Training Must Transfer to the Job

Skills and knowledge learned in training must be applied—transferred—on the job, otherwise your investment in instruction cannot reach its full potential. With limited budgets stretched tightly, successful training transfer is critical to enhanced performance and ultimately to your continued success.

Training that transfers is most critical for those who can directly make an immediate financial impact on your company: your marketing and sales professionals, managers, and especially executives. There are a number of factors involved in successful training transfer. To summarize:

• The learner must have the right attitude, be open to the training, understand its relevance, and be committed to your company.
• Your company must make a commitment to training, allow the learner time to assimilate new knowledge and skills, and hold the learner accountable.
• The training must be designed with specific goals, contain only relevant topics, model proper application, and most importantly, enable appropriate time for practice, allowing for making and learning from mistakes through expert oversight.
• The atmosphere that learning matters must pervade, be supported, and opportunities to perform exist.

Ultimately, companies must give people time to learn and practice; in other words, you must make available the opportunity for training to transfer and not jam learning into an already crammed work day. We can assist you.

My Kindle, For Better or Worse

Do you own a Kindle? Or another e-reader? Well, I do — I received it as a gift last Christmas.

For those of you who own an e-reader, you know how it has changed the face of reading. It certainly did for me, and I wrote about it in my latest Toward Humanity blog post “My Kindle, For Better or Worse”. I hope you enjoy my perspective.

One issue I didn't address in the blog post was dealing with PDFs. The Kindle doesn't do it very well. I downloaded the PDFs for a couple of professional magazines that I read, and then emailed them to my Kindle. While they did load onto the Kindle, they did so at full 8.5 x 11 size. That's okay on a computer screen because it's easy to scroll there. But on the Kindle... Not so.

However, I do receive a lot of Word documents that I have to read either for business or STC Board work. I create PDFs of these documents and send them to the Kindle. They fit perfectly on the screen. Now that is wonderful!