Charles Jennings notes in Who needs learning objectives? (free subscription required) that they’re mostly useful for instructional designers and not of much value on the job or for those taking the training.

If you are going to assess the impact of a course on individual participants’ performance in the workplace you need to forget about learning objectives for doing the job. Remember, learning objectives may be useful to help you create a logical design, but that’s all they’re useful for. When you get to measuring transfer of learning to the workplace you need to engage with the people who are in a position to observe behaviour and performance and those who are in a position to measure outputs. This usually means the manager and the team member who is responsible for maintaining performance metrics for the business or team – the balanced scorecard metrics or similar.

Connecting the training department (or training developers and instructional designers) to the work to be done is the real issue here. It may be easier to go off in isolation and develop some training when given learning objectives developed by a couple of subject matter experts, but good training can’t be developed in isolation. All human work is contextual, and models like valence theory show how we are all influenced by several factors:

Getting involved in the way work is done and understanding issues is what’s necessary to be of service as a learning/training professional.

I still remember the case of a nurse clinician in charge of the performance and training for all nursing staff in a hospital. I asked to do an on-site performance analysis over several days and of course had to be accompanied. After two years on the job, it was her first time on the wards. Getting out of the office is a low-tech method that can reap major performance benefits. From a distant office view, only a few of the valences in the figure above would be noticeable.

Learning objectives are a way of reducing human performance into manageable Taylorist bits, stripped of their humanity. We have more tools to communicate and connect with people than ever before, so there are fewer excuses to reman distant from the work that needs to be done. As I’ve recommended before, the training department needs to get into the business of connecting & communicating:

I usually ignore requests to follow a blog meme, but Virginia Yonkers has tagged me for a reflective post and this is my 1,500th blog post here so I thought it would be appropriate to at least partially  respond. Here are the requirements:

4 R’s Meme: Favourite Posts, asks those tagged to select 4 of their favourite posts from their own blog, one from each of the categories: Rants, Resources, Reflections and Revelations.
The posts are then listed with a brief summary on each describing:
why it was important,
why it had lasting value or impact,
how you would update it for today.
The intrepid bloggers are to tag all of their selected posts with the label postsofthepast and then select five (or so) other bloggers to tap with this meme.

Rant: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee started my journey of looking at ways to change the training function:

Training departments have allowed themselves to be lulled into a comfortable spot while times have been good. Everyone feels better after a little training, so that is what was prescribed – for all that ails you. I have met too few L&D professionals who can actually analyze work performance and come up with something other than training as the solution. Well, it seems that the days of the one trick pony are over.

I, for one, do not regret the demise of the L&D function. Perhaps our profession will wake up and start helping the organisations we serve.

This concept is being constantly updated in my presentations, with the last published version a collaborative effort on the future of the training department I did with Jay Cross.

Resources: Several years ago a created the Toolbox section of my website, which I update and add to from time to time. It’s probably time to review it, so thanks for the reminder.

Reflections: The question of schooling was a personal one as we saw how it failed to meet the needs of our children, and I wrote about schooling, deschooling or unschooling and followed this with many more questions than answers. Schooling is of course linked to our training systems and my reflections and rants merged in the question of a learning reformation.

Revelations: One ah-ha moment was that soft skills are foundational competencies, something I pretty much knew but had not articulated.

Soft skills, especially collaboration and networking, will become more important than hard skills. Smart employers have always focused more on attitude than any specific skill-set because they know they can train for a lack of skills and knowledge. The soft skills require time, mentoring, informal learning and other environmental supports. Once you have the soft skills to perform in a networked workplace, you’ll have foundational competencies.

Sorry, but the meme stops here, unless anyone else wants to take it up …