“Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.”
14th Century Proverb, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations

The Society for HR Management recently reported that expected hiring levels for May 2010 “could reach levels not seen since 2007″ and that this “spring fling” has led to increased difficulty in hiring qualified candidates.

In conjunction with the increased hiring many organizations will be implementing in coming months, we can also expect many current employees will take the opportunity to job hunt actively as the economy continues to improve and new opportunities open up.

And in the May 2010 Fast Company Magazine, Chip & Dan Heath argue that, “When you own the talent factory, you’ve created a permanent competitive advantage.”

Given these realities, now is a good time to examine the ways in which training and development directly impact YOUR organization’s employment life cycle and some high-return actions you can take to ensure you are positioned to take advantage of improving conditions.

The Employment Life Cycle Seasons

SPRING: Hiring & On-Boarding
At the beginning of the employment life cycle, training & development plays a crucial role in both identifying appropriate candidates and bringing them into the organization effectively. On the hiring front, you can help your supervisors and managers incorporate behavioral interviewing to ensure consistency, take the guesswork out of hiring, and increase your ROI by ensuring a better fit between your organization and new employees.

On the on-boarding side, there are a variety of tools you can use to get new employees up to speed quickly. In addition to the standard instructor-led orientation sessions, savvy organizations are also incorporating technology-based self-paced modules, peer mentoring programs, a flexible orientation curriculum that allows new hires to opt out of subjects in which they can demonstrate mastery, and similar innovations.

SUMMER: Needs Assessment & Skills Development
Ongoing skills development is the traditional province of training & development programs and remains a critical component to your organization’s success. Employees need product- and job-specific knowledge to perform their individual roles effectively; they also need to be able to function effectively as team members to improve organizational performance. Smart organizations conduct regular needs assessments to ensure they are providing development opportunities that meet the needs of both individuals and various teams/departments.

Summer is also an excellent time to identify the tangible skills and intangible knowledge each employee will need to succeed and advance within your organization—do your employees know what they need to know to be promoted? Do you?

FALL: Performance Management/Giving Feedback
Once you’ve identified the skills and knowledge your employees need to grow, the next step is to provide continuous, effective feedback. The Wall Street Journal recently shared a tongue-in-cheek quiz confirming that, “Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews.” Since it’s unlikely that most organizations will banish annual reviews, at a minimum you must ensure that your organization’s review process is effective, efficient, and as painless as possible.

Even more important, however, is making certain that your employees know how to give constructive feedback on an ongoing basis. Supervisors and managers are of course your front line reinforcement team and need to know how to coach and mentor effectively; you can also implement peer feedback and mentoring as well.

WINTER: Succession Planning
Now that you’ve brought your new employee on-board, identified what skills s/he needs to succeed, and implemented a cycle of continuous feedback, the next stage is to ensure your organization’s succession planning process supports the ongoing cycle and the return to spring. Quick: can your managers identify their “A” players by name? Can they tell you exactly what their “B” players need to make the A-team? Have they identified their direct reports who would be appropriate for reassignment to another role or to be let go?

Effective succession planning doesn’t need to be complicated or involve giant spreadsheets and 100-page reports. It does require ongoing assessment of your employees and that continuous feedback discussed in the fall. It requires an understanding of where your organization is going and how each individual team/department will contribute to that destination. And it requires your leadership team to know their role in the process.

Ensuring you have the appropriate training opportunities at each stage will position your organization to hire rock-solid performers, retain key talent, develop your employees, function more effectively, and help all of your acorns grow into mighty oaks!

Ashley Andrus is President of Zoe Training & Consulting. Her passion is making HR folks and meeting planners look like *rock stars* by providing one-stop access to 90+ speakers, trainers, facilitators, coaches, and consultants.

With the “Where the Wild Things Are” movie taking the box office by storm it’s a good time to think about feral learning and the ways in which Training & Development are taking a walk on “the wild side.”

In today’s “Google World” it’s possible to find instructions and information on almost anything you might need.

• Looking for that new BBQ restaurant? Google it.
• Wondering how many Rocky movies are in the series? A few keystrokes, a click, and voila.
• Need to know how to change out the filter in your furnace? You know what to do.

Most of us search online every single day. For 2009, Google reports a little under 300 million searches per day on average—almost 9 billion searches in the month of September alone. Technology has changed—forever—the way we gather information. The question is whether your organization’s training & development model has effectively adapted to that reality.

In the P.G. (pre-Google) days, the standard people development model was all “push.” Show and Tell. The company set the framework and the timeline. Both the content (the ‘what’ employees needed to know) and the time frame (the ‘when’ they got it) was determined by the organization. On-the-job learning was still taking place, of course, but without the speed and depth that the internet has made possible.

Over the last decade we’ve seen many organizations shift towards employee-driven development, in which the individual employees have a stake and a say in their own individual development plans. A recent google search for “personal learning environment” returned more than 280 million results, while “Training 2.0″ garnered 105 million. This attitude, in conjunction with technological advances, has resulted in a huge efficacy leap in the ability of learners to figure out what they need to know and to actively seek that precise information.

The result? Feral learning. The term “feral learning” was coined in the 1990s by Ted Nunan, perhaps, or by Dr. Roy Lundin (see here for an overview of the history of the term) with regard to the increasing trend by students of using the Internet to supplement formal curricula, to learn from other learners, and to adapt on the fly to situational changes.

Many K-12 and post-secondary school systems are actively experimenting with ways to more fully integrate this collaborative learning environment into 21st century classrooms (see a thought-provoking video here and an overview on how the Internet is tearing down classroom walls here.) It can be more difficult to incorporate into corporate culture (see here for some potential pitfalls in the realm of employee-driven development) but it’s here to stay and smart organizations are identifying ways to blend “push” content with “pull” capabilities.

3.5 tips for putting this trend to work for your organization:

1. HELP YOUR EMPLOYEES BECOME BETTER LEARNERS. In addition to providing the technology to access online resources, help them refine their “human Google search terms” to more effectively gather info from co-workers. Help them understand how to better gather information internally and externally through social networking, both online and in-person. As networking expert Sarah Michel notes, “in the 21st Century your network is your netWORTH™”…do your employees know how to utilize their networks on the job to help the organization accomplish its objectives?

2. HELP YOUR EMPLOYEES BECOME BETTER TEACHERS AND MENTORS. All organizations are being asked to do more with less. Therefore it’s critical to give your employees appropriate tools and techniques so they can serve as a resource for others without negatively impacting their own job performance. Todd Hudson’s excellent peer mentoring program is an example of a framework that works for organizations from copper mines to call centers with regard to effectively on-boarding new employees AND for helping existing employees tap into the knowledge that those new employees bring in with them.

3. IDENTIFY WHICH CRITICAL AREAS ARE SUITABLE FOR “PULL” LEARNING and which you still need to offer as “push” programs. There isn’t a single structure that’s right for all organizations. Your ideal training structure depends on a variety of factors. Hone your offerings and make them timely and relevant.

3.5 OFFER THAT CONTENT IN MULTI-MEDIA FORMATS. Face-to-face is excellent for some topics and some learners; some people hate podcasts and prefer to read. Offering your internal learners a variety of media from which to choose enhances the likelihood of information transfer…

…which is the point, after all.

Ashley Andrus is President of Zoe Training & Consulting. Her passion is making HR folks and meeting planners look like *rock stars* by providing one-stop access to 90+ speakers, trainers, facilitators, coaches, and consultants.

If Starbucks had a Most Valued Customer club I would have it made in the shade.  Those 600 locations they are closing?  Not my fault. Between my 6am get-‘er-done dose, various meetings, and insane afternoons that scream “get me a mocha STAT!” I estimate that I make an average of 2.3 daily visits to some Starbucks somewhere.

This has been my routine for the last 3.5 years. In that period I calculate I’ve consumed somewhere in the neighborhood of 35,259 ounces* of coffee.

That’s 275 gallons of coffee.

1100 quarts.

Heck, if coffee came in beer kegs, I would have consumed almost 18 of them. By myself.

And I did it all one “tall” serving at a time.

The point? The little things add up. In the same way continuous small doses of material goods accumulate, the same goes for people development. Training—effective training, that is—is not a one-time “hit and run” thing.

This isn’t a newsflash, or at least it shouldn’t be.  When you show up for the first day of Little League practice, you aren’t playing at the Major League level.  You probably can’t even stop that slow rolling grounder from getting through your legs.  When you sit down at a piano for the first time, you don’t play like Liberace. You can’t even manage chopsticks. Building skills takes practice. We know this. So why don’t we more often apply it at work?

Effective people development programs aren’t merely about workshops, webinars, and e-learning courses. Those are necessary, but not sufficient.  True continuous skills development requires ongoing opportunities to learn.

There are a wide range of effective ways organizations can offer bite-sized pieces of information to complement formal content delivery:

• As Gina Schreck of Synapse 3Di explains, “when utilized properly, entertaining podcasts, informative videos, internal discussion boards, social media tools, employee business book clubs and relevant and timely articles can give your brain a Triple Venti Espresso of energy with new ideas and action items to implement.”
• Todd Hudson of the Maverick Institute says “Training needs to learn from manufacturing and ‘Go Lean’. Let people pull the information they need exactly when they need it.”  Whether it’s using face-to-face methods like peer mentoring or digital ones like wikis, organizations are retooling to eliminate waste and make every training dollar deliver measurable business results.
• Tara Powers of Powers Developmental Resources describes the efficacy of true blended learning solutions.  “Instead of stand-alone workshops, employees might participate in a pre-program survey, an e-learning module or online assessment and an instructor-led component, followed by facilitated action planning and regular accountability checkpoints to one’s manager.”

I’m sure there are some people out there who disagree. These are the same people who say “taking the stairs at work won’t make you healthier or lose weight. The only way to make a difference is to commit whole hog and start training for a marathon.” Well, marathon training works for some folks. But for a lot of people, that’s an overwhelming goal. And not everyone has either the time or the inclination to run multiple miles per day, week in, week out.

But a sprint isn’t the answer, either. Remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare?  Slow and steady wins the race. You can’t drink 275 gallons of coffee in one sitting.  And you wouldn’t want to even if you could. It’s better to savor the journey—12 ounces at a time.

* 12 oz/visit x 2.3 visits/day x 365 days/year x 3.5 years

Ashley Andrus is President of Zoe Training & Consulting. Besides coffee, her passion is making HR folks and meeting planners look like *rock stars* by providing one-stop access to 90+ speakers, trainers, facilitators, coaches, and consultants.