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What Corporations and Educational Institutions Can Learn from Each Other to Improve Performance
July 29, 2009
By Julie Stein
Both corporations and educational institutions have strengths that help make learning stick. What can they learn from each other to improve classroom engagement and build stronger skills?
What Education Can Learn From Corporations
1. Value students' time: Training costs money, and organizations carefully scrutinize the time employees spend away from work. At Safeway, the executive sponsor of a department manager training program would emphasize that every hour of training cost the company $40,000; as a result, the human resources development department was always keenly aware of the importance of designing to ensure every hour and every minute count.
Education follows a different set of rules with underwhelming incentives for professors to demonstrate the value of students' time. While professors receive periodic student ratings, they are mostly pressured to publish, work on committees, and fill classrooms. When instruction is poorly designed and facilitated, students are left frustrated that their time has been wasted, and resigned to continue in the class because of limited scheduling options.
Demonstrating value for students' time results in more engaged students who will demonstrate a higher level of commitment to learning, and a higher level of respect and civility in the classroom.
2. Link learning to competencies: Overall, organizations do an effective job of linking course concepts to organizational competencies. Corporate mission statements, company and department goals, and related skills are commonly used as a framework for learning.
In education, students often think myopically about a required course, sometimes complaining about the lack of value or application to the real world. Many professors have worked little, if at all, outside of an educational setting. They can be poor at helping students see the relationships between the course and the skills they are building.
By helping students see the link between course content and the educational, corporate, and the real-world competencies being built, students can make stronger connections to life skills and gain a higher motivation to learn.
3. Limit the lecture: For the most part, organizations keep their training methods current. It is rare for a course to have a lecture-only format.
In education, traditional classroom lecturing without interaction comes from a time before computers and the Internet when professors were the ones with the knowledge, and young people should be seen and not heard. It remains a shockingly all-too-common practice for professors to lecture without interaction for long periods of time—sometimes as much as two or more hours. Last year, at the request of freshmen students in a linked class, I pleaded with a science professor to include interaction with his students. His response, "That's what labs are for," is not uncommon with tenured Baby Boomer professors who prescribe to the idea that good quality learning includes suffering through long lectures—much as they did in college. Other comments along this line include, "I am not here to provide entertainment," and, "They need to put their cell phones away and pay attention."
This new generation of multimedia seeking, multitasking students can Google most topics a professor teaches. What students want is hands-on experience, and to see the real-world application for their lives—not the professor's.
Professors need to stay current in the field of education. Less lecturing and better designed curriculum will make the classroom more engaging and less like a prison for students.
What Corporations Can Learn from Education
1. Take time to build skills: Building skills takes time; building interpersonal, problem-solving, and leadership skills takes more time. Education understands it takes weeks, months, and sometimes years to build competency and mastery. It is unrealistic for corporations to expect new supervisors to come back from a three-day training program prepared to manage a team as a veteran.
Taking more time to build critical skills today gives organizations employees who can better solve tomorrow's problems.
2. Measure accountability for learning: In education, accountability is outlined in a syllabus, and students receive a grade for their work. Common complaints from corporate trainers include low enrollment, no-shows, disappearing students, and incomplete assignments. This will continue as long as there are no significant consequences.
When attendance, participation, and training deliverables are linked to job retention, compensation, job mobility, promotions, seniority status, or work assignments, you can bet participants will show more commitment to training.
3. Teach to rubrics: Education uses a scoring tool called a rubric to evaluate the quality of an assignment. For example, a writing assignment might breakdown the scores or grades in the areas of grammar/mechanics, organization, and length. Using this method, students clearly understand how they will be graded on their work. Along with a good quality writing sample to show what an "A" paper looks like, a rubric helps students clearly understand what good performance looks like, and are better at meeting graded targets.
In a training class, participants typically receive a certificate of completion and some generalized feedback about their performance. It is less frequent for them to understand to what degree their performance in training met or exceeded expectations. Back on the job, busy managers are hard-pressed to have a discussion beyond asking, "How was the training?"
To help make training stick, trainers need to be able to provide both participants and their managers with specific feedback on performance.
Organizations could do a better job of making participants accountable for learning, and by breaking down the competencies built into measurable units for a more detailed understanding of performance in a course. Education needs to improve the quality of instruction. Students should be served as they are obtaining their degree, and not feel in servitude.
Julie Stein is an instructor at California State University, East Bay in the College of Business, Department of Communication, and Department of General Education. She also is an instructor in the Business Department at Las Positas College in Livermore, CA. She has a B.S. in Industrial Psychology and an M.S. in Human Resources Management with more than 20 years combined experience in corporate education and college and university instruction. Organizations she has worked for include Pacific Gas and Electric Company and DHL Airways. Most recently, she was manager of marketing, Web, and retail training at Safeway's U.S. headquarter office in Pleasanton, California.
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