Epic show report

ASTD International Conference and Exposition

Washington DC, 23-27th May 2004
Report by Mark Harrison, Learning Consultant, Epic

So what is the ASTD Conference about?

The ASTD is the American Society of Training and Development and has over 70,000 members from the whole learning and development community in over 100 countries.

The International Conference and Exposition (ICE for short) is massive (300 sessions on topics ranging from Organisation Change to Performance Improvement). It is also a great way to test the pulse of the training world. What’s in, what’s out and what is the impact of e-learning on the day to day life of the average trainer.

So, what were the key trends?

The buzz around the place was clearly about learning being wholly business-focussed. The message was clear, if you don’t start the dialogue with your senior executive team on what they want to achieve and work with them to provide the solution, you are going to fail. Speaker after speaker pointed out how this was the key to their success. If you are asked to prove ROI after a programme has been completed, you’ve lost the battle already. The creation of the Chief Learning Officer role (well established in the US) is part of this process.

Talking of ROI, there was a massive appetite for return on investment advice and case studies. Although ROI has been around for a while now, there is still a real need to prove the value of the training function. There was an acknowledgement in every related presentation that purely proving cost reduction is not enough. As Ed Cohen, from the ASTD BEST award winning consultants Booz Allen pointed out “it is no longer enough to prove that a new learning approach is cheaper and quicker, you have to prove it has added to the top as well as the bottom line”.

One key idea that we could all gain from was the idea of publishing an annual learning report which directly mirrors the way the businesses report their progress during the year – right to the layout and fonts used!

The other big thing was human performance improvement (HPI). It is by far the most popular self development programme for learning professionals (over 5000 went through the ASTD HPI programme last year). This mirrors the move from being a training deliverer to a consultant looking for solutions to business problems.

A number of examples of blended learning reflected this. Programmes such as the American Honda Decision Making Skills course (see below) which has a final phase in programme in which each participant presents to the course tutors day-to-day applications of how they have applied the knowledge gained in the earlier phases of the programme. In this case, the learning teams in Honda can refer to these as tangible examples of business value.

The message to all developers of blended solutions is don’t stop at the workshop. Your job is not done until you get the knowledge applied in the workplace so you need to be around (virtually) to see this through.

Perhaps the most significant trend from an e-learning point of view was the lack of talk about e-learning. Every case study (even if it was not in the E-learning stream) presented blended approaches without a single ‘look at me’ fanfare when it came to the e-learning part. It was quite telling that there was not a single session entitled ‘Introduction to e-learning’.

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Interesting Sessions

With over 300 sessions, you can only get a very personal slice, but I was pretty lucky to get some fascinating presentations. Here’s a snapshot of the best:

Using Blended Learning for Sustained Problem-Solving Results at American Honda Motors
Presenter: Leon Ronzana, Honda

This was a really effective way of integrating a learning programme into the work place activities so seamlessly that you couldn’t see when the learning finished and the application began. The end result is a blend that guarantees to show tangible benefits.

The topic is a core competence in Honda. Over 350 managers have now been through a three phase programme. First of all, they go through e-learning which introduces the topic and then crucially gets them to propose to the tutors the topic areas and decision-making applications prior to a workshop. Phase 2 is a workshop which is designed to meet the specific needs highlighted by each group.

Nothing hugely remarkable there. The difference from most blended programmes though is the fact that the programme does not end until each participate has completed up to 40 worked-through decision-making tasks from their own work areas and sent these to the tutors for comment.

This post workshop activity has led to the greatest levels of learning as only through application of the ideas do learners actually master the ideas presented in the previous stages of the programme. The real bonus though is that for each learner there is a tangible audit of the impact of the programme. For every cohort of learners there are at least 400 business-based decisions documented with business impact assessed. These are then automatically added to a database of best practice, so Honda has got learning and knowledge management for the price of one!

Wells Fargo – Call Centre Induction
ASTD Excellence in practice Award winner
Presenter: Tina Campbell, Wells Fargo

This was a more traditional model of learning but representative of the types of blended learning that are regularly being implemented throughout the USA. The story is simple but powerful and really well presented by a confident training team.

Every year Wells Fargo Phone Bank hire 2000 new starters in 12 customer contact centres. It normally takes 6 weeks of mainly classroom based instruction mixed with one-to-one coaching.

The new blend (lasting 4 weeks) includes 50 hours of e-learning (covering all the key processes and customer call engagements with audio-based walkthroughs and simulations of the systems).

The results were impressive.

13% improvement in quality of calls (using their random monitoring processes with a standard rating system) during the first 7 weeks immediately after completing the programme
Increase in closing sales of 24%
Unit profit increases of 34%
Speed to mastery 10 days earlier (leading to extra $250k revenues)
Reduction in training time of 33% with an estimated $2m annual savings in trainee/trainer labour costs
Reduction in staff turnover of 4% with estimated saving of $200,000 annually in the area of associated labour costs
The message was clear; with large annual numbers in a sales arena, effective blended learning can transform the business performance of an organisation.

Leveraging e-learning to Promote Transfer: A research based approach
Presenter: Will Thalheimer, Work-Learning Research

Will is one of those people who won’t believe it until it is cast-iron guaranteed, which is refreshing in the training world which latches onto any graph it sees and then presents it as fact for years to come.

Will spent the whole session debunking theories, backed up by his research in existing studies in the cognitive psychology field.

Key messages were:

Within your learning programmes you have to build in the future cues to information retrieval – so simulations don’t just engage they also help you build the cues
You should try and build in repetition – improvements in learning have been shown in tests to be 30-110% after a single reiteration of the learning. Interestingly, a subsequent reiteration only adds about 15-40%
Build in spacing between repetitions – it improves learning by 5-40%. Learners have been proven to retain more when they do not get direct feedback (a direct challenge to common practice in e-learning). It’s been proven to be better to give them the feedback one day later. (This does not of course allow for the frustration of learners who want instant feedback – the message though seems to be let them wait, even if they don’t want to!)
There was lots more but it’s best you find out for yourself by going to Will’s website

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Collaborative Technologies supercharge informal learning
Presenter: Jay Cross, Internet Time Group

I’ve wanted to meet Jay Cross for some time now. He is the man who coined the term e-learning, so he has a lot to answer for!

His argument, delivered in a very laid back but convincing fashion, was that we are faced with a tsunami of information. We cannot ever master the information we need, however clever the learning solutions are out there. Formal learning models are doomed to fail as they cannot keep up with change. Our only hope is to help ourselves. His equation is simple Learning = Content to the power of collaboration.

We have some new terms to get used to, if he is right. You may have heard of Blogs (people informally posting views and ideas on their own information sites). But now we have Wikis (where you can amend the postings of others) and Plogs (which are project logs in which people share how they have carried out tasks effectively providing realistic manuals on how to use the systems out there).

Go to his website to get the full presentation fully annotated.

Advanced Learning Technology Today and Tomorrow
Presenter: Sam Adkins, Workflow Institute

There are some presentations that make you say, “Well, I learnt nothing there but I’ve now got some good statistics for future blended learning business cases”. Then you get some that make you say, “When that happens, we’re going have to rethink everything”.

My wake–up call came from Sam Adkins, clearly someone with a brain the size of a planet.
His presentation on the developments happening now in the enterprise software world exposed the audience to a ticking time bomb that could change everything we come to understand as e-learning (or learning come to that matter).

The picture for the new future (within 18 months) is one in which everything we do (word processing, searching databases, getting web-based information and contacting others) will be delivered as granular programs assembled on the fly according to your needs as a user. This is called Service Orientated Architecture and the impact will be profound. With SOA and its user tracking capability, you will automatically get tools and services according to the workflows you normally carry out. The systems will know what you want and, observing how you perform, will offer contextual help (and new applications) even when you have no idea that you needed it. An example will be software tools that observe all the key presses that you are making and automatically suggest more efficient ways of carrying out tasks – a bit like a useful version of the MS Office paperclip!

It’s a bit mindboggling and scary but the message to us in the training world was clear:

All of these SOA workflow tools need serious task analysis work before they can be implemented (you have to know what people have to do, before you can provide the tools they need in a timely way). This is something trainers should be well suited to. So get talking to your IT people now and find out if you can get involved – it’ll get you to the heart of the future direction of your organisation before anyone else does
If you get intelligent corrective tools, there is less need for detailed training programmes. The theory being that the systems just won’t let you get things wrong. The future for training in systems and processes could therefore only be in short coaching modules that are available at key moments in the workflow direct at the desktop. No one will go to an LMS and find the right content, the content will come to you – as long as it is ready for SOA and is mapped properly against the right stage in the workflow

If you are buying an LMS or have bought one recently, just ask your LMS vendor if they have a SOA strategy. Gartner have said that within 18 months large organisations will standardly use SOA technology and if the learning content is trapped in a non compatible LMS, it just won’t get the learners desktop, killing your e-learning strategy stone dead.

Sam talked about 5 million other things in a session that flew by. To get some of the fascinating ideas and a sense of our future that’s just around the corner go to www.workflowlearning.com and look at some of the links and articles.

Don’t say you weren’t warned……

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