Teach the Job Not the Tool

Teach the Job not the Tool

Premise

Why do many folks confuse teaching people to analyze business problems or generate meaningful reports with using sophisticated computer applications or new equipment? You can’t just give someone the ingredients and hope that will make a good cake. Or, as in the image above, they'll see the tree but not the forest.

Example

Think about an example from the retail world. Retail buyers – either of fashion, car parts, food items, beverages, etc. all need to learn how to read spreadsheets, interpret data and graphs, and produce reports all using Excel. Now, most retail organizations will have a group of dedicated IT professionals who can help them fix bugs and learn the basics and some of the buyers or other people within the merchant arm will become “super users”. That said, most don’t need to learn VBA scripting, advanced command functions, or how to build spreadsheets that import raw information from the company’s internal database system. So, developing a class on Excel for this audience really means teaching them the fundamentals, giving them loads of practice time, and making sure the course(s) is heavily laden with interaction, feedback, and question/answer time. The goal is not to make them super excel users – it’s to improve their analytical understanding and reaction to the data the spreadsheets show them.

Reality

No one wakes up in the middle of the night with a burning desire to use Excel, or for that matter any other software application. They may wake up to get a job done. When you develop content to teach someone how to use a software application or other job tool and then rely upon them to transform that knowledge into better job performance, you may be giving them the right ingredients, but not the recipe. 

Guess what? It usually doesn’t work out and here is why:

• Most people don’t do their jobs all that well in the first place.
• Few people can agree upon the best way to perform their job.
• Fewer possess the insight to determine how to redesign their jobs when their tools change.

• Chances are also that none of them have the vision to determine what upper management had in mind when they developed or purchased the new application or equipment. 

Example 2

Let’s consider developing content to train or support an automobile technician in performing a tune-up using a new piece of equipment. You may have to teach them when a tune-up is required, the order in which the tune up tasks should be performed, the parts necessary for completing a tune-up, where to put the tools and what to do with them, and how to determine if the tune up was done correctly. 

Teaching someone to do their job well is a lot more work. First, you need to determine how people will be doing their jobs using the new tool. Only then can you begin developing training content. Now, how do you do that?

Recommendations

• Observe a few “experts” do what you want the others to do using the new tool. Watch them closely, take good notes, and ask many questions. Don’t be afraid to slow them down and ask them what they’re doing, why they are doing it, whether they always do it the same way each time, how and when they do it differently, and how they know when it’s done right. 

• If you are developing content on using a new tool to the organization, your job is a little tougher, since you may not yet have any experts. In that case, you will need to find people that are as close to experts as you can get, become an expert yourself, or team a tool expert with someone who is an expert at the job. Allow the tools expert and the job expert plenty of time to work together before you start trying to learn from their experiences. 

That’s how to get the information that you will need to develop the content to train and support people to do the job, not simply use a new tool. How you use that information to design and develop training programs is more difficult. 

Thoughts

By leveraging true job experts -- those who consistently perform at high levels in a job -- you can:

·         define what they see as the valuable outputs of the job

·         figure out what they do differently, and

·          use that knowledge to improve the performance of others in the job.

Re: what they do differently, high performers often both do (at least slightly) different things on the job AND arrange their environments differently (find better tools, get better feedback, etc.). Both aspects can be leveraged to improve performance.

I think many times we develop tools to enhance performance but forget to take care of the underlying issue that caused us to design and build the tool. A process or set of processes was not being followed or understood. We build the tool to accomplish those processes and we have never really addressed the problem of the work force not being able to accomplish the task with the tool set they have at hand. I understand and have experienced the fallacy of replacing a process with a tool that let's say accomplishes a piece of financial analysis, which then is misinterpreted just because the process and purpose of the tool are not understood. If you don't understand the concept behind the process, no tool set will substitute for knowledge. Teach them the process!

Teach the tool in context with the process. Think about trying to teach a presentations course that includes PowerPoint. If you teach only PowerPoint without the delivery skills you will end up with slides that show off all the bells and whistles, but the presentation itself will be ghastly. If you teach only presentation skills, without PowerPoint (or any other tool), you will get better speaking skills, but lousy slides. By combining both in a single class you can integrate all those skills and turn out better presenters.

Performance-based training, by definition helps participants learn what they need to do and produce -- as opposed to generic skills or competencies.

So PowerPoint training wouldn't just focus on the various bells and whistles of the software but on producing a presentation that meets certain criteria. And presentations training would include that, but also how to deliver an effective presentation that is likely to have certain results