At the mental health manager's meetings

Bola's Learning Diary

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

At the Mental Health Managers Meeting

On September 16th 2013 i attended the MH Managers meeting at my company. Now for a bit of context, we recently started using a business partner model so I partner with the MH aspect of our organisation hence i attended the meeting to give the managers an update about what learning and development and also to talk about Recovery Star training. Recovery Star is a person centred tool we use in Certitude to support our service users. So what were my key lessons from this meeting.

To start with i found out that i sometimes talk too much and don't listen. Well honestly that is something i already knew but it dawned on me more at this meeting. Secondly I listened to Susie Petherick, our new Leadership Development Manager who gave a brilliant presentation and really engaged the audience. I think her listening skills and ability to use light humour was outstanding. Also was the encouragement for me to network more.

The goals for me out of the programme was:

• To visit our services more often
• To design a new Recovery Star training programme that is more blended and less classroom focused.

Qualifications and Performance

Research shows that hiring a person over qualified for a job does not mean they will perform better. At the same time it does not reduce the need for them to be trained in specialised skills. Accenture's Graduate Employment Surevy in 2013 stated that 63 per cent of respondents said they still needed training to do their jobs properly. Also rarely  do graduates come with all the skills that employers need. They still need training and do expect it from the ir employers. Lots of jobs are being unfilled because employers are expecting ready made candidates. Employers need to change their expectation for hiring graduates and focus on investing in training.

Action Points:

• Don't hire people who are over qualified for the job
• Train your new hires in the essential skills needed to do the job effectively
• Don't expect graduates to come with all the skills you need for the job

Source: CLO 2013 - Turning Potential Into Performance - Page 6

Learning and Social Media

Read an article by Marc J Rosenberg recently. It was titled Boston, Social Media, and Lessons for Learning. Here are some of the lessons I learnt from the article.

• Social media is very effective for delivering information speedily and to a large audience in a short time.
• Social media is inclusive as it facilitates the inclusion of a lot of people. The barriers to participating are little or even non-existent. Social media will be good for communities of practice and crowdsourced knowledge.
• But social media can be wrong. Since almost anybody can be involved in contributing information it is easy for people to contribute information that is not accrate.
• Also not all authors involved in contributing content to social media outlets are expert. What these means is that we have to be careful about information that comes via social media.
• Information from social media can be overwhelming. It adds more to the information overload we are already dealing with.

CIPD's HRD

I briefly went to CIPD's flagship event for the learning and development profession called HRD Conference and Exhibition. Personally I was not impressed. It all seemed a bit stale and it looked smaller. Maybe that's because I have not been to it in the past three years. Although I am a member of the CIPD I do have a lot of personal issues with them. To start with I don't think they promote  L&D adequately. It seems to sit in the background of other aspects of Human Resources. But my biggest beef with them is the cost of their qualifications. They are way too expensive. I would imagine that they should allow different routes of study. CIPD currently has only two routes. You either study with them or through one of their certified providers or you study at a college/University.

In a world with great and affordable learning technology I find that very backward. Here are some options I would like to see CIPD provide to study their qualifications.

• Distance study: They can sell their resources for those who believe they can study it independtly on their own. All they need to do is to assign a tutor to people studying this way. Kind of like studying with the Open University.
• E-Learning: Why not make use of virtual technology which can provide content for study and also use the community of practice model to get students to interact.

Recently I have taken a lot of interest in EdTech (Educational Technology) and the pace of innovation is breathtaking. We need this type of innovation to disrupt the current models of providing professional certification. To become a graduate student of CIPD do I really need to pay over £9500? I think it is absurd and ridiculous.

If you are reading this, what do you think?

I must admit though, they  have a great library and the people who work there are really nice and helpful.

Creating a Team Learning Strategy

One of our services called CDW Brent is launching a new service called Travel Support. The purpose of the service is to provide support for people with Mental Health illness to move about using public transport. The people employed in this service will be called Travel Buddies and they will be people with lived experience of Mental Health illness. To provide training for the Travel Buddies they have been set up to do our mandatory e-learning courses and booked on mandatory courses that are not currently run through e-learning.

But I am also interested in seeing whether they need any development which will support them to do their jobs up to the required standard. To tackle this I have sent an email to the service's project manager. Here is what I sent to her:

I’m trying to put together a development plan for the Travel Buddies. I have read the Job Description. I need some more information from you. Please can you send me information on the skills and knowledge the Travel Buddies need to be able to do the job up to the required standard.

I am  expecting her reply.

Some Good Webinar Tips

I recently read what I consider to be a very good post about webinars from the HBR Blog Network written by Rachel Burstein who is a research associate at New America Foundation's California Civic Innovation project. In the post she identified what she saw as the weaknesses of using webinar as a learning tool and ways to make webinars more effective. I will divide this summary into two parts based on Rachel's assertions, 1) Why webinar's may not be so great for teaching and 2) How you can make webinars more effective for teaching.

Why webinar's may not be so great for teaching

• Webinars have the advantage of being ubiquitous which means lots of people in different places can view it at the same time but that doesn't make it an effective delivery method. To start with the content being delivered tends not to be tailored to the learners.
• Also the virtual experience of webinars does allow for a lot of engagement between the learners and speakers.
• Another thing that is also an issue is that there is no consequence for non-attendance, neither are there rewards if you do attend.
• There is also little or even no quality control applied to the webinars.

How you can make webinars more effective for teaching

The above mentioned points are not absolutes and there are certainly exceptions, but generally what can be done to ensure webinar developers engage learners and learners learn more from webinars?
Here are a few pointers.

• Be careful what you use webinars for. It's not fitted to communicating every type of information. For instance webinars may not be suitable for discussing innovation which requires more engagement but better for training to use a technology or giving details about some new legislation. So chose topics carefully.
• Focus webinars on training not analysis. Webinars are less effective when concentrated on topics for which there is no consensus or require a lot of customisation to fit the audience.
• Create opportunities for dialogue. Technology can allow questions to asked in real time and skilled facilitators can integrate the questions into the discussion.
• Help participants to grow their networks. Facilitators can circulate their contact details before the webinar starts and they can encourage participants to contact them through various online sources.
• Provide ways to help the participant display what they've learned. For example giving a short quiz or allow them to accumulate points towards their professional development. This will no doubt engage the learners more.
• Also provide notes which the learners can use after the webinar.

It's not just those designing and delivering webinars that need to be mindful but also those watching webinars can take some action to benefit more from the webinar.

• Choose webinars carefully according to how much value it will add to you. Don't register for every and any webinar.
• Watch webinars in groups. This can facilitae a discussion about the webinar topic among the group. Also people are more likely to attend when they know they will be in a group.
• Take and distribute notes.
• Use the webinar to network. If facilitators distribute their contact details, don't be shy to contact them.
• Ask questions during the webinar and talk to other colleagues who may be watching the webinar with you about your questions.

No learning delivery method can be perfect but these tips may go a long way in helping you get more out of webinars.

Crucial Reminder By Kirkpatrick

Nowadays I hardly ever buy books because I spend a lot of time reading from a number of sites such as HBR Blogs, Learning Solution Magazine, Chief Learning Officer, Entrepreneur, Inc and Harvard Business Review. That is not to say that I won't be buying and reading books. I have a number of instructional design books in my Amazon learning and development wishlist that I really want to read, but I need to get a kindle first. No more killing trees for me.
One of the sites I also learn from is Kirkpatrick Partners. Offcourse the name sounds familiar because Kirkpatrick is the evaluation guy.
I routinely receive a newsletter from the Kirkpatrick website with lots of useful information. Just this week I was reading the Quick Tip series from the site. Currently I think they are at Quick Tip 3. After reading the three articles I came up with a list of learning points which I feel are important to any learning and development practitioner and here they are:

1. When discussing learning and development with your stakeholders use business language that they understand not your own industry jargon.
2. Create a robust evaluation framework that can identify the impact of training in the workplace and on the organisation (he would say that wouldn't he?).
3. Provide on the job support tools possibly after a learning programme to encourage application of learning back at work.
4. Create knowledge sharing communities, either physical or virtual.
5. Learning does not end after a classroom training course or an e-learning course completion.
6. Identify what factors affect the application of learning back in the workplace and how to monitor them.
7. From the onset before any learning programme discuss possible barriers to application of learning in the workplace with necessary stakeholders.
8. Work with stakeholders to overcome barriers to effective learning application.
9. Make sure you identify clearly that learning is the right solution for a problem that needs to be tackled.
10. Be assertive enough to tell stakeholders that training alone will not lead to improved performance results.

That's it, summary of my learning from the first three kirkpatrick's quick tips. You might want to have a read of the tips yourself. Here's the website:

http://www.kirkpatrickpartners.com/Blog/tabid/135/Default.aspx