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How to Deliver Training and Development that Delivers the Desired Business Outcomes

By Leanne Hoagland-Smith

To be competitive and to remain a player in today’s 24/7 knowledge driven business world requires that your employees be thoroughly trained to deliver the best customer service both to your external and internal customers. The old 19th and 20th centuries’ paradigm of controlling the employee has transformed to one of freedom for today’s knowledge worker.

Yet, continued research suggests that the majority of training and development initiatives estimated at 80 to 90% whether they come from the human resource department to the executive management team fail to deliver a positive return on investment. Consequently, when training fails, the first department to experience budget cuts is human resource because of this failure.

Part of this reason that a positive return on investment is not achieved potentially begins with a failure to connect the learning with the desired results. For example using customer service, is the training about the correct procedures in processing the sale or is the training about creating a loyal customer during the sales process? A recent customer service survey indicated that the number one response customers do not want to hear is “That is not my department.” This response is probably a result of knowing the procedures, but those procedures do not necessarily create happy and more importantly loyal customers.

Another part of may reside in how the training is delivered. Most training goes against the best learning research that indicates repeated exposures to a learning event deliver significantly greater long-term memory when compared with one time exposure. From our earliest school days, we all know what 10x10 is, almost without thinking. However, to respond as quickly with the correct answer to 23x24 is far more challenging. Common sense tells us that if we can’t remember what we learn then we can’t apply what we have learned.

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Online Quiz Creation Guide

Online quizzes can be great tools in helping students learn and check their comprehension of the information they have been taught. However, a quiz must be worded, ordered, and structured properly to ensure that students understand the appropriate material.

Like written quizzes, online quizzes are usually short in length and specifically test a student’s ability to comprehend information previously presented to him. For example, a student may read a lesson about the history of the automobile and then answer questions about who created the internal combustion engine, who created the Model T, and so forth.

One thing to keep into consideration, however, is that a quiz should test a student’s ability to recall pertinent details and make generalizations about the entire subject on which he is tested. Instructors commonly create questions that test irrelevant details or are too directly related to the material to be of value to the student. One instructor may ask for dates and names of famous battles in English history, and a particular student may do very well on this quiz. However, when he is assessed on his knowledge of English history and asked to write an assessment on the War of the Roses, he could very well come up short. The disparity stems from the low-level, pure comprehension nature of the questions in the quiz as compared to the higher-level thought process required to write an analysis of history.

Teachers also can make the mistake of creating questions that are overly general. One of the common complaints of students is that questions appear too abstract or ambiguous, and this is often true. An instructor may ask a question like: “What was the nature of early English-Native American interaction?” Such a question is perfectly innocuous, but when the answer choices are given as one-word characterizations like “timid,” “overbearing,” and “indifferent,” students are left to guess what a teacher “meant to ask” rather than ponder the material covered in the quiz.

A teacher must strike a balance between questions that are overly specific or overly general. While it is not always easy to tell what a “good” question entails, here are a few guidelines:

• The question should reflect the student’s ability to comprehend and not simply recall information
• The question should aid in a student’s analysis of the information presented
• The question should be worded such that the student cannot determine the answer easily by process of elimination from the answer choices
• Good questions require the judgment of the student so that the student does not just choose the “correct” answer, but the “best” answer

Consider the following two questions as illustrations of the points above. Both questions ask essentially the same thing, but one is a good question while the other is decidedly ineffective as a learning tool.

Is the NFL-AFL merger considered an example of monopoly? Why or why not?

Which features of a monopoly did the NFL-AFL merger exhibit? Which features allowed for an exemption from antitrust law?

While both of the above questions test a on a student’s knowledge of antitrust legislation and the NFL-AFL merger, the above question is ambiguous as to what the question really wants the student to respond with. The question below, while asking basically the same information, requires the student to cite specific examples of features of monopolies and antitrust while guiding the student in an effective analytical response. Clearly, the bottom question is superior.

Of course, it is difficult to judge every question as a “good” or “bad” question, but over time, educators can get a feel for the effectiveness of the quizzes by the responses they receive from their respective students. Effective quizzes will help students use knowledge in analytic responses and on lengthy assessments. Ineffective quizzes will encourage students to “brain dump,” or cram. If used correctly, quizzes are an indispensable tool to the educator and a great learning tool for the student.

About the Author:
ProProfs Quiz School is a free web based tool that enables educators to create online quizzes and practice tests for their students. It also offers a large collection of free quizzes. To create a free quiz visit: http://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/

Read more articles by: ProProfs Quiz School

Online Anatomy & Physiology

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Using Instructional Media in the Classroom

By Suki Reed

To follow up on our recent newsletters, our third method of losing control in a training session happens when we expect our instructional media to do the training. There is a tendency to allow the movie/slideshow/PowerPoint to do the teaching for us.

A common student complaint is that they do not feel like they get anything out of the material. Reasons for this could be because there was no explanation of what they should be looking for, no understanding of the subject matter, or that the material was simply boring. It is important for you to assess the students learning, and for the students to understand how they can apply the material to their learning.

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Obstacles to Talent Management Strategies

The fine art of retaining winning talent has an effect on your ability to deliver business value. A recent survey by McKinsey & Company asked senior executives of global companies to rank obstacles that prevent them from having talent management strategies. Among the most critical as defined by executives:

• 54% - Senior managers don’t spend enough time on talent management


• 52% - Line managers not sufficiently committed to people development


• 51% - Silos discourage collaboration, resource sharing


• 50% - Line managers unwilling to differentiate high, low performance


• 47% - Senior leaders do not align talent management and business strategies

Read A Tightly Woven Process: Retaining Talent to learn more

Training Trends

Training Trends

From Susan M. Heathfield
Your Guide to Human Resources
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Training conferences provide insights into what is happening in the field of training and development. Attending the annual American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) conference or Training or another of the specialty training conferences now available, is educational. These are several of the trends I am hearing a lot about.

Multimedia and Online Training

“If you’re not in multimedia or online training, you’d better be thinking about it,” said one trainer to another at a recent Training conference. Both the Exposition and the Conference sessions echoed this sentiment. A recent ASTD conference featured less multimedia, but online providers of educational sessions proliferated. Even though the current move in organizations has been to offer training on CDs, Web-based training (WBT) is not far behind.

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