In this podcast, Professor Robert Brinkerhoff of Western Michigan University talks about his own career journey - starting from being an officer in the United States Navy, which taught him about how to make the best of training and what the downsides of training not done well are. Following which he completed his graduate study on program evaluation, where he began to evaluate training programs. Thus began his lifelong curiosity in enabling people to learn and excel.

Prof. Rob talks about how the rise of apprenticeship started the "training and learning" activity. With time, given the complexity of the jobs, this function started to get more centralized as the L&D department. Which leads us to today's world where there is a need to learn and but employees are constrained for time. 

The key paradigm shift that he believes will be instrumental for the L&D function is to stop viewing themselves as a “training” function and start thinking of themselves as being in the business of enabling performance. While talking to People Matters, he discusses two key methods that can help L&D professionals to make ensure that the learning interventions are actually worth it. 

The Success Case Method:

In this method, Prof. Rob articulates that there is a need to learn from “early adopters” or those employees who are seeing phenomenal results due to the training. And then try to replace or reverse engineer these steps for other employees. He goes on to highlight how to deal with the context of personalization of learning while thinking about this method and to what business contexts this approach would be most effective.

 High performance learning journey

A key lesson has been that performance change evolves over time, and therefore it is important to stretch the learning journey over a period of time. If you take a two day workshop, employees are often expected to learn and absorb everything that they need to know in a limited time. This sort of intense training will not lead to lasting change. So the high performance learning journey is likely to spread it out over months. 

There is a need to move to higher level learning journey – and what has evolved is the creation of learning transfer platforms that are cloud based tech platforms that help structure the process, so that it becomes more effective. Prof. Rob talks about how content should be structure in order to make it effective.

In a world that is increasingly disruptive, L&D professional should focus on not just the right content but also the means to ensure that the learning delivery is impactful. 

This Podcast is brought to you by C2C Organization Development, India Partners for Promote International