Training, Hiring, Spending Survey

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The economic downturn of the past couple years has had a significant impact on most businesses, and it has been a particularly rough patch for training departments. The old adage, “When there are cuts to be made, training gets hit first” seems to have been proven true. At GCP, we’ve heard from many clients that their budgets were slashed, and we’ve heard from plenty of prospective clients that training purchases were out of the question.

But the news seems to get better in 2011! Business, media, and government analysts report a turnaround in hiring, as seen in these news items:

"The share of executives who said they plan to hire new workers in 2011 rose to 47 percent, compared with 28 percent who forecast they would add jobs this year..."

"Companies added more workers in February than in any month in almost a year - a turning point for the economy that finally pushed the unemployment rate below 9 percent. Economists say the stronger hiring should endure all year."

"Private employers added 222,000 jobs last month, the most since April. That shows that companies are feeling more confident in the economy and about their own financial prospects. And it bolstered hopes that businesses will shift into a more aggressive hiring mode and boost the economic recovery."

"The labor market is improving slowly. On average, employers are expected to add 178,300 jobs per month this year. The economists predict that 210,000 jobs will be added to payrolls in each of the last three months of 2011."

"Small businesses have ramped up their hiring in recent months, fueled by a recovering economy and more optimistic business owners. That's a far cry from little more than a year ago, when the sector was losing thousands upon thousands of jobs each month."

Training industry reports we’ve seen indicate that this is going to be a big year in training, as well. Companies that have delayed needed training have loosening budgets that should allow them to catch up in 2011.

True for you, too? What’s going on in hiring and training in YOUR business life? Hoping that information would be helpful to you in your training decisions, we're researching for an article to be published in our next newsletter.

Please take this very short survey to help us out with some real-life data. This questionnaire should take less than 10 minutes to complete.

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Narration, Text and Graphics - Best Mix Practices

In a recent LinkedIn discussion, Tom Pendergast asked, "What does research show about the benefits/ drawbacks of having non-redundant onscreen text and narration in e-Learning where graphics/animations are not the focus?"

An important question, as it seems to be the standard that an "online learning module" will mix narration, text and graphics almost by default. Stephen Schneiter posted some very relevant research links, the gist of which is that distraction is a bad thing, and if the brain is forced to try to comprehend two streams of input, distraction will ensue.

Based on our own experimentation with focus groups as well as feedback from clients, we've "solved" this quandary for ourselves in our courseware development. (I say "solved" carefully because there are always trade-offs with any approach, and no one solution can possibly be perfect for every learner.)

What we needed to accomplish:

• address multiple learning styles/preferences within a single product
• address accessibility issues for learners with visual/auditory/literacy limitations
• address the cognitive load issues mentioned above

Ted Finger wrote a succinct summary of his approach to mixing text with narration. To describe what we came up with, I'll play off some of Ted's points, in italics below:

• Make sure the onscreen text closely summarizes the narration. (Instead, we made sure the onscreen text matches the narration exactly.)

• Synchronize the onscreen text along with the corresponding narration as precisely as possible. (ABSOLUTELY! Also, we made sure the text animation reveals text in meaningful chunks that match how people read - i.e., revealing complete bullet points, sentences, or even short paragraphs, rather than something cute and clever like revealing each word as it's narrated. Some of our early attempts were very creative and cool, but ultimately annoying to learners! ;o)

• Keep the onscreen text as abbreviated as possible; for example, short bullet points. (As I mentioned above, we DON'T abbreviate the text. What we found was that abbreviated text increases the cognitive load. As Stephen pointed out, if the learners see something different from what they're hearing simultaneously, it's confusing and distracting.)

• If possible, offer an audio transcript in the interface. (CRUCIAL! We wanted to keep the screen real estate uncluttered - no overwhelming sea of text, and plenty of room for supporting graphics. So while the first piece of text may go away to make room for the next piece as narration progresses, full text is always available via a slide-out box at the bottom of the screen for those who prefer to read the whole thing at once or just want to review a particular part that may have left the screen.)

Learn more about research and decisions that guide our instructional design approach on our website.

E-learning and Telecommuting - Inequally Evil?

Telecommuters will invariably end up ripping someone off - someone ALWAYS gets shortchanged.

Either their company, or the teleworkers themselves and their families.

At least, that was the declaration of a former boss when I proposed working from home at least a few days a week. When teleworkers slack off, with no one to supervise them, he said, they're stealing from their employer. Conversely, when they have a strong work ethic, they feel compelled to prove (to themselves as well as their boss and colleagues) that they're not slacking off, and end up spending more hours at their desk than they should.

Of course, you're a better teleworker than that - I know I am! Right? You and I are always responsible and mature in our use of the gift of flexibility that our telecommuting situation provides, right?

Well... knowledge work - for the chronically curious, the compulsive reader, the ADD-inflicted - is like a distillery job for an alcoholic. The web is a million constant temptations, and each one links to a zillion more. I admit that I sometimes have to "work" 16 hours in a day in order to get 8 hours of tasks completed.

But in general, I am indeed a better teleworker than that. It's incredibly productive to walk downstairs rather than having to drive for an hour and a half, to set my own schedule, to work in the comfort of my home office dressed comfortably, to not be around an officeful of interesting people interrupting me (and I them) all day long. I get a LOT done, and more happily and healthily than when I drove to work.

John McDermott posted an interesting question on LinkedIn's Learning, Education and Training Professionals Group: "Remote learning is great, but no remote workers, please!" Why are employers willing to allow e-learning but not e-work? Is this a fear of employees slacking off, or a devaluation of the training/learning function?

Most likely both, I say. The lack of trust employers have for telecommuting demonstrates a strong acknowledgment of the value of teamwork but lack of recognition of the utility of online collaboration tools to facilitate that teamwork despite lack of physical proximity.

And the apparently contradictory acceptance of e-learning acknowledges the ability of trainees to take responsibility for their own learning tasks, while failing to recognize the social aspects of learning.

A crucial aspect of all of this is the fact that some of both our work and our learning tasks are best tackled in quiet solitude with singular attention, while others are enhanced (or even made possible at all) by nature of interaction with one or more teammates. None of us at GCPLearning ever tell an HR, training, or environmental health and safety manager that our training was designed to replace trainers, the classroom, or any other tool they're currently using.

E-learning - like teleworking - is one arrow in the employer's quiver, to be applied thoughtfully and deliberately where it will do the most good. Employers would do well to recognize - no, embrace - this key fact and make business decisions, related to both task and training functions, accordingly.

Photo courtesy of slworking

Training That's Good Enough to be Great

I recently read an article that resonated so well with me, on a bunch of different fronts. The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine by Robert Capps appears in the September issue of Wired Magazine.

The basic premise: our tastes and evaluations have evolved; "quality" often no longer means the fastest and shiniest and techiest offering. QUALITY means the thing that is convenient, flexible, and cheap. The article gives a bunch of excellent examples, starting in with the Flip camcorder, and going on to illustrate how "...companies that focus on traditional measures of quality—fidelity, resolution, features—can become myopic and fail to address other, now essential attributes like convenience and shareability." Capps cites the growing adoption of Skype vs. traditional phones, Hulu vs. television, cheap netbooks over fancier computers, and several more. "As the worst recession in 75 years rolls on, it's the light and nimble products that are having all the impact—exactly the type of thing that lean startups and small-scale enterprises are best at."

Our needs themselves have evolved. Or a better way to look at it, I think, is that our recognition of our true needs has evolved. As we shop, we're seeing more clearly what's most important to us in our real lives.

"The attributes that now matter most all fall under the rubric of accessibility. Thanks to the speed and connectivity of the digital age, we've stopped fussing over pixel counts, sample rates, and feature lists. Instead, we're now focused on three things: ease of use, continuous availability, and low price."

An example for me personally is cameras. I love to take photos. I love to look at photos. I can't seem to stop myself from taking photos. (Just ask my annoyed wife and sons!) I've got a beloved old Nikon 35mm I get out once in a... OK, come to think of it, it's been at least 5 years since I had it out. (I wonder what's on the roll of film that's still in there??) And I have dSLR ambitions, but most of the photos I take are with the crappy camera in my phone, or at best, with my waterproof, shockproof, freezeproof pocket camera. Why? Because the quality most important to me is, what camera can I have with me all the time? What's convenient and flexible? (The third quality comes into play too – cheap. My pocket cam was under $300, and in effect, I didn't pay for my phonecam... I bought the phone, and the camera's just an assumed part of it. And hey, in any given month, I don't seem to have a thousand bucks laying around after bills get paid – so no D90 for me, so far.)

Funny thing is, an evolution in taste has occurred - a cause or an effect of this revolution? I don't know. But there are those who actually appreciate this lower-resolution aesthetic in photography. Search Flickr groups for "phonecam" and find 691 different groups devoted to folks who love this or that aspect of the photos they get from their cellies. (example: PhoneCam Expressions is "...for all those who love to use their phone cameras, but with a sense of taste and beauty." And DBOLRL ("DBOLRL: a playground for a Drunken Bunch of Low Res Lovers") has a brutally light-hearted (light-heartedly brutal?) voting game that's been running for nearly 4 years, reveling in the wonder of chunky, noisy photos from cheap cameras.

So anyway... this is supposed to be my e-learning business blog, and I need to show why I'm babbling about all of this.

I propose that there is an elegance possible in a simpler e-learning solution for corporate training. I would like to suggest that there are bells and whistles in the more expensive "end-to-end, enterprise solutions" a lot of vendors push, that most training organizations simply do not need. I assert that if the training content itself is excellent, there are plenty of delivery features that upon examination, you might discover aren't as necessary as you may have thought when they were described to you in the sales process.

So I'm submitting for your discussion, that e-learning consumers need to ask themselves Capps' three questions as part of their evaluation: "Is it simple to get what we want out of the technology? Is it available everywhere, all the time — or as close to that ideal as possible? And is it so cheap that we don't have to think about price?"

If you have a staff of thousands, in multiple locations, by all means, you need to think Cadillac in selecting a tracking and scheduling and reporting system. But if you're training 20 people, or 50, is it really all that difficult to collect printed completion certificates from trainees, and manage your records by hand in a spreadsheet? Does your skill gap analysis really require the use of an elaborate database? Doesn't it make good business sense (especially in cash-tight times like these) to buy only the lean and nimble access to training that you need, rather than paying more for fat that isn’t adding any benefit to your training?

I'd loved to get feedback on these thoughts. For e-learning in your organization, what's good enough?