Do You Really Know What Training Is?

Written by:

TL Peters II, President & Founder

Training. We are bombarded with this word and we are charged with effectively producing the outcome that this word conjures. But how? Do you know how to actually train another person? Are you sure about that? If so, how do you know? If someone else taught you, how are you so certain that they taught (trained) you correctly? How you will know if what I am about tell you is correct?

I am going to share with you what I discovered sometime in the early 90’s. At the time I made the discovery, I myself was trying to learn what training is because I was newly charged with providing the employees that I worked with “safety training”. I’ll expand on “safety training” later on. It did not cross my mind at the time that I may want to write the date down somewhere because I would be passing this information along to others in the future. I do however recall the time frame was the early 90’s.

As I stated, I now had an additional responsibility to conduct safety training. At the time I was working for a company in Jacksonville, Texas that manufactures medical products. I became employed with them, in their engineering department in October 1988. Sometime in either November or December of 1988 I was given the additional responsibility of Environmental Coordinator and right behind that came the Safety and Health side. I would venture to guess that many of you started your career in the EHS field the same way. So now one of the things that I was supposed to do was provide, you guessed it, “safety training.” But, I had no idea how. I had never trained anyone before, so I had no idea how to perform this new responsibility. I was told that it would be easy. I was told that safety training was conducted once a month and that there was a calendar that I could refer to, so that I would know what the topic was for the month. All I had to do was send out a memo letting people know when the monthly safety training would be and what the topic would be.

So on the selected date, employees would come into the conference/meeting/training room and I would show the video on the topic that was identified in the memo. Now these videos were about 12 minutes in length and were very generic and scripted. When the video was over, I would ask if anyone had any questions. Often no one did, other than “can we get new videos?” Now the most important part of the whole safety training process was getting the sign-in sheets. Because the sign-in sheet was the “holy grail” of safety training. Does any of this sound familiar to you so far?

Now, after all of that safety training, month after month, injuries were still occurring. So as you can imagine, eventually my boss asked me why and I didn’t have a logical answer. Although I did not know what training was or how to do it, I was fairly positive what we were doing was not training. So I set out to learn what training was and how to do it. So, the first place I went was to the library. That turned out to be a dead end. So, I had to rely on a skill set that I was taught called benchmarking. I began by seeking out – what I considered at that time – some of the most dangerous professions with the least numbers of injuries and fatalities. The first three I decided to benchmark were, commercial airline pilots, doctors, and members of the armed forces. I have since expanded that research to law enforcement, fire fighters, and paramedics.

 What Is Being Passed Off As Training Today?

As I stated earlier, I was put into a position to provide “safety training” for the employees I worked with, but I had no idea how to do it. Turns out, neither did anyone else. So, everyone did what human nature leads us to do. We made it up as we went. No one understood – or at least no one that was associated with the safety industry – how the brain functions during the learning process. And no one understood how to help the learner develop specific habitual working skills. Oh, there were many people that clearly understood what training was and how to develop and deliver effective training. There were just none of them that were in the safety industry. If there were, then they stayed hidden.

So what was sold to us that we bought into hook, line and sinker, was to show expensive generic videos. If a company wanted to make it appear that they were really serious about training, then they would require each employee to complete a generic, easy to pass, test. Regardless of which they selected, it was a waste of money that achieved nothing except costing the company a lot of money and giving the employees a break from work. However, it did absolutely nothing to improve the skill level needed to perform the required tasks of their jobs the right way. What is even sadder is, the very same approach is being repackaged and sold to employers all over the country to this very day. I receive multiple email ads daily trying to sell me the very junk that I just described. What is even more disturbing, the same fake training programs are being sold by large, respected organizations that many people trust. Are you beginning to understand why year after year, nearly 3 million employees are injured at work every year in the United States?

 What I Have Learned About Training

So here is what I have learned and what I do and what I have been teaching others for approximately 25 years now. There are three components to training. Each one has a very distinct function. Leave out any one of them or do not fully complete one of them and training does not occur. Here are the three components of training; Education, Demonstration and Evaluation.

 Job. Job Function. Job Task.

Before I continue, I want to define a few terms that I will use in this blog and in future blogs and in future lessons. I will often describe either a Job Requirement, a Job Function, or a Job Task. Actually, this is the order of operation; Job, Function, Task. For every Job, there is a Job Function and for every Job Function there is a Job Task. I also often refer to the Job Function as a "Chain" and the Job Task as the links of the chain. So, if an individual is weak in any particular job task (link of a chain), then that is where the workplace injury will occur.

I’ll give you an example of a plumber. A plumber’s job is to either install new plumbing, replace old plumbing or repair existing plumbing. That is their job(s). Now there are many functions to those jobs. Replacing a sink faucet is a function of one of those jobs. Turning off the water, loosening and removing the water line and then removing the old faucet are all tasks of links in the chain required to complete the function of replacing the faucet, which is required to complete the job. The danger exists in the job tasks. Perform any of the job tasks wrong and trouble will occur. This trouble could result in injury to either the person that is performing the job task or someone that is nearby. Now let’s begin looking at the three components of training.

 Education

I want to begin by stating that education is not a first step. Education is an integrated component of the training process. It isn’t as though you complete all of the education portion then you move onto the demonstration portion. Again, education is an integration of the training process.

Your employee (student) needs to develop the knowledge needed to understand how the job function you are requiring them to perform, works. They need to know every detail about each job task to complete the job function that they are to perform. If you know it, they need to know it. If anyone else knows it, manufacturer, the designer, manager, anyone then your employee needs to know it. Any small piece of information that your employee does not have to successfully complete each job task to complete the required job function, then that is where things will go drastically wrong, resulting in a workplace injury.

So either you or someone else that has experience developing specific course curriculum will be needed. I hope I am being crystal clear here, when I tell you that the curriculum for this portion of the training process MUST be specific to the job task the employee is required to perform.

So Education is one of the components.

 Demonstration

The next component is demonstration. Now this is a component that you are probably very familiar with. This is where you show your employee exactly how the specific job task is to be performed and then you have them mirror that task back to you. And you have them perform that task until they get it right and you continue to have them repeat the task until they can’t get it wrong. There is a very specific area of the brain that is being developed during that process. It’s called the Basal Ganglia. I won’t go into a discussion of the function of the basal ganglia here, but understand that it plays an extremely important role in the training process.

During the demonstration portion, you are working on developing the habits required for repeat performance. I want to share a myth with you. It has been said for many years that you want to keep practicing until you develop muscle memory. Well, there is no such thing as muscle memory. Our muscles have no memory. Our muscles only do what they are told to do by the brain, hence, the basal ganglia.

Demonstration by the instructor and repeated demonstration by the student is extremely important to the training process.

 Evaluation

The next step in the training process is evaluation. If they have reached this level in the process – keep in mind, not everyone does – then they have reached a very high level which means that they were successful in the Education and Demonstration levels. CAUTION: Do not move your employee (student) to this level unless they have successfully completed the Education and Demonstration levels. If you do, you are setting them up for disaster.

In the evaluation phase, the student is assigned to work with someone that is already at the required skill level (expert – I’ll describe this person in a later lesson.) This is where they are performing all of the job tasks that they have been taught in the work environment. This phase will continue until they have proven that they can perform, consistently, without mistake, each job task that they were trained to perform.

If the employee is successful after this phase, then actual, specific skill developing training has occurred. If anything other than what I have just described to you occurs, then training did not happen and you should not be surprised when something goes wrong. You should actually be expecting it to happen. You should be expecting your employee to be injured and surprised when they are not. But, if they are properly trained, then you should be surprised if they are ever injured or performs any of the job tasks wrong.

 Practice Practice Practice

When their training is complete, the final piece is Practice Practice Practice. All skills that we have developed are perishable. If we do not perform that specific task with some level of regularity, then we will slowly begin to lose our ability to perform that specific task the correct way, or at least begin to lose our established efficiency. So, if there is a job function that an employee does not perform on some sort of frequent basis, then setup opportunities for the employee to practice the job function so they can keep their ability to perform each of the job tasks correctly and efficiently.

 How Long Does The Training Process Take?

This is a question that many do not want to hear the answer too. The real answer is it depends. It will depend on the complexity of the job function and the abilities of the student. This is what I tell my students. The more complex the job function, the smaller the population and the longer time span it will take to complete. The less complex the job function, the larger the population the shorter time span it will take to complete.

Unfortunately, I do not have a specific time frame to give you. What I can tell you is, for complex job functions such as operating a forklift and other complex pieces of equipment cannot be completed in a few hours or even a day. It could take weeks, maybe even months to complete. So, if anyone ever tells you that they can complete something such as forklift training in a few hours or even in a day, then they are either lying to you and simply trying to cheat you out of your money, or they have absolutely no idea about what they are doing and they are faking their way through it. In either case, you and your employees will lose.

Training is something that is near and dear to my heart. I work hard in every class that I teach to stress the importance of training and the requirements for effective training. If it is your desire to finally learn what training actually is and how to conduct effective training, please subscribe and I will be ecstatic to teach you.  So until next time, keep learning and never give up.