What Is the Best Way to Train Employees on New Technology

When it comes to training, many companies take the approach that a lot of cheerleading and some high energy classroom teaching sessions, will get the job done. The rest is up to the employees to learn the new way of doing things. This is a bit of an exaggeration but if you are serious about learning you’ll want to use the tools that are available to do the job right. That means being educated on tools that map directly to how people learn, retain, and apply new technology in a real work environment.  Fortunately, the hard part has been researched. We know how to learn through grounding in cognitive science, understanding workflow integration, and use of measurable outcomes as your guide.

GETTING STARTED

New technology is a broad subject. It can mean software, changing testing procedures, new fabrication techniques, or subsystem changes, just to cover a few of the possibilities. No matter the challenge, learning new technologies all have the same starting point - understanding what the current technology does. You want to be task-centric and the training is focused on what needs to be accomplished rather than the features. Next is to map out real workflows and use cases. Then the real integration begins. Map the new technology capabilities directly to the existing tasks and workflows, noting any areas that overlap. To demonstrate capability, once you have achieved this stage of the training, trainees should be able to complete a simple, but realistic task under the new framework.

BUILD UNDERSTANDING

The next stage is known as the Just Enough stage. It is the logical next step where the trainees are given knowledge that is about 20% conceptual, focusing on the edge conditions that they are most likely to encounter and where they could get stuck. The remaining 80% is working on the applications that they are most likely going to have to solve. This gives them the skills to handle most of the conditions that they will encounter. In this stage, to cement the learn it is important to not only learn how to apply these 80% solutions but also “reflect” or think more deeply about the differences between the old way and the new way and why the new way improves the activity. This helps in digesting the changes and is the first solid step to answering the question, “ How does this make my job easier, faster, or more accurate?”

HANDS ON

At this stage, they should be ready to demonstrate ever increasing complexity with the new technology. The usual pattern is to start with basic operation and navigation, followed by standard workflows, exceptions and then troubleshooting, and finally optimization and power use. Each step up should build on top of mastery of the step below it. This is sometimes referred to as building a scaffold.

RETAIN OUR LEARNING

A vital part of learning new technologies is understanding where they breakdown. This involves purposely driving the technology to failure. This is often done inside what is called a sandbox environment. If there are known, specific failure modes these should be explicitly practiced, along with any recovery technique. Errors should be seen as a significant part of the training: avoiding errors during training leads to more errors in production. Learners should have free reign in a safe environment to experiment with non-standard conditions. The learning during this stage is incredibly helpful in building “cheat sheets” with dos and don’ts. Now is the time to deploy the technology in the real work station. This is a vital step that changes the mindset from just practice to actually doing valuable work. This is what makes it real in the mind of the trainee. Ultimately the new technology ages and gets an up-rev. When this happens, it time for a refresher and some test time with the changes. Training is a continuous activity if done correctly.

MAKING IT COUNT

The new technology was originally incorporated for a specific task. It may have been purchased to increase productivity, save cost, offer faster response or for some other reason or KPI (Key Performance Indicator). It is important to have that in mind through the training and deployment. The KPI’s should be monitored as the trainees improve their skill. This helps in evaluating if the desired goal was achieved, determining what is the average time from deployment to proficiency, determining if certain workflows are more time consuming than others, who are the power users and so on.

WRAP IT UP

Needless to say, not all training situations are the same, but the overall flow should match as close as possible to the outline presented here. Skipping steps will penalize your efforts down the road. Investing in thorough training has been proven time and again to reduce errors while productively adopting new technologies.