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Employee Training Mistakes

These are the Mistakes you MUST Avoid in Employee Training

The success of your company is directly dependent on how competent your employees are at doing their job. Employees with previous experience in the exact field that they are going to be working in at your company will generally have no problem with keeping up with their workload, but you won’t always get lucky with this type of employee. More often than not, you’re going to get a worker that, while qualified, has no previous experience with the type of work he or she is going to be performing, and so they’ll probably need someone to show them the ropes, as they say.

Because of this, it’s often necessary to have some kind of training program for new employees, a program that will be able to properly educate them and give them all the necessary abilities for the work they are going to be doing in the company. Now, creating a solid training program and properly putting it into practice is no easy feat, so educators often tend to make mistakes. Fortunately, these mistakes can be anticipated – you are far from the first person to have made them – and rectified before they cause any problems for the employees taking the training. In this post, we want to talk about some of the most common mistakes that educators make when putting a training program into practice, so without further ado, here they are.

Too Much Information

One of the most common mistakes that educators make when first initiating the training program is that they overwhelm the trainees with a bunch of info. And no matter how well you categorize it, you’ve got to realize that the human brain is really not that good at remembering different types of information during a short period of time. It’s a bit like when you listen to someone explain the rules to a board game you’ve never played before – you kind of absorb some of the info, the gist of it if you will, but you won’t really get it all down until you actually sit down and play the game. And you’ll certainly need to be reminded of the details more than once.

So, rather than bombard your students with all kinds of information and hoping that they’ll soak in the most important stuff, it’s better to just give them only the most important stuff at first, and then build up from there.

Failing to Motivate

Any time that we try to learn something new, our minds will immediately go to the question: “How can I use this information? Is this really something that I will need in my work?”

And as an educator, you really need to be aware of this fact and adapt your material so that your students always know why they’re learning whatever they’re learning. Lots of different examples are always good because they make the material of the employee training program tangible for the trainees and enable them to see the value of what they are trying to learn.

Lack of Communication

It’s important to realize that we as people are all different in terms of how quickly and efficiently we can learn a new skill. Some will pick it up pretty quickly, others might need more time, and what might seem like child’s play to one person can prove significantly more challenging to another, and vice versa. Because of this, it’s important to always keep in contact with your students and be aware of how well they’re mastering the material, and clear up any uncertainties that they might have over any subject.

Also, encourage your students to ask as many questions as they find necessary. Asking questions about one’s uncertainties not only clears up the uncertainty, but it is also a much more active and involved learning process than simply listening to a lecture. By involving oneself in a conversation with the lecturer, one’s attention span is significantly more powerful, and so it’s far more likely that the student will remember whatever it is that the question was about in the long-term.

Large Groups

The larger the group of trainees is, the harder it is to keep a sustainable level of communication between the students and the teacher. It is, therefore, good practice to keep this number to about a dozen or even fewer than that. The fewer people there are, the more effective the training will be unless you use some kind of software aided training program that can keep up with any number of trainees.

Using our knowledge testing software GetCertified, for example, it is absolutely possible to teach a large group of people at the same time, but only because you’re aided by a powerful computer program. If you want to keep the lesson as organic as possible, however, the number of participants is definitely something that you should keep under control.

Generic Training

Humans like diversity – we always have, and the less diverse a subject or lecture is, the more effort we need to put in to keep our focus and attention. This is why generic lectures that are always initiated and conducted in the same way will undoubtedly fail at educating your employees properly. Make sure that your classroom atmosphere is as dynamic as the training will allow, and you’ll find that it is much easier to keep trainee’s attention, and ultimately allow them to produce better results at the end of the training.

Summary

That about covers all of the most important mistakes you should always look out for when conducting employee training. To sum up, you need to make sure not to overload your students with a lot of information, make sure that your lessons are meaningful and motivating to your students. It’s also important to limit the number of trainees taking the training at the same time and encourage the students to initiate communication with the teacher in the form of questions. And lastly, make sure that your lectures are interesting and diverse, as that is way more likely to keep a trainee’s attention and thus help them master the material a lot better. Good luck!

Employee Training and Certification and Motivation

Employee Training – Government Edition

Little known fact: employee training is not just for quiz makers and private companies! Government training and state testing are also important on a much larger scale. It just so happens that the private sector is not the only one in need of skilled workforce. Regardless of what you may have heard about government employees in general, they too need to educate and better themselves and there are all sorts of things about employee training that agencies have yet to learn, in addition to those they have reluctantly adopted.

Why is Government Training Necessary?

When was the last time anyone has heard of a budget increase for a government institution, other than in times of a huge national crisis? And when was the last time somebody working for the government got in front of a camera and started talking about pending budget cuts? You’ve heard a lot more of the latter, and this is kind of endemic in most countries. On the one hand, we have people who are supposed to be in charge of things of extreme importance like making and enforcing laws and policies. On the other, many of these agencies could not even pass the regulatory inspection that they themselves condone, support or are trying to enforce.

It is the equivalent of seeing a police car parked on a spot reserved for people with handicaps. In fact, even when these agencies do decide to modernize, it is hastily executed and any subsequent updates are sketchy at best. At worst, they are nonexistent, and it puts us all at risk. The list of things they should be doing but aren’t is almost as long as the list of excuses they have come up with to counter them. It seems policy updates seem to reach the general public faster than they do the people who are supposed to be acting upon them.

There are people whose jobs involve risking their lives or saving other people, and you kind of need them to take regular competency tests, like paramedics and cops. Seeing an overweight cop or a soldier has long since stopped to phase anyone. Instead of enforcing rules and regulations, the military is figuring out ways for overweight people and those who would otherwise fail at the physical to be allowed in because they lack the manpower as well as the resources to hire professionals. Or people manning nuclear silos being forced to use those huge floppy disks from the ’70s.

Or something as trivial as waiting in line for a new photo ID because of “system failure” or some software update. It is scary when regular people have more technology at their disposal than government officials and workers.

Introducing Software into Employee Training in Governments

Employee training software has been around for years, and not just as a concept. In some instances, it is literally the same software but at least some of it comes from a time when the priorities were still straight. When using any kind of software, the age-old fear of a catastrophic failure that would leave millions of people in distress and other reliability issues are still relevant even to this day. Aside from that, they need something that can be quickly applied all across the country. If it takes too long to create universal tests and organize groups, this simply will not do. The more versatile, the better. If it is automatic, this would be just swell. When your tests are of pen and paper variety, there are numerous issues from  lack of standardization, to fear of cheating and don’t even get us started on the grading process. With computer tests, everything is done automatically, with a push of a button. Except for filling out the blank spaces – that is for the trainees, of course. The efficiency is vastly superior in almost every way, except when you want to grade an essay or something like that. But even that is easier to do in an electronic form. The only people who are against this are the old-fashioned employees who are scared of technology.

The Most Important Thing – Security

As with most things, safety is going to be a serious issue. Those urban myths about 14-year-olds with laptops emailing nuclear launch codes to Pentagon may be exaggerated, but they illustrate the core issue. They have a lot to learn from companies and sites such as Oracle, whose databases tend to be the most secure of them all. Additional safety measures need to be applied and they need to be constantly updated as any government site is under threat these days.

Versatility of Use

As we have mentioned, the best case scenario would be the possibility to merge databases and share software between different agencies and similar departments. For instance, giving police access to the driving test database might even save some lives on the long run, but the potential for abuse also increases with every such “solution”. As much as we all want a “one size fits all” solution, it could not possibly be available right now. Or could it be?

One of the solutions that could fit the needs of employees training in government institutions is YouTestMe Get Certified. Get Certified allows instructors to generate tests and create custom designed certificates for employees and significantly reduce employee training costs.