I'm working on a systems project at my company where we will need to help
plant technicians learn to use new computer systems. In the past, we've
employed many different forms of "training" including
classroom/instructor, job aids, written manuals, and, unfortunately, brief
demos followed by a well intentioned "Good Luck!". I'm not aware of any
experiences which I would consider completely successful. Invariably, we
end up with an "area expert" as the main source of ongoing training.
I passed along a couple of the notes from this thread to the project
leadership team and asked about mentoring/apprenticeship. Since we end up
needing these area experts anyway, why not expend our efforts for training
on the development of these apprentices (future experts)?
We have a very formal apprenticeship process within the company for
training plant technicians for operating the plant. It takes many months
to complete and consists of mainly self-paced and instructor-led training.
I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on how to build such a mentoring
or apprenticeship process for building these area experts. Do we still
fall back on the more classical training methods for the apprentices or is
there another lesson there as well? Should we "apprentice" them to the
development team as the project is being built?
--Phillip Tencer <patencer@eastman.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>