Remodelling of Training Package
State University
Abstract
This paper reflects on the need to improve the training methodologies that are used at the government organization that deals with statutory child protection. The staff turnover is high and in order to reduce that the new supervisor points out a way to audit the training package. The training package will be remodelled keeping in mind the expected performance and the essential skills and prior work experience that the staff has. The training remodelling starts with reviewing the roles of the child safety officers (CSOs) and matching the qualifications criteria outlined in another externally developed training package CHCO8 Community Service Training Package.
While conducting a session on Child Safety Officer (CSO) training I judiciously considered evaluating the effectiveness and the efficiency of the training program. Training programs in the non-educational workplaces are very different from the educational workplaces mainly because the goals of the trainings are different. The type of learning that is expected at these two different types of set-ups vary.
Since non-educational workplaces have different set of organizational targets, the need for training and learning has to align with their goals. Employees must be trained in a way which helps them achieve their set of targets and perform their roles and responsibilities according to the guidelines laid down by the organizations. This is critical so as to maintain and streamline the processes within the organization. But not all aspects of a role played by an employee are objective; there are certain subjective elements which have to be applied and hence trainings are required.
Usually the environment in educational workplaces such as universities and colleges propels the desire for learning and hence push students to seek relevant trainings in desired disciplines. Same might not always be true for a non-educational workplace where the trainings might be looked upon as a bothersome and incommodious along with the work targets. Hence it is extremely important to cultivate a learning environment through many different types of training modules. The training sessions should also extend to off-workplaces too.
Much of the conducive learning environment within the non-educational workplace will depend on factors which are intertwined. The effectiveness of the training will depend largely on competency of the trainer that the organization has. The trainer’s competency will in turn depend on the factors that affect his job. For e.g., if his performance is judged based on how many trainings he has conducted then the trainer might focus just on delivering trainings without focussing on the effectiveness of training. He may not gauge the learning aspect of the participants.
Equally important is the need to implement nationally-recognized training packages. This not only increases confidence among the employees to be associated with the best practices but also makes sure that the organization has implemented a well-researched and developed training package.
During my experience as child safety trainer, I and my newly appointed supervisor too found the flaws that our training materials had. Though they were mapped to a variety of units of competence when they were developed several years ago, they lacked accreditation. Since the staff turnover was high, we thought we will join the ranks of the nationally recognized training packages for our organization. We thought this may be encouraging in nature for the employees and hopefully this may reduce the employee turnover. We felt that the nationally recognized training packages will have a better mapping of the qualifications required for the role of a child safety officer and hence be able to deliver more appropriate trainings.
We reviewed the role of CSOs and reviewed the various qualifications within the CHCO8 Community Services Training Package and found that the closet fit was the Vocational Graduate Certificate (VGC) in community services – both for Statutory Child protection and for Assessment and Case Management. But since we are government and we do not receive funding, the benefits were not truly attractive. At the same time we could not ignore the importance of a nationally recognized training material which focuses on learning for the adults and at the workplaces.
Therefore I and my new supervisor, who had worked for many years in universities and TAFEs, decided to undertake the auditing of our training material. We distressingly discovered that the mappings were done inadequately. We found that the materials did not meet the requirements outlined in the performance criteria, essential knowledge and essential skill for every unit of competence. They also lacked characteristics of adult learning and many educational principles. The typical characteristics of adult learning are the reasons why they would learn, which in turn would be propelled by their previous work experiences and educational background. These factors impact on how and why they learn. Once we unravelled the fundamentals of adult learning characteristics, we decided to embrace few well-known and reputable theories of learning.
While remodelling our material we tried to incorporate four out of five main schools of thoughts for principles of education as pointed out by Paul Hager (1998). These were:
1. Theory of experienced based learning
2. Dewey’s theory of learning
3. Argyris and Schon’s work on professional practice
4. The Marsick and Watkins theory of informal learning
It is true that workplace training enhances employee performance. Workplace training reinforces product knowledge and involves role playing scenarios. This helps the trainer to identify the strengths and weaknesses and helps the employee to understand the areas for improvement through interactivity and continuity, which are the two central tenets of Dewey’s theory of learning. This helps in improving the workplace performance. Continuous training helps in keeping the expected performance levels of the employees at par with the visions and missions of the organization.
Having understood the importance of workplace training and learning, we adopted four schools of thought for principles of education, as mentioned earlier. The first was the theory of experienced based learning. The theory of experience based learning upholds that knowledge is created by transformation of experience. The theory lays importance to the experience that an adult brings to the workplace and while at work, he learns more through reflection and abstract conceptualization of the experience acquired at his workplace. The complete cycle of experience based learning works through the presence of concrete substance (which in this case would be job of an employee) and experimentation, and the conceptual part where the employees assimilate information through cognitive behaviour.
We also embraced the Dewey’s theory of learning. Dewey’s theory also purports learning by experience and supports progressive education. Dewey has laid importance on appreciating the experiences that humans have and hence proposes that education be designed on theory of experiences. His theory rests on two central tenets – continuity and interaction. He contends that humans respond to the learning from experience. Every experience leads to some kind of learning and these accumulated experiences influence every future behaviour and hence, the experiences also. I reflected on this part and thought that in relevance, the training in an organization should be competence based, giving due consideration to an employee’s previous experiences. Our training material should be re-mapped to the essential skills and knowledge of the employees and the performance criteria that is set for the employees.
Another interesting theory that we studied was the double-loop learning theory developed by Argyris and Schon. Their work focuses on the organizational learning and purports that an individual or an organization is able to modify or even reject the goals after repeated attempts to achieve the goal in different occasions in the light of experience.
Thus I combined the nuances exhibited by all these theories about the importance of experience based learning and the importance of competence based learning. This was my own learning for providing better training in my own continuous learning cycle - both cognitively and reflectively and because of continuity and interaction with my supervisor.
We studied another interesting work by Marsick and Watkins (1990) who are known for their work on informal and incidental learning at the workplace. Informal learning is not structured and not necessarily unplanned but incidental learning is necessarily an outcome of an experience through an unplanned activity. Informal and incidental learning need a lot of social interactions so that in continuum the individual assimilates learning either consciously or sub-consciously. The learning here is centred at the individual. The informal learning at the workplace happens when the employees interact without design or control of the trainers. This learning happens more because of the closed bound social group that is found due to working in the same organization and working towards some common goals of the organization. Though it is very difficult to document such a collective learning, it is an important aspect for the overall training efforts at any workplace.
After understanding the theories of learning at workplace we needed to understand the theories about delivering training at the workplace. The various training delivery methods are usually divided into cognitive and behavioural approaches, based on the learning objectives. The cognitive approach is used when the objective is to achieve changes in knowledge, whereas behavioural approach is used when the objective is skill development and attitude change. Some of the common cognitive methods of delivery are lectures, e-learning and discussions and some of the behavioural methods are role playing, business games and behaviour modelling.
These above theories have highlighted enough the importance of a competency-based learning at the workplaces. The appreciation of previous work experience and the skills with the employees can help in evolving training materials best suited to reduce the gap between the outcome expected of the employees and the actual performance of the employees. What we figured out that the entire training module has to be developed and remodelled with a blend of cognitive and behavioural approaches of delivering the training so as to maximize the required learning with the employees. There also has to be a balance between the informal and incidental learning versus the structured and designed learning controlled by trainers in our training package.
We had to now plan the sequential remodelling and implementing the learning process in our workplace. Training is a systematic process designed to meet the current and future learning objectives some in controlled manner and some in informal collaborative manner using social dimensions to it. Hence the sequential steps of need analysis, design and development, implementation and evaluation were undertaken. First we had to gather and manage data for RPL (recognition of prior learning) and RCC (recognition of current competency in order to develop an effective training material. We conducted 10 week classroom sessions of telling students what they needed to know. This was followed by a 11-month long competency based and workplace based training, broken up into a 3-week and a 1-week classroom based activities. These activities were mainly scenario based practices, discussions followed by periods of reflection where the students would get a chance to reflect upon the learnings in the workplace.
References
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