The Learning and Development Book: Change the way you think about L&D

By Tricia Emerson and Mary Stewart

Everyone thinks they know everything about training. Right? We've all gone to school, been trained on the job, and maybe endured the occasional corporate seminar. But if you're a professional in this field, you know that's familiarity, not expertise. Instructional design and implementation are not as easy as they look. You know there's an art to enabling people to truly change their behavior, moving themselves and their organizations toward the right future.

That's what inspired The Learning and Development Book. Open the book to any page and you'll find a short chapter that holds one hard-won lesson—the reward of decades implementing instructional design in real-world settings.

Why should learning be more like playing?

Is the culture of your organization working against you?

Should you really measure the effects of your training program?

Have you ever thought that learning begins when training ends?

Each chapter holds a nugget of wisdom on subjects like these. Whether you're a battle-tested educator or embarking on your first big training job, we hope we can give you tips, tools, big ideas, and (bonus!) a smile.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Association for Talent Development
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781607287889

Book preview

LEARNING &

DEVELOPMENT

book

the

change the way you think about L&D

LEARNING &

DEVELOPMENT

book

the

change the way you think about L&D

Tricia Emerson

Mary Stewart

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© 2011 the American Society for Training & Development

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any

means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please contact ASTD Press, or contact Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive,

Danvers, MA 01923 (telephone: [phone], fax: [phone]).

ASTD Press is an internationally renowned source of insightful and practical information on

workplace learning and performance topics, including training basics, evaluation and return-on-investment, instructional systems development, e-learning, leadership, and career development.

Ordering Information: Books published by ASTD Press can be purchased by visiting ASTD’s

website at store.astd.org or by calling 800.628.2783 or 703.683.8100.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011928868

ISBN-10: 1-56286-808-X

ISBN-13: 978-1-56286-808-6

ASTD Press Editorial Staff:

Director: Anthony Allen

Manager, ASTD Press: Larry Fox

Community of Practice Managers:

Juana Llorens, Kristin Husak, Justin Brusino

Associate Editor: Ashley McDonald

Associate Editor: Heidi Smith

Editorial Assistant: Stephanie Castellano

Copyeditors: Larry Fox, Stephanie Castellano,

Heidi Smith

Graphic Design: Yvette Tam

Interior Illustration: Ramiro Alonso, Colleen Coover

Printed by: Versa Press, Inc., East Peoria, Illinois;

www.versapress.com

CONTENTS

Preface VIII

Foreword X

Acknowledgements XII

SECTION 1: Fundamentals 1

Eww… I Just Saw a Squishy Objective! 2

Critical. Common. Catastrophic. 8

Make Sure Your Training Is Rated Mature 13

Are You Lost? 17

Training Was a Success 24

SECTION 2: Medium 35

An Inconvenient Truth: Powerpoint Is Not Training 36

Take Vanilla Off the Menu 42

The Medium Matters 49

A Blended Solution 56

Learning Begins When Training Ends 63

SECTION 3: Engagement 69

Presentation or Facilitation 71

The Same Old Story 78

Does This Have To Be Boring? 88

Play Works 95

Make Your Training a Day at the Beach 102

The Five Most Hated Words… In Facilitation 106

Speak to Learners in Their Native Tongue 111

SECTION 4: Performance 119

Training Is Not an Event 120

Take the Learner’s Perspective 124

That’s a Training Issue. Is It? 128

The Cheese 135

SMEs Operate in Cruise Control 141

Set the Bar Higher 147

Can a Fly Help a Company Save Money? 153

Employees Will Find a Workaround 159

The Case for Place 164

Use It or Lose It 172

PREFACE

LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

is hard. Even for us, the learning and development professionals. As we help people blossom, we must continually sharpen our own skills.

We wrote this book for people like us – experienced, time-challenged professionals looking for ways to be more effective. The insights in

this book are meant to help when you feel stalled. They are about the

gotchas – the hard-won knowledge that comes from skinned knees

and bumped heads. They might jump-start your creativity, give you a fresh idea, remind you of something that worked in the past, or simply change your perspective.

You enable effective learning. And from time to time, you must

articulate the case for effective learning practices. This book gives

you simple ideas and concepts to illustrate these needs and illum-

inate learning and development efforts for you, your clients, your

teams and your company leadership.

This book is simple and flexible. Our chapters are written to be short and easy to digest. Each contains a nugget of wisdom from years of learning and development consulting experience. There’s no need to start at the beginning. Read the table of contents and pick something that interests you. Each chapter is self-contained, so read one or read them all, in any order you like.

Periodically, a chapter will give you suggestions:

This icon indicates a suggestion – other chapters,

related to the current topic, that you might want

to read.

Want to learn more about the topic? This icon

references books, articles, and websites that will

help you go deep.

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Foreword

Here’s a test I used to evaluate the Learning and Development Book: As a researcher I believe in stratified random sampling. So I flipped to two random pages from each of the