Can Informal Learning Be Captured and Evaluated?

I’ve always struggled with how corporate training is evaluated. It seems like hours and hours go into the complex developing of and communicating about training, only to be followed up by end-of-class smile sheets or just a checked box beside some LMS hyperlink. And fairly much the smile sheets tell the course owners how well the classroom or web-based experience was for the respondent. In the real world of application training, does anyone ever go beyond level 1 evaluation?

Well at least when talking about formal training there is record and possible evaluation of said training interaction. Informal work-place training/education, however, –like the kind you get from a talk with a colleague next door or a chat in some social media forum-  doesn’t lend itself to the same easily. But companies want to know the impact informal training (in all its modes) has on their workforce. And that’s because maybe informal training will affect the organization’s bottom line or its training culture somehow. So despite its existing in the ether, can informal learning be documented and quantified by the organization? 

I think informal training interactions (again in all of its modalities) can be assessed qualitatively and quantitatively - to an extent. Informal educational interactions are squirmy. We don't know when they’re going to happen, where they’re going to happen, or how meaningful they’re going to be when they do. But we can assume maybe that informal learning will happen to nearly every employee at some point throughout the year. So if we want to document that, then why not just ask the people to whom it happened to talk about it. End of the year performance assessments could be a viable place and time to do that. It’s when organizations are counting performance numbers, work quality, and such that they could ask employees about their work related informal learning experiences.

The organizations’ questions about those interactions would solicit employees to provide enough meaningful detail (aka narrative) that an identifiable theme could be deduced from each interaction. A theme could be “got re-enforcement training on how to perform accounts payable transaction in our new version of SAP”. Besides the narrative, the employee would state her own perceived work-performance outcome stemming from said interaction – and that maybe is the money shot. And lastly, the employee could provide some numerical rank for the interaction’s overall quality and impact on that employee’s performance.

Between the narrative, the narrative's theme, the outcome, and the ranking a profile for each interaction could be constructed. And dare I say that this profile might be measurable and documentable. To wrap it up, this profile becomes part of the employee’s training record in a learning management or HR system – something that could pick out trends among many profiles. Could this be this be impact organizations are looking to measure regarding informal learning? This is all kind of like IBM project assessment tool in a way, where employees provide a narrative of their project experiences and those experiences are ranked.

Ok so while in an analytical sense, the measuring of informal learning’s frequency, quality, etc. is a great thing for business, it could be with met with resistance from those it solicits. Informal learning is a telling thing, yeah … in addition to being a squirmy thing I  know. So revealing it to a third party, like a boss, could be threatening. Here’s a scenario. Boss says to employee, “So we paid for you to go to three days of training and you still had to get Mary’s 30-minutes of informal learning help with that transaction?” Ok maybe that’s an extreme supposition, I don’t know. But it goes to say that asking employees to report or document informal learning could be perceived as a threat. So if the organization wants to know about or measure informal learning within their walls, they need to ensure that they have the support structure to foster this learning mode.

Informal training probably drives business more so than formal training. Where planned, formal training is organized and relatively static, informal training is nimble, reactive, and personalized. Where it lacks certification is pushes quick outcomes. That’s because the results of informal training can be immediate. In short and convenient time, the worker learns what he wanted to know and implements such learning post haste. Informal and formal training are not in competition. If anything they are in compliment of each other. Thus the dynamics of informal study should be studied if organizations implement ways to document them. 

Instructional what?

The 21st century can be a conflicted place when it comes to work and careers. In centuries past it was expected that your barber would moonlight as the local doctor, specializing in bloodletting and leach therapies to balance the humors. Or it was common for the parsons to double up as the village undertaker too, or the local jeweler to pull duty as a gun dealer. Perhaps the times of earlier centuries dictated multiple occupational skills over single occupational skills.

The nature of a post industrial America has, with its complex tools and processes and ever increasingly complex job roles, forced the widening of the line between the division of labor and occupations. So now it's rare to have the type of crossover that was seen in times before. Now everything from car mechanics to medicine men and women comes specialized. A mechanic can specialize in electrical systems inasmuch as a physician can specialize in nephrology - thanks to mankind having discovered enough about the complexities of our world to appreciate its granularity.

But all isn't necessarily lost to the ages. There's still some job sharing in the 21 century. Here's an example, instructional designers and corporate trainers. A lot of times on job websites and projects the terms are paired, if not used interchangeably, as if to increase chances of the post being found. But really the two couldn't be more distinct in their job tasks, skills, and objectives. 

Let's go back to the example of the singer/songwriter. There are some wonderfully blessed savants who do both very well (depends on how you define well - I won't go there). From back in my day, I viewed Lionel Ritchie and James Taylor as songwriting beast. Back in the 70's and 80's they could do no wrong. They wrote for themselves; they wrote for other people. They were the bomb. While they both could hold a note and had enviable tone they were probably more respected for the compositions they wrote.

Then there's Whitney Houston, Adele, and Audra MacDonald. All known and respected more so for their voices and the interpretations they bring (brought) to a songwriter's idea.

Summarily, songwriters write songs and singers vocally interpret them. The mastery behind each discipline is confirmed in the fact that higher ed outfits offer degrees in music composition like they offer degrees in voice.

So here we are with instructional designer versus trainer. Each job title says what it does. Instructional designers create instruction. Trainers train or deliver instruction. In the same way a songwriter develops an idea into a tune, constructing it out of sound, time, and words, an instructional designer develops an idea into instruction. She uses her best senses to construct meaningful instruction from disparate procedures, rules, and guidelines. Trainers are the deliverers of what instructional designers produce. Like the singer, the trainer interprets and follows the ideas of the instructional designer.

The important thing is that instructional designing and training (as a trainer) are two completely different disciplines. The art of instructional design can be learned in institutions. You can get a degree in it, like a B.A., MAEd, M Ed, etc. Expertise in training, however, is developed only from doing and experiencing the actual job or product at hand.

Say a brilliant surgeon comes up with an idea to decrease stroke risk during a particular surgery. He performs the procedure successfully tens of times, proving its effectiveness. A medical school approaches him about developing a three-day workshop on his procedure, training other surgeons. While this medicine man knows much about anatomy, medical tools, and what he does in the OR, he may know little about creating three days worth of instruction. Not to worry, that's where the medical school assigns him an instructional designer, with perhaps a specialty in medical communication.

Now we have a symbiotic relationship between two very different practioneers. 

In the end, the doctor operated as trainer, which is what he should be doing because he is the SME. And the instructional designer operated in her correct capacity - not delivering the training but giving the trainer scope, form, and function for the trainer to deliver. The two worked together to help the trainer deliver the message he wanted to deliver in a way that was clear, interesting, and cohesive for the trainee. An instructional designer is to a trainer, as a songwriter is to a vocalist, or a playwright is to an actor, or an architect is to a builder, or a ... ok you get the idea. Instructional designers develop pedagogic infrastructure for trainers. And trainers, who always ought to be subject matter experts in their discipline, interpret and follow that instruction to deliver the content their audience expects and the trainer wants.

Yeah it's true that in one trainer you could find decent or exceptional instructional designer skills. But maybe that's the exception and not the average. Just like in the arts, you could find in one artist both a decent songwriter and singer - kind of like Michael Jackson or Elton John. Those guys are (were) all-in-ones.

So if it's so clear that there is a line between instructional designers and trainers. Why do some job posts not recognize that? I've two ideas. 1) The organization assumes the trainer is always an expert in both disciplines or at least the trainer can put together an ok curriculum and can operate Articulate. 2) The organization doesn't understand what instructional design is exactly.

The field of instructional design has a duty to continually educate the public and employers on what the occupation really is about. Instructional designers have expertise in designing training to support what subject matter experts (trainers) want to say and do in their training events - instructor led or web-based. When hiring an instructional designer/trainer, an ad ought to read, "hiring for instructional designer/subject matter expert". Because that's really what's being asked for - a subject matter expert. Unless the firm is looking for subject matter in the art of instructional design itself, the prospective applicant may want to ask ... "a subject matter expert in what?".

In the training process, the function of speaking to and leading the learner, audibly or in text, should be the domain of the trainer role. In the same process, the function of developing curriculums, materials, validation, and basically providing pedagogical support to the trainer role ought to be the domain of the instructional designer.

Training Reconn - Capturing What Matters

In a lot of environments, corporate training is like the city fire department. When the organization realizes there’s an emergency, like invoices routinely being inaccurate, equipment being mis-operated, sales not being made, etc, training whirls to the scene. Instruction is designed and classes are taught. And the transfer of knowledge is validated.

Over time, fire departments expanded their functions - going beyond mere extinguishing. Pro-active prevention is now a staple aspect of most fire departments. Pro-active action leads to less fire emergencies, findings being rolled-up to city management and product developers thereby influencing change, and fire departments educating citizens on best practices and behaviors.

So what if corporate training operated in the same way – pro-active training? Sure training would be there for the emergencies and planned training events like always. But training could be there in a more constant way as well, not just reacting to problems but sniffing them out.

Management gets a lot of credit for identifying problems and more so for identifying the causes of problems. But problems are sneaky and stealthy. And a lot of times they live in the heads of workers well before management detects them. So how could training become more of a pro-active force?

If you hook a hot network cable to a computer’s network card, the active network will constantly poll the card to assess the card’s status. Is it still there or not?  In a pro-active model, training could do much the same – performing something like a performance reconnaissance mission among the workforce.

This recon-ning would initiate with no assumptions about anything being wrong or broken within the organization. In this activity, training would be polling the workforce, at all levels of the organization, for their insights and assessments about the tasks, tools, and processes that impact corporate performance.

The feedback would be analyzed for trends and illuminations on matters that could be the tellings of burgeoning issues. This isn’t a reformed gap analysis. Because that would imply that we know where we are and where we need to be. And we just need to figure out how to fill in the middle. This reconnaissance would know no start, middle, or end.

Its objective would be to ask intelligently designed questions that gain from workers (all workers) what they think works well and the things that work not so well regarding the tasks, tools, and processes that impact their work. While there are numerous predictive analytics and statistical models that can predict friction points and even behaviors, this type of surveying could  work to gain insight into workforces’ thoughts and sentiments.