Make sure you master new skills
You’ve made the commitment, invested the time, your team have been on a training course and return to work full of enthusiasm about how they can deploy their new skills. Now what?
Typically, formal learning activity represents less than 10% of the overall learning journey.
How do you turn fresh skills into subject mastery that delivers lasting impact for your business?
The answer lies in reinforcement over time to ensure mastery.
The importance of practice and repetition to build skill levels is a well explored path, particularly in mechanical fields, such as touch typing or sports performance, where you can build procedural memory and muscle memory to improve automatic performance over time.
In many work contexts, the opportunity to practice the same routine task thousands of times won’t be realistic, so where next?
The answer lies in providing your team with a range of structured activities that enable them to socialise their learning and practice the continued development of their skills.
Social Learning activities help embed new knowledge and skills by building confidence, so that they become business as usual.
Popular social learning activities that can be easily incorporated into the work routine include:
- Using one-to-one meetings with managers for reflection
- Seeking informal feedback from colleagues
- Seeking advice and sharing understanding with others
Popular experiential learning activities include:
- Enabling colleagues to expand their scope of work to take on new responsibilities.
- Increasing decision making freedom and authority
- Substitution for more experienced colleagues
- Championing changes to work practices by using new skills to work smarter
A broad rule is that every hour of formal learning, benefits from two hours of social learning and seven hours of practice and experiential learning to ensure mastery. This mix underpins the practical ‘learning by doing’ that sits at the heart of the Pitman Training methodology.
If your colleagues would benefit from practical learning that delivers lasting results, we’re here to help.