Learning Paths

Accelerating the Speed to Competency

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics¹ companies hired 207,000 new employees in the month of July, 2005. This raised the number of new jobs in 2005 to 1,223,000.

As new employees continue to flood into the workforce, companies are challenged now more than ever to get employees up to speed as quickly as possible. Recruiters and managers are challenged to conduct effective and efficient interviews in order to hire the right people to further reduce that critical time to proficiency. Training executives and managers are challenged to execute a strategy that will increase productivity swiftly and effectively.

Many companies have orientation programs and complete training programs already well established. Some of these programs are designed as "boot camps" or "express training" with the intent to immerse the new employee in all the training needed to perform their job. The result in many cases is that the new employee forgets much of what was taught in the first few days of training by the time they reach "graduation" and they actually continue to learn and re-learn their job after training is completed.

Other companies take a much more practical approach by developing customized orientation and training development plans that map out the training and activities that a new employee must complete to be considered completely competent at their job. This is closer to an even more effective approach to getting employees up to speed.

Learning Paths², a methodology developed by Jim Williams and Steve Rosenbaum, takes a practical approach to defining proficiency and then producing an effective sequence of training, practice, coaching, and experience to accelerate the time it takes for a new employee to reach that defined proficiency. The Learning Path is not just for new employees as it can also be applied to accelerate below average and average proficient employees to high performers, or even for succession programs to promote employees to the next level.

Another major point of this methodology is that managers become the trainer and the coach. Coaching is not a new concept for managers; however as Steve Arneson wrote in an article for Workforce Performance Solutions magazine, "Leaders-as-teachers programs are growing in popularity at companies like GE, Time Warner, Dell, and Capital One. Their programs have demonstrated outcomes that exceed the actual learning, benefiting the leader-teachers as much as the learners"³. Learning Paths utilize this concept to excel in the transfer of knowledge and skills from the manager to the employee.

It also embraces the traditional Japanese approach of the Kohai-Senpai relationship. This is a relationship between a new or junior employee (Kohai) and a senior employee (Senpai). The Senpai mentors or coaches the Kohai to help bring the Kohai up to speed. The Learning Path is not restricted to the manager alone coaching the new employee, but also enlisting a senior employee as a mentor for the new employee to accelerate the learning process.

It doesn't need to stop with training new employees to become proficient employees; Learning Paths can be taken to a whole new level by using it as an effective tool to establish the proficiency of potential candidates for open positions, and thus shortening the time to proficiency even further.

Time to Proficiency

In order to truly understand the impact that a Learning Path would have in training and development, we need to explore Time to Proficiency (T2P) . Time to Proficiency is the length of time from the first day in a new job role to the day that the employee becomes proficient. Proficiency is reached when an employee can perform tasks without assistance and without errors. Essentially proficiency is reached when the employee is independently productive.

Proficiency is truly defined for the job role by the metrics used to measure success in that job role. We can discover the definition of proficiency by asking a manager of the job role "How do you know a proficient employee from a non-proficient employee?" This question would lead into a discussion that would identify specific measurable criteria for that job role.

For example, proficiency for a sales person may be typically measured by the amount of revenue generated, however when explored further we may discover that areas with higher traffic correlate to higher revenues for the sales people in that area, and when that is compared to other areas with less population and traffic could produce a false reading. So proficiency may really be defined by the percentage of traffic or sales leads that are converted to sales.Another example is a technology professional that develops technical solutions for business problems. We might measure this person by the number of projects completed on time and within budget. Further analysis may reveal that some projects last longer than others and that budgets are slashed out of the control of the employee, so a better measurement of proficiency might actually be the number of projects completed that met the goals of the project and generated the least number of issues or fixes.
When a new employee is hired there is already a substantial investment expended on that employee through the recruitment process. An additional investment is made in training that employee in their new job role. Conversely the productivity that the employee is able to provide is non-existent to very low. As the employee is trained and works on the job the investment declines and the productivity rises to a point at which productivity exceeds the investment. When the employee reaches proficiency the investment is at its lowest level, and the productivity is at its highest level for that employee. This initial investment is a real expense for the organization.

Part of that initial investment is the training that a new employee takes to learn their new job. The training is designed to transfer the information needed to perform the requirements of the job. At some point the training is completed and the employee has reached Graduation Day; however the learning has not ended there. The employee will continue to learn new topics not covered in the training, changes in the process, or simply re-learn details that were forgotten. Job aids with shortcuts or tips created by co-workers and that are not part of the training will be transferred to the employee. Co-workers will share their insights on executing the job role proficiently. At a later point in time the new employee will become proficient and therefore will reach Independence Day; the day they become independently productive.

Understanding this length of time from Day 1 to Graduation Day, and from Graduation Day to Independence Day is one of the first steps in developing the Learning Path.

Developing the Learning Path

The goal in developing the Learning Path is to accelerate the present T2P by at least 30%. The development of the Learning Path involves careful consideration of how proficiency is measured, thoroughly defining the most efficient way that proficient employees learned their jobs, and defining the new Learning Path by eliminating wasteful items. The Learning Path is executed swiftly with opportunity for continuous improvement.

In order to develop the Learning Path we need to form a Learning Path team of an executive sponsor, project leader, subject matter experts, training leader, instructional designer, and other stakeholders.

This team will carefully define the metrics that would represent proficiency in a job role. It is extremely important that careful consideration is given to how proficiency is measured and tracked. The metric must define a specific measure over a period of time so that the progress of getting up to speed can be analyzed.

Statistics will play an important role in measuring proficiency as well as it can be used to analyze data to understand trends and correlations that could be useful not only in measuring the effectiveness of the Learning Path but also to identify other key areas that impact proficiency, such as processes.

Once the metrics have been defined, they can be applied to identify actual employees that fall into the range of average proficiency and high proficiency. These employees are pooled together to form a focus group. Other focus groups will be formed which include the managers of the proficient employees, employees that are still new to the job, and their managers. The focus groups are interviewed separately with pre-defined questions that identify the topics, activities, and materials that contributed to their learning experience and those that had little or no value. They are encouraged to share any job aids or other materials that they or other employees developed to enhance their performance on the job. The Learning Path is then formed by taking the useful topics and discarding the wasteful ones and ordering them from simple to complex.

This process follows another Japanese approach of Kaizen or continuous improvement in soliciting the input from employees who touch the job role on a daily basis. The only difference is that the Learning Path focuses on a specific group for a specific job role. The Learning Path is flexible in that by taking information from the people in the organization it is adapting to the culture and processes of the business model it is being applied to.

The Learning Path is defined not just as a training course that is delivered over a period of time but rather a sequence of learning events. These events may include time in the classroom, but it is most effective when it includes opportunities to observe or shadow an employee and then to practice the task while being observed by a mentor or coach. As mentioned earlier, these events are organized from simple to complex so that as the employee masters the simpler tasks, and build on that to learn more complex tasks. It very well could be that the simpler tasks are later in the job role's process and the complex tasks are earlier in the process; however if the employee is trained in the order that the tasks are executed it may actually slow the learning process. In fact the Learning Path may be defined such that the new employee is actually executing one of the simpler tasks on the first day of the job and thus provide an immediate contribution.

Once the Learning Path is clearly defined, the instructional designers, technical writers and other developers are put to work in developing the materials for the new Learning Path. A participant guide is developed with the materials needed throughout the Learning Path and is used like a manual for the job role.

A coach's guide is also developed to provide instructions that guide the coach in focusing on the topics in the correct order. The coach may be the manager, a mentor, or another subject matter expert. The coach's guide may be used by whoever is coaching the new employee during the Learning Path and it will include the same materials in the participant's guide as well as the specific instructions to conduct practice and experience activities.

Coaching can evolve towards an Action Coaching approach that considers the individual education based on a cycle of building trust, evaluating performance, and translating feedback to action⁴ of a new employee to accelerate the learning process.

Applying Technology to Accelerate Proficiency

Someone once said "practice makes perfect", although it can be more accurately reflected that "practice makes permanent". The reason for this perspective is to consider that if someone is taught how to perform a task and the process is flawed, then the learner has simply learned to perform the task incorrectly and therefore not at all perfect; however the repetitive nature of the practice has established a permanent pattern within the cognitive conscious of the individual.

The process of learning a task through practice is also subject to errors; therefore it is best to practice in a safe environment. A safe practice environment is created in the classroom in the form of role playing or lab exercises; however this is usually limited in the number of opportunities to practice. The Learning Path extends the practice scenario into the real world when the coach provides opportunities to practice in a live business environment. While this produces favorable results in accelerating the time to get up to speed there is an opportunity to also leverage technology to provide additional practice when the opportunity is not present. This is particularly critical in job roles where the opportunities are impacted by external factors, for example in a sales environment that is dependent on customer traffic which can fluctuate in extremes.

Technology can be useful in creating practice environments as an integral part of the Learning Path. The expense and time invested in developing such technology simulations could pose as an obstacle and the investment would need to be justified. Consider that certain activities may be shared by multiple job roles such as automobile sales, service sales, and parts sales in an automobile dealership chain and comparing the expense to the benefits of accelerating the proficiency of new employees in a high turnover business could realize a respectable return on the investment.
Technology simulations exist in many forms and are not limited to just software application simulations; there are simulation vendors that provide tools and services to develop business, soft-skill situational, and procedural simulations as well.

The heart of a simulation as it relates to the Learning Path is in how it measures the performance of the learner during the simulation. The most effective might use the Artificial Intelligence approach of employing intelligent agents to monitor and rate the performance of a learner who is interacting with a simulated environment that is also modified depending on variables that are changed by either the learner or an intelligent agent. The result is that an experience is created that is unique to the individual learner, so that a multitude of paths may be taken to reach the conclusion and the learner can be graded on how well they made decisions in reacting to the changing environment to reach the desired conclusion in the most efficient manner.

The same concept can be applied by using simpler technology such as JavaScript to generate conditional paths and choices that a learner may select and can lead to a varying array of paths to a correct or incorrect result. The learner's score can be increased or decreased depending on the choices that the learner made during the simulation.

Technology can also be used to track the progress of an individual learner in the Learning Path. A Learning Management System (LMS) that can create a Learning Path like curriculum can be used to collect and report individual results as well as collective results for all associates in a job role or department.

The individualism of measuring performance supports the value of respecting the individual which has become more prominent in the workplace. The LMS is a valuable resource in managing not only learning progress, but also individual performance when the Learning Path is applied. This is because the Learning Path considers the impact that learning has on the performance metrics rather than the reaction or learning results themselves. In this perspective the Learning Path is developed with the goal of evaluating Level 3 of Dr. Donald Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluating Training⁵. This does not mean that the reaction (Level 1) or learning results (Level 2) are not important, only that the primary focus is reaching proficient performance.

A properly configured LMS that is integrated with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application such as PeopleSoft and aligned to the Learning Path has the potential to produce a balanced partnership between Learning and Performance Management.

Measuring Success

Technology and statistics are very useful tools in measuring performance and the success of not only the individual, but also the organization. When the employee has become completely proficient, the return far exceeds the investment and it produces an employee that is ready to grow and embark on other Learning Paths. Measuring success comes down to identifying that an individual is achieving the specific objectives they are assigned, and mastering the skills of the job.

Part of that measurement comes from observation, so a supplemental component to the Learning Path is the Skills Validation Checklist. The Skills Validation Checklist is composed of specific skills that the new employee is expected to demonstrate on a daily basis. The coach or mentor observes the employee over a period of time in which all of the skills have been demonstrated and provides a subjective evaluation of what was observed.
This is somewhat similar to how a talent scout might evaluate a baseball player to be considered for a team, except that in the corporate environment it happens after hiring and it is combined with statistics to create the complete picture.

It is important to note that observation alone does not validate the performance of the individual; it merely adds another dimension to measuring success. In the final analysis it needs to be combined with data and the statistics that indicate measurable performance results. Even in baseball it has been recognized that statistics plays a key role in measuring the past performance, present performance, and the probability of future performance.

Michael Lewis described this approach in his book entitled "Moneyball"⁶ which documented the success of Billy Beane who as manager of the Oakland A's recognized the usefulness of statistics in recruiting talented baseball players with a limited budget and led the A's to win the World Series.

Using the Learning Path to Hire Proficient Talent

The Learning Path can be extended yet another step to recruit talented workers into the workforce. The Learning Path defines proficiency and provides the metrics that can be used to identify proficient candidates.
This can be used to develop an interview guide that includes questions and requests for work results intended to target the level of proficiency a candidate has already reached in the Learning Path. Of course, the interview guide would also include questions that determine other factors to consider such as the educational background and if the candidate is a good fit for the culture and profile of the company.

The interview guide can yield an abundance of questions that would be daunting for a single interviewer to accomplish so it is used by multiple interviewers who select a portion of all the questions that is most relevant to their expertise, perhaps with some overlap. Interviewers can then compare impressions and make an informed decision about moving the candidate forward. Additionally, a "Phone Interview" guide is also created for screening candidates with questions that would quickly identify candidates that may already be proficient in the target job role.

The interview guide would also include the specific metrics that are defined in the Learning Path and the interviewers can rate the candidate to those specific metrics further clarifying the fit for the job. It is also important to note that with such a large candidate pool flooding the market there will be many that will hold a degree in different disciplines than the job requires or have no degree at all. The Learning Path does not consider the educational background but rather the current proficiency level that the individual has attained not only through education, but also experience and informal learning acquired over time. This approach targets the recruitment of the most proficient candidate as measured by specific metrics defined in the Learning Path.

Getting Up To Speed

Companies that are hiring a large number of new employees are facing the challenge to get these new employees up to speed. The Learning Path methodology and the supplemental applications described here have enormous potential to get new employees productive sooner and reduce the investment needed to get them there.

Learning Paths goes beyond the traditional orientation training followed by on the job application and continued trial by error learning. It defines the specific activities that get an employee productive in the most efficient manner possible. It supports the manager to act as coach, mentor, and teacher to further accelerate the process. It can be used to recruit the most proficient talent for an organization.

This may seem a totally different approach to training and it certainly can challenge organizations grounded in traditional training and development methodologies. The world is an ever evolving landscape and companies that are willing to embrace change could see this as an opportunity to meet the challenges of the current economic and social environment. The key, as with any methodology, is to completely understand the process in order to consider it and successfully apply it.

References

1. "Employment Situation Summary". Bureau of Labor Statistics. 5 August 2005. United States Department of Labor. 10 August 2005. <http://stats.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm>.
2. Williams, Jim and Steve Rosenbaum. Learning Paths: Increase Profits by Reducing the Time it Takes Employees to Get Up-To-Speed. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2004.
3. Arneson, Steve. "Leaders as Teachers: Experience and Emerging Talent". Workforce Performance Solutions. Aug. 2005: 18.
4. Dotlich, David L. and Peter C. Cairo. Action Coaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1999.
5. Kirkpatrick, Donald L. Evaluating Training Programs, The Four Levels, Second Edition. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1998.
6. Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.

Copyright ©2006 E-Learning Engineering
Last modified: April 23, 2006
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