Mindflash has recently released a new analytics tool for online training. The cloud-based software, powered by GoodData, will provide trainers with insightful information such as material comprehension and course satisfaction. By arming oneself with this data, trainers can better gauge student needs and tailor the course while training is happening, not afterward. Reports can be easily generated as they are needed.

Mindflash offers its employee and customer training solutions to more than 1,000 clients via an online platform. One of those clients is Efinancial, a life insurance company. We spoke with Andy Wiggins, Retail Sales Manager, about his company’s experience with Mindflash and the organization’s training needs.

Can you provide a brief overview of Efinancial’s  training program?

Our training falls into three areas (new hires, reps becoming agents, ongoing training for tenured agents).  Previously we conducted most of our training via PowerPoints, which I would administer myself in a classroom setting. Since our business [life insurance] requires a lot of knowledge about products, regulations, underwriting, etc. this resulted in a lot of time spent doing presentations in a classroom setting.

What’s been your experience working with Mindflash?

Mindflash has helped us take quite a bit of this training, and distribute it to the trainees to complete on their own time. Just upload the PowerPoint, give your course a title, and distribute to as many trainees as your plan allows. Essentially it’s like having two of me! While they’re completing their required coursework I can continue with curriculum development, and hands on training with my direct reports. Basically, Mindflash allows me to do more than I otherwise could have done.

How do you currently measure the effectiveness of your training program?

In addition to distribution and presentation of the materials, we have also been able to better assess what the trainees learned from the presentation.  How many trainers have to deal with trainees that are texting on their smart phone during a classroom presentation?  How much did they retain?  Were they listening? Now the agents have to prove they understand the material contained in the presentation by completing an assessment.  I just add a quiz to the training module, and set a minimum score the trainee must achieve in order to receive a completion certificate.  If the trainee fails to complete the quiz with the required score I can re-invite them to the module.  There’s even a setting that allows them to retake the module as many times as it takes to pass without having the trainer re-invite them.

Another benefit is that we can track what modules trainees have been invited to, and completed.  In the past if an employee was out of compliance in some way they loved to say “I was never trained on that.”  One solution was to keep a log of every course completed by every trainee.  Of course that generates a lot of administrative work that takes away from what us trainers do best: training.  Mindflash allows me to make sure that each employee has completed their required training.  I’m not going to lie…it feels good to come back and say, “Yeah, you were trained on that!”

Let’s talk about your overall satisfaction using Mindflash tools. Are you happy?

The staff at Mindflash has been extremely helpful any time I’ve had inquiries regarding the software.  They’re very responsive, and ready to help at a moment’s notice.  They’re never satisfied with the status quo, which any user can tell by the regular improvements and additions to the site.

So what effect has Mindflash had—more training, better assessment, and standardization of training each trainee receives.

Earlier today, Marc Rosenberg led a brilliant session: “Building eLearning Strategy for the Future: Nine Key Shifts to Watch.” He first defined what he meant by strategy, he followed with a discussion on how to be strategic vs. tactical, and then spent most of the hour breaking down the 9 key shifts to watch.

1. “From eLearning to eWorking”
   • Forget the classroom, most learning happens in the workplace. We are going to see more integration between working and learning, with most of learning occurring any and everywhere outside of the confines of a “class schedule.”
2. “From Information Scarcity to Information Abundance”
   • Learners want to “carve their own path.” Because we all learn at different paces, users want to guide their own path as they explore various content offerings.
3. “From Target Population to Cyber Intimacy”
   • No one wants to waste time learning what they already know. You must create individual learning experiences for each employee.
4. “From Courses to Apps”
   • Courses don’t work on tablets, smart phones, and other mobile devices. With this shift to mobility, learners want guidance and performance support not courses. They want applications that are not only quick and to the point, but simplify tasks.
5. “From Grades to Experiences”
   • With the integration of social learning and performance, and the emergence of the Experience API, there is less emphasis on “what grade did you get?” and more emphasis “on what do you know?” Rosenberg identified this as resume vs. transcript.
6. “From ‘Teach Me’ to ‘Guide Me'”
   • The instructor’s role is changing. It’s less about lectures and more about practice, creative thinking, and collective problem solving. There is a greater emphasis on informal learning, such as coaching and mentoring.
7. “From Course Catalogs to Knowledge Bases”
   • Information is everywhere! Learners should stop asking “what do you offer?” and instead ask “what do you know?”
8. “From Content Production to Content Curation”
   • There is a lot of bad information out there, especially online. We need knowledge managers and content curators to make sure learners have access to accurate and up-to-date information. Remember everyone is a content consumer and creator.
9. “From Push to Pull”
   • As a learner evolves from the novice to expert stage their needs change. There is less emphasis on training and more on collaborative learning. “Master performers” are more likely to pull from a knowledge database; they want to learn in their own way. Allow it!

If you have not already moved in the direction of change, it’s not to late. Don’t get left behind. And don’t forget to test your strategy!

Rather than thinking about training as just a course, webinar or job aid, think of it as the ongoing process of making micro-adjustments to employee performance—and more importantly, it’s the process of curating and providing the resources for employees to improve their own performance over time. Training needs to be a comprehensive approach to personal development that includes mentorship, connection to training content, opportunities to share and discuss the material with colleagues, and resources for self-directed learning.

Make Learning a Career-Long Priority

Supporting life-long learning in your organization means widening your gaze from specific problem solving to creating a culture that supports learning and sharing. Here are a few steps for getting started.

Recognize learning. Make sure your organization does more than give employees a pat on the back or a certificate for learning new skills. A commitment to learning new skills should be matched by a commitment to giving them opportunities to grow on the job and take on more responsibility.

Repetition, repetition, repetition. When an employee takes on new responsibilities, build in multiple opportunities for the employee to check in with the content expert or manager on this skill. Research reveals that people retain information better if they are reintroduced to it several times, so make that part of your process. Consider using technology tools to automate sending content refreshers to employees to help promote application and integration of new skills.

Another great way to turn a learner into an expert is to challenge them to teach the material or concept to someone else. This is also a great way to promote information sharing and communication.

Make content and conversation available. “Content curation” may sound like a fad, but it’s more than that. As content migrates online, training and learning managers have an essential role as curators—librarians of institutional knowledge. Part of making sure that training is not just a one-time event is making sure that employees have the access to the resources they will need to refresh their understanding, access new resources and engage with their colleagues. Performance support groups, internal wikis and social networks are other great ways to support the implementation of new skills and abilities over time.

In conclusion, take this series of posts on the most common mistakes in training as an opportunity to take a good look at what your organization is doing and what you can do better. Many of these changes don’t require big budgets—just thoughtful evaluation of how to make improvements to your existing workflow. More suggestions? Join in the comments.

About the Author

Kelly Meeker is the Community Manager at OpenSesame, the elearning content marketplace, where she creates, curates and shares with the learning and development community. Find her on her blog at www.OpenSesame.com/blog, on Twitter (@OpenSesame) or at kelly.meeker@opensesame.com.

Diagram copyright Bozarth, Jane (2008) From Analysis to Evaluation: Tools, Tips, and Techniques for Trainers. San Francisco: Pfeiffer. This material is reproduced with permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

When you have a disengaged employee, internal obstacles, or simply an unqualified employee, attacking the problem with a training-related solution will be ineffective. The solution to performance problems is not always reinforcing techniques or processes employees may already understand. The best solution may require deeper analysis of business processes to improve, simplify, or add resources—or to find a more qualified employee.

Understanding and Addressing Performance Problems

If you’re working with a manager to address a structural or performance issue, there are a few steps you should take to assess the problem.

• Job shadowing. If the performance problems affect a wide swath of employees, spend a few days with them. Keep an open mind, ask a lot of questions and take the time to understand how processes work currently before you make recommendations or develop training resources. Talking with a broad group of employees will give you a better sense of which challenges are rooted in personal issues, and which challenges are the result of ineffective processes.

• You have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion. Often, training managers play the role of group therapist. Sometimes, managers impose their vision of “what’s wrong” onto a situation. Other times, simple communication breakdowns turn into bigger problems. It’s your role to unearth the root causes of performance and structural problems by bringing together diverse perspectives, and approaching the problem with an open mind.

• Use technology tools. Start by using technology tools to gather data and collect feedback. Making data-driven decisions will help balance out individual decision-makers and promote good action plans. Explore tools like Tableau (for data visualization) to see what performance gaps may map to weak points in your overall organizational performance. For example, if you map your company’s sales cycle, can you see where customers drop out the most? Can you address that weakness with training or more resources?Use technology tools to assess where your employees are looking for help. What questions are most popular in internal social networks? Can Google Analytics tell you what resources employees are accessing most in your learning management system?As you move into solution design, technology tools like internal and external social networks are a fabulous resource for enabling easier communication and performance support. A culture of communication and sharing will go a long ways towards interrupting performance problems before they develop.

Training managers who are integrated in the business process from start to finish are prepared not only to design and manage excellent training programs, but also to recognize when the answer isn’t training and to make a useful recommendation to leadership.

About the Author

Kelly Meeker is the Community Manager at OpenSesame, the elearning content marketplace, where she creates, curates and shares with the learning and development community. Find her on her blog at www.OpenSesame.com/blog, on Twitter (@OpenSesame) or at kelly.meeker@opensesame.com.

You don’t want to disregard this gut feeling entirely. Having a good working relationship with the people you’re going to deal with on a day-to-day basis is crucial to the overall success of your training program. Unfortunately, the salesperson is typically not the individual you end up partnering up with once you’ve signed a contract. Instead, you find yourself dealing with sales engineers or customer service representatives.

This is fine if you love the product or service you’ve purchased, but if you find yourself having trouble justifying the purchase seconds after your superstar salesperson has stepped out of the boardroom, you may want to reconsider what aspect of the product or service actually impresses you. Here are our recommendations for making a decision based on the needs of your learners, and not on your social preferences.

How to Make the Right Purchasing Decision

• Make a list. Before you step into any sales meeting, you should have articulated a precise list of needs. Be sure to think critically about how those different needs affect different people in your organization, and which needs are most important. When you come into a meeting equipped with this list, you can easily determine which products or services are a good fit based on their features rather than the face attached to them.
• Check it twice. Both before and after your initial meeting with a salesperson, you should take the time to get to know their product or service on your own. Detaching your own perception of the product or service in question from the influence of the salesperson will help you gain clarity. If you’re considering purchasing a technology product, get a demo or trial license and use it.
• Don’t go it alone. Test it out yourself, and invite other people in your organization to review different options. You may be rooting for one product that works best for you, but you’ll need participation from a cross-section of the eventual users to make the right decision.
• Beware the workarounds. A salesperson addressing your specific needs with suggested workarounds may be a red flag. If a service is appropriate for your organization’s needs, workarounds should be minimal. Make sure you understand how much you’re compromising your needs before you sign on the dotted line. When you decide to purchase from a company with their promise that they’ll implement a set of workarounds, hold them to it and get the salesperson involved if necessary.
• Check out cloud tools. Most software tools are now available as cloud services. If your company’s security and firewall settings will allow it, you’ll save administrative and support efforts by using cloud tools. You’ll be able to rely on the vendor to keep your version of the software up-to-date, reduce server costs and have more flexible access to the resources. This includes elearning authoring tools—the Adobe Creative Suite, Articulate and other popular tools are now available as cloud subscriptions.

Technology tools are a great way to expand the reach of your training programs, but since you often need to make long-term decisions when purchasing technology tools, take the time to get it right.

About the Author

Kelly Meeker is the Community Manager at OpenSesame, the elearning content marketplace, where she creates, curates and shares with the learning and development community. Find her on her blog at www.OpenSesame.com/blog, on Twitter (@OpenSesame) or at kelly.meeker@opensesame.com.

The onboarding process is an exciting period for new hires and the organization alike. Everyone’s excited to get to work—and managers are often too quick to end the training phase because they want to get back to their own work.

As a result, organizations rush or even skip the onboarding process, in favor of more pressing tasks. But onboarding sets the tone for an employee’s relationship with the organization, and it’s essential to get it right. The first months of a new employer-employee relationship are a key opportunity to ensure the new employee understands not only their role in the organization, but the context of their role.

Furthermore, good onboarding helps new employees both embrace and exhibit your company culture. Take the time to cement these ideas early, before you are stuck coping with overwhelmed, underprepared and confused new hires.

Here are the essential first steps for designing your onboarding program.

Recommendations for Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Program

●      What are your assumptions? Before you shake your new employee’s hand on their first day, take a step back and take a critical look at your organization and your onboarding program. Too often, employers shift directly into training an employee for their specific roles and responsibilities without introducing them to the organization at large.

When you greet your new employee on the first day, you embody the organization’s attitude towards their team members. You want to make sure you’re starting with a discussion of the organization’s mission and vision, moving on to the goals for this position, and discussing how they fit into the big picture.

●      Organize institutional knowledge. As the training manager, it’s your role to ensure new employees have the resources they need to get started effectively. That means ensuring that resources are not simply in your brain or in other employees’ brains: Everything needs to be online, and not simply in blocks of unorganized Word documents. This is the time to start organizing your institutional knowledge (whether in your learning management system or using another internal website), so that new employees are not reinventing the wheel. Think of yourself as the company librarian, who focuses on making sure the resources are curated, well-organized and up-to-date.

●      Make the time. As the training manager, not only should you invest a significant amount of time in managing a new employee’s first several weeks of employment—you need to make sure their direct supervisors and peers do the same. Taking the time upfront to ensure that they understand the company’s goals and what they’re expected to accomplish will prevent early miscommunications from snowballing into larger problems down the road.

Specifically, create a sample “new employee” calendar that managers can use to plan a new employee’s experience.

●      Get personal. Provide new employees with the opportunity to develop both professional and social relationships with co-workers. Fostering these different relationships—friends, allies, mentors, etc—is crucial for creating a workplace where new employees feel comfortable. Healthy workplace relationships help employees —newbies and veterans alike—enjoy spending time at work, stay motivated, and know where to turn with a question.

Remember that creating an effective onboarding program is an investment. The time you spend fine-tuning your onboarding program will save you time that you would otherwise spend correcting employees in the future. Share your successful onboarding examples in the comments!

About the Author

Kelly Meeker is the Community Manager at OpenSesame, the elearning content marketplace, where she creates, curates and shares with the learning and development community. Find her on her blog at www.OpenSesame.com/blog, on Twitter (@OpenSesame) or at kelly.meeker@opensesame.com.

As readers of this blog are well aware, a lot of thought and effort goes into optimizing training programs, which means there are many opportunities for things to go wrong.

In this series, we will take a close look at four common mistakes that organizations of all sizes make when creating training programs. We’ll also look at solutions for these problems and strategies for eliminating them outright.

The Four Most Common Mistakes in Training
When we asked our Twitter followers what training blunders they commonly ran into, we received many insightful responses. We’ve combined the thoughts of these elearning professionals with our own field-tested insights and came up with the following four mistakes:

1. Ignoring onboarding. This is the most crucial time for the training department, and yet it is frequently overlooked by companies eager to get their new hire on the floor. By taking the time to initiate new hires into company culture and get them started on the right path, you save time correcting future mistakes and decrease the potential for unhappy employees.
2. Falling for the salesperson, not the product. When you’re evaluating vendors for training products or services, if you find yourself having an excellent understanding of the positive qualities your salesperson possesses, but can’t recall the features you discussed, something is wrong. While the training products you use aren’t the only key component to your training program, making clear-headed purchasing decisions is an important foundation.
3. Assuming you have a training problem. Before you get to work developing training, you want to make sure the problems your company is experiencing don’t lie elsewhere. You don’t want to build your training problems on shaky foundations—perceived training issues that are actually unrelated.
4. Training is not a one time event. The modern workplace changes so rapidly that constant training is a necessity. Just as learning is a life-long process, training should also be continuously integrated into an employee’s work experience.

Come back next week, we’ll suggest the most effective ways we know to manage training programs and build a strong, learning culture to support your organization.

About the Author

Kelly Meeker is the Community Manager at OpenSesame, the elearning content marketplace, where she creates, curates and shares with the learning and development community. Find her on her blog at www.OpenSesame.com/blog, on Twitter (@OpenSesame) or at kelly.meeker@opensesame.com.