when they are being coached by supervisors, and on-the-job training is a good way for new employees to build relationships with their comrades.

Problems to Avoid

There are, however, potential issues with on-the-job training.  Supervisors and experienced employees may not have the needed skills for training other employees.  Often, supervisors or managers were promoted because they were good at performing or managing their own work, but this doesn’t guarantee that they also possess the skills or ability to coach new employees.  Not everyone is a born teacher.

Time also can be a huge issue! Supervisors and mentors may not have the time to spare to  help new employees. And since on-the-job training usually follows no formal procedure or specified content (other than the task at hand), supervisors and mentors will need still more time, to pass on the extra knowledge, skills, and  business context that employees will need to solve future job problems and respond to business changes. So upper management must give employees who are doing this training the time they need.

During on-the-job training, trainees also need time to practice the skills they must learn.  In turn, supervisors and trainers must prepare adequate drill materials for trainees, and provide feedback early and often in the drilling process, to prevent trainees from acquiring unwanted job behaviors. So again, upper management must make sure that everyone gets the time they need.

An often-overlooked issue that can plague on-the-job training is company lingo. Trainees must receive a clear, consistent understanding of the concepts and terms used in their organizations. And even when an employee says they understand a word or concept, they may not.  They will often say they understand to avoid looking incompetent. So supervisors and mentors must keep this in mind, and constantly repeat and reinforce the terms and concepts that new employees must learn.

And on top of all the above, supervisors and mentors are only human. They can easily pass on their own counter-productive habits to other employees…and must work hard to avoid doing so.

OJT Development Techniques

Usually, OJT employs one or more of the following four techniques:

·         Coaching—This one-on-one interaction is usually done by a supervisor or someone outside the company, and is often prescriptive and corrective in nature.  It helps the trainee understand their strengths, weakness, and areas of improvement, and tends to be applied for a fixed amount of time until the employee is deemed proficient.

·         Mentoring—This too is an ongoing one-on-one technique that’s usually done by a more experienced company executive or supervisor.  The mentor works with the trainee to find their strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement.  The mentor provides feedback and guidance, and points out areas that may have been overlooked.

·         Job Rotation—This approach allows trainees to practice and become proficient in various aspects of the work at hand, or different roles within the company.  It helps employees because they are exposed to different work areas and learn about various company functions.  (It’s also a great opportunity for employees to try out different functions, to see what they like or don’t.)  The company also benefits, because job rotation diversifies worker skill sets in critical areas, and helps the company respond to unforeseen events like vacations, flu epidemics, and catastrophes.  Job rotation also fosters organization-wide goal- and objective-sharing, because employees better understand each other’s job responsibilities.

·         Job Instruction Techniques—There are many great online resources to help you plan, prepare, and implement on-the-job training. But most models ask trainers to plan, present, trial, and follow up.  The plan consists of a written breakdown of the work and of your training objectives.  In the trial stage, the plan is presented to the trainee(s), who are asked to try it out…with regular follow up during the process. There are variants to this method and it can be either streamlined or made more complex, depending upon the business case and the tasks to be learned.

How Can LMS and e-Learning Tools Help?

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and e-Learning authoring tools can help with all parts of on-the-job training.  Depending on your organization’s needs, you can use an LMS to track and manage one or more parts of the OJT process, including:

.

·         Registering trainees

·         Scheduling training

·         Storing and delivering reference materials (such as company procedures, concepts,  and terms)

·         Delivering regular practice drills

·         Testing and evaluating job competencies being learned

·         Collecting and storing training results

·         Delivering and collecting follow-up employee surveys

·         And, more!

About the Author:

Mary Polley-Berte is Director of Customer Support & Training at SyberWorks, Inc., in Waltham, Massachusetts. Mary is a graduate of Boston University and resides with her family in New Hampshire.

About SyberWorks

SyberWorks, Inc. (http://www.syberworks.com) is a leader in providing Learning Management Systems and custom e-Learning Solutions for Fortune 1000 corporations, higher education, and other organizations. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market.  Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed and delivered unique and economical solutions for creating, managing, measuring, and improving e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe, and other countries.

http://syberworks.com/articles/ojt-article.htm

1. Read a book.
2. Watch a video.
3. Attend a speech or workshop.
4. Enroll in an online course

Now suppose that in addition to being more knowledgeable you wanted to become skillful at something. It could be anything like golf, karate, selling refrigerators, negotiating, making presentations, etc. The point is you want to become truly proficient. Your objective is not just to know something; you want to be able to do something, and do it well. If skill is your objective, then your only option is to practice with an expert coach under realistic working conditions until you achieved fluency.

When you do something repeatedly – trying to perform up to an explicit standard – your mind and body get the “feel” of doing it proficiently. And the “feel” of doing it is the skill. If you don’t acquire the feel, you haven’t acquired the skill. Further, the feel is acquired only by using the skills to produce a real result: A good golf stroke, a sale, a successful negotiation.

Coaching the actual performance shortens the time it takes for an individual to become proficient enough to achieve the desired result repeatedly. Eventually, the new behavior becomes a preferred and self-chosen way of behaving.

Yet, when it comes to interpersonal-skills training in the business world – the teaching of so-called “soft skills” such as listening, leadership and teamwork, practicing with an expert coach under realistic working conditions is the least chosen development method. And that is the real reason behind the endless hand wringing in the corporate training field about how hard it is to get “learned” skills to transfer from the classroom to the job. It is also the reason that in difficult economic times, the training budget is often the first one cut, and it’s our fault

Training vs. Education
There is a great deal of difference between training and education, though the vast majority of trainers are not aware of it. Educating is not the same as training. For most people, there is no causal relationship between education and performance. There is, indeed, a causal relationship between training and performance. Knowledge isn’t power. Competence is power. Power is the ability to create a desired effect and that is performance.

To educate is to increase intellectual awareness of a subject. To train is to assist someone become proficient at the execution of a given task. Many wonderful things can be said about education, but education doesn’t cause competence.

Try making a youngster competent at riding a bicycle by sitting her down at the kitchen table and explaining how to ride a bicycle. Try taking a one-hour golf lesson from someone who uses typical online “training” methods. He’ll meet on your computer screen far from the golf course, talk to you about a golf swing for 30 minutes, show you his swing for 10 minutes, let you take make-believe swings at an imaginary golf ball for 5 minutes, then ask you to write an “action plan” describing how you will apply what you’ve “learned.”

Skeptics will protest that some people who receive education in soft-skills areas actually do turn out higher performance as a result: They do, in fact, get better at selling or influencing or working in a team. And this is true-for maybe 10 percent to 15 percent of the trainees. In fact, that 15 percent were already skillful before they attended the latest online educational offering. If you take anyone who is already competent and add more education, you often will get better performance to some degree.

What about the other 85 percent or 90per cent? It make no sense to pretend that the training department’s job is simply to deliver some information about skills (The Five Key Practices of Famous Leaders, The Ten Fabulous Values of Team Players), and then abdicate responsibility for proficiency to the person’s manager/supervisor. If you accept the title of “trainer,” your task is to make people competent, not just more aware. Blaming managers because the “skills” you supposedly imparted in your educational event failed to transfer to the job site is irresponsible.

Real Training For Real People
Begin by abandoning notions of what people ought to know or what sort of attitudes they ought to have or even how people acquire knowledge. Instead, ask, “How does one acquire skillfulness?” The most efficient and effective way to acquire skillfulness is straight forward: 1) Spend a little time educating about the results to be achieved and the skills to be executed in order to obtain those results. 2) Spend a lot of time practicing, with a coach who can reduce trial and error time, until fluency is achieved.

In the hands of a good trainer or coach, Step 1 takes up 5 percent to 10 percent of the allotted time. Step 2 takes up the other 90 percent to 95 percent. Step 1 is purely education. Step 2 is training.

If the student isn’t doing it, it isn’t training. A day spent talking about skills will not make anyone skillful. Nobody gets the “feel” for real execution, done to a specific standard of competence, and if they don’t acquire the “feel,” they don’t acquire the skill.

Even if you agree with these points you may say: “Fine, but all of that would have to be done in the field. It can’t be done in a classroom. And even if it weren’t too expensive and difficult to put that many expert coaches in the field, we don’t want our trainees practicing on real customers. So how we do make them proficient before we send them into the real job environment?”

There is a way.

How to Do It

To do real training in soft skills, start by taking a tip from advocates of “action learning”: Invite people to a meeting room for a genuine working session—into which some coaching will be added. You can provide some online pre-meeting assignments and education to maximize your work session time.

The purpose of this working session is to evaluate and make decisions about ideas for improving the business: Real ideas for real improvement that will make a real difference to the company. Ask participants to bring their own ideas to the meeting. Stipulate that these ideas must meet two criteria. First, the people in the meeting must be capable of implementing them; that is, someone in the room must have the authority to give a real yes or no to the idea. Second, if adopted, the improvement must be both measurable and capable of producing financial consequences for the business within 90 days.

In other words, you don’t want ideas such as, “Let’s change the cafeteria’s vending machines.” That might be an improvement, all right, but it’s unlikely to produce a measurable ROI within three months. Your online pre-work gave them a quick educational overview of the skills that would most likely help them gain the commitment and support they’ll need to implement their ideas.

Next you must also clearly define what “skillful” means – not just what the skills are. For instance, you are skillful at “showing respect” if you can acknowledge another person’s point of view so well that the person begins to feel they are being taken seriously within 15 seconds.

Make this introduction as succinct as possible. Then put everyone to work on the task of trying to gain commitment and support from one another. Coach them while they do so. Make them do it over and over again, until at least 85 percent of them have become proficient at the skills and have achieved concrete desirable results.

An obvious “desirable result” is that a participant gains the needed support and approval for a good idea. A less obvious but no-less acceptable result is that the participant becomes persuaded that his idea is flawed, but accepts this with no hard feelings; that is, the participant and his “adversary” agree that the idea is a nonstarter, and emerge with their relationship undamaged or even strengthened.

You can stop worrying about “reinforcement.” Why? Because we all naturally keep doing what works. We only need the goading or encouragement or reminding of managers when we can’t produce the results we want.

Online “training” is acceptable and even preferred when the desired outcome is to educate.

Doing the real training is required and perfectly feasible, even with large groups of people when the desired outcome is acquiring skill and proficiency. This approach – Educate briefly, then train at length – is the method of martial arts trainers. It’s the method of sports teams. It’s the method of coaches in the performing arts. It works.

This formula almost always achieves measurable success, regardless of the skills you’re trying to develop: Selling, leadership, teamwork customer service, problem-solving and so on. Instead of seeing slight improvements in the performance of those 15 percent of trainees who were already capable, you’ll send 85 percent out the door with genuine skillfulness instead of mere awareness.

The group is producing real initiatives that will make or save money, your company can expect a very healthy return on investment within three months. These outcomes are critical in these difficult economic times. And nobody will have to ask you again if your training actually makes a difference.

G. Thomas Herrington and Patrick T. Malone are co-authors of the new book Cracking the Code to Leadership and Senior Partners at The PAR Group, an international training firm headquartered in Atlanta. They may be contacted at info@thepargroup.com.

That’s one of those statements that’s pretty much accepted at face value, and I certainly agree with it. But I would like to take a look at what interactivity really is, or should be, because I think that somewhere along the line we’ve taken an easy path where any mouse click is countered as interactive and if we put enough tabs, or rollovers, or instructions to click on this to see that, we can check the box and say that we’ve developed interactive training.

You’ve seen what I’m talking about: bulleted lists were you roll your mouse over an item to see related text, tab templates, graphics with associated pop-up text. Sometimes when an instructional designer to write an “interactive” course, you get a lot of that. In the worst case the online page becomes a sort of treasure hunt, where you’re clicking this and rolling over that to find all the information.  

But I don’t think that content’s really interactive, because you’re not engaging learners in a meaningful way. Further, the content actually becomes harder to understand.

·         If important information is hidden, content becomes difficult to skim, and we all know that online readers skim.

·         It becomes difficult to compare information contained in different pop-ups. I recently saw a table that showed only column headings; you would roll your mouse over a heading to see the entire column, and only one column showed at a time. That defeats one of the main reasons to put information in a table – tables allow you to compare information.

·         You run the risk of annoying learners by forcing them to click and hunt for information.

This may be a simplification, but I like to think of interactivity as being synonymous with engagement, and try to do things that I think will engage the learner. Things like narrated animations, role plays, and quizzes where learners really have to apply knowledge and solve problems are great techniques for engagement. Audio can also be good (so long as it doesn’t simply read the text!). If you have the money and the bandwidth, video can be great. Content should also be engaging. Emphasize what’s in it for the learner, why they should care. Remind them of the consequences of not knowing the information. Tell a story. Respect their time and keep the training concise.

Then I try to think of the all the rollovers, etc., as techniques for layering information, and apply those techniques  to secondary information, stuff that’s nice to know but not essential, detailed technical information, definitions, things like that. Rollovers and tabs are also useful when you need to include a lot of information on the page and want to avoid scrolling. (But when you think about, indiscriminately hiding information isn’t very different from scrolling, because in both cases you’re forcing people to click to see information they need to see. They’re just clicking on some kind of pop-up rather than a scroll bar.)

So think about what types of interactivity will really be useful, and realize that mouse clicks don’t necessarily equate to interactions.

Managers may want to develop their own mathematical model to better understand the relationship between costs and delivery of their training programs. Many managers have found a common key element when they have analyzed the costs of their learning programs. Their key finding: e-learning is less expensive to deliver almost regardless of the participant population. For example: in populations where the participants number 100 or more, e-learning had clear cost advantages and as the population number increases, so does the cost advantage. Cost advantages were still measureable in groups of 100 or less and even with classes as short as one hour in length. In a corporate study conducted by Catepillar, they determined that e-learning was 40% less expensive than the tradiational classroom models.

When preparing to conduct a cost analysis study, managers should be prepared to understand all the different factors involved with the development and delivery of training programs and then develop a customized list of factors that are applicable to the organization’s training needs and environment. For example, the costs associated with a physical classroom can widely vary depending on the geographic and physical plant characteristics of the company. For some organizations, it may not be relevant to conduct any sort of market analysis if their niche market is highly specialized or small. On the other hand, factors such as timeliness, travel costs or development costs may be very relevant for the organization to consider say, for example, if they are outsourcing their training programs.

After the manager has created their unique “model” or list of factors or variables for analysis, they are ready to begin the comparison process. Gather data from comoparable organizations or training delivery programs, preferably from those using like and differening models. This will help in benchmarking the organization’s costs to that of comparable companies. If the organization or department has specific regulatory or quality assurance standards, such as Cancer Registry departments as part of a healthcare organization, the costs associated with training (or not providing training) for compliance may also need to included in the analysis process.

e-Learning may not be the best delivery method for all training. For example, programs that require role-playing, individual or group interaction or observation of the participants are not conducive to online learning. On the other hand, the total cost of delivering instructor-led classes to many students must be taken into consideration whenever the organization begins planning a large training program. Cost analysis may reveal that a combination of both e-learning and tradiational classroom can deliver the optimal training delivery needs of the organization. Once the manager has completed the cost comparison process results should be documented carefully and used for future comparative studies or even for training program justification and strategic planning purposes.

Copyright 2005, M. A. Webb. All Rights Reserved