7 Common Questions about Training and Development
I am so excited for today's episode; it's an Ask Me Anything episode and I've collected some great questions from listeners just like you, as well as from past clients.
There's one thing you should know. You can ask me anything, anytime.
But in today’s episode, we cover questions on everything from custom competency models and competency assessments to email training.
Listen to the episode or scroll down to read the blog post ↓
Key Points:
03:23 Using a custom competency model to prioritize training
07:33 Where to begin with L&D in small organizations
09:58 The greatest challenges for contemporary trainers
11:23 Making a large training group feel more intimate
13:43 The role of competency assessments in ensuring staff are equipped with the necessary skills to succeed
16:11 How email training works
18:21 How to ensure that training is engaging
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7 Common Questions about Training and Development
Before we dive in, there's one thing you should know. You can ask me anything, anytime.
But for today’s episode, I've collected some great questions from listeners just like you, as well as from past clients and today I’m going to answer them.
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In this blog post, we’re covering the following questions from Learning for Good listeners and past clients:
1) How do we use a custom competency model in our learning strategy?
A lot of times I'm working with clients to create custom competency models to identify what skills staff are going to need to be successful within the organization.
Once you have that model, it becomes a foundational resource that can be used in all of your talent practices from hiring, staff development, and career pathing to performance evaluations.
It can be used throughout the talent lifecycle.
So I often get asked, how do we use this in our learning strategy? How do we know what training to prioritize based on the competency model? Or how can we create a comprehensive training program based on the competency model?
If you want to know more about creating a custom competency for your nonprofit, listen to the episodes below:
Episode 39: Ask These Two Questions to Identify Your Nonprofit's Core Competencies
Episode 20: How to Determine Which Competencies Are Right for You
Episode 19: One Nonprofit's Honest Opinion after 6 Months with a Competency Model
Episode 18: Four Reasons Your Competencies Don't Work
So once you have your competency model in place, you have identified the skills that are needed for staff across the organization. And then the model defines what that skill looks like at each particular level in the organization.
So let's take communication as an easy example.
Communication at the support staff level will look very different than communication for the person who's leading the organization, your C suite, or your VPs. That communication is going to look a little bit different because they are often interacting and communicating with community partners or with people in the policy and advocacy space, for example.
Their communication looks different.
They also communicate internally differently because they're often setting a vision for the organization. They're influencing an organizational culture, they're taking organizational strategies, and deciphering or translating them for teams across the organization.
The support staff might also be communicating externally or internally, but they're probably going to be focused more on making sure their communication is really clear, making sure that they're being clear about deadlines, or what their request is.
So once you have those competencies identified, you can do a couple of different things to prioritize training.
1) Firstly, identify an area where you need training, like communication. Then you can go to those specific behavioral indicators, and see what people at a certain level need to be able to do when it comes to communication. Then you can create your training based on those behavioral indicators, so that you know you're training people to act in the way that you've identified will be important in your organization.
2) Another way is to map those competencies and identify which ones are priority competencies across the organization. That is, identify the things you want to focus on as an organization and get better at as an organization. Those priority competencies can become opportunities for a comprehensive training program.
2) How can a small organization get started with Learning and Development?
A lot of times, the smaller the organization, the less likely they are to create custom training. And so I would recommend a couple of things for smaller organizations.
1) First, it's still important to know what skills are valuable to your nonprofit.
Therefore, there is a benefit to creating a custom competency model, even when you're a smaller organization, because you're identifying what skills are needed to be successful, no matter where a person sits in the organization.
That impacts hiring practices, how you onboard staff, developing staff over time, and career pathing. So competency models are a great place to start.
2) Next, what I would recommend is doing some sort of self-assessment for staff.
This can be informal, where they're reflecting and thinking about what their strengths are, and what skills they want to leverage over time. Or, this can be formal with a 360 assessment or an independent assessment that is hosted by a vendor.
What that does is it allows the individual to see what skills they need to focus on moving forward.
3) Then, you can identify training opportunities. For the smaller organizations, I would recommend looking outside of your organization. So instead of bringing in custom training, see what kind of training is already available to purchase.
3) What are the greatest challenges for contemporary trainers, especially in turbulent times?
Two particular challenges came to mind as I was thinking about this question.
1) The first is the amount of change that's happening in the world and in the organizations, and the amount of change fatigue that most staff learners are experiencing.
So when I think about this, it becomes really important as a facilitator, to recognize that your learners are experiencing a lot of change.
There's a lot of uncertainty even in the workplace.
That change fatigue impacts the way they show up to your training. And so if you are a trainer, being able to facilitate well and being able to build that trust is going to be really, really important.
2) The other thing that comes to mind is the amount of divisiveness that we're seeing in the world today.
I think that again goes back to strong facilitation. Facilitators have to recognize that people aren’t always going to agree with the conversations that they bring up in the training space. And they're not necessarily going to politely disagree or ignore the fact that they don't agree. People are going to speak up.
So being able to facilitate conversations, even when people don't agree, is going to be really important.
4) How can we make a large cohort of learners feel more intimate?
So if you are doing any kind of synchronous training, relationships are a huge benefit of bringing people together in a space, whether virtual or in person.
And so when you have a large cohort of learners, it can be difficult to make that space feel more intimate where those relationships are able to be built.
So in this case, I recommend using smaller groups throughout the training so that they are getting to know each other and working together in those smaller groups where relationships can be formed.
I also recommend taking things offline, so to speak. And so if it's a virtual training or even an in-person training, what can you do to include some social learning, some peer learning, so that they're learning from each other outside of the “class?”
It can be one-on-one; it can be small groups; it can be online discussion boards. But how are you bringing people into community and facilitating that in a way that it does feel more intimate?
5) What role does ongoing competency assessment play in ensuring that staff are equipped with the necessary skills to succeed?
I've talked about competency assessments in the past.
If you want to know more about competency assessments, listen to my past episodes below:
Episode 11: Three Types of Assessments that Pay Off for Your Hybrid Workforce
Episode 12: The Secret to Making Leadership Assessments Work
Episode 41: Not Sure Where to Start with Personalized Learning? Three Tips for Nonprofits
Competency assessment is great because it gives you a few different benefits.
1) You can use it as a before and after.
So an individual can take a competency assessment, go through training or a set of trainings, and then they can take another assessment after that allows them to see for themselves any growth they've had.
2) It allows staff to create an individual development plan based on the assessment results.
So they complete the competency assessment and then they're able to tailor what they want to focus on in their individual development plan. And so that helps them make sure that they're developing the right skills that they feel they need moving forward.
So you can use a competency assessment, and even that individual development plan to allow the staff person to really personalize their learning experience.
3) The last thing I would say is coaching.
So you can do a competency assessment and then provide ongoing coaching so that staff are being equipped with the necessary skills to succeed.
That ongoing coaching is a great way to help fill in the learning so that whatever they're picking up, either in formal or informal ways, they're able to really apply that to the job.
So ongoing competency assessment definitely plays a role in equipping staff with the necessary skills to succeed.
6) How does email training really work?
I have created email training in the past, and it's always a little bit of a question mark if you aren't familiar with what it is. So let me give you a high-level summary of what email training is.
So I think of email training more as just-in-time training.
What I like to do is to create the objectives for the emails that are going to get created and then identify the topics that are associated with those objectives. And then identify the resources that are going to be helpful for that just-in-time reminder, just-in-time tool, or just-in-time training. That will allow your staff to do whatever those objectives are more effectively, and apply them on the job.
So for example, an email might include a video of someone else in the organization talking about something that they did, how it worked, and what they learned. An email might include a link to a checklist that has been created and will help them do their job better. It might be a link to a blog post that is just out there in the world and you feel like it's a really good example or a really good tutorial.
So those emails are created, and they're sequenced over a period of time. So it could be over a few months, or it could be over a year. It really depends.
I've seen organizations do this well with onboarding. So maybe there's a 90-day onboarding. And the emails are scheduled to go out within that 90 days.
You could also do this as a year-long training so that you're continually reinforcing something that they've already learned or something that they're supposed to be doing in their role.
7) What strategies can be employed to ensure that training is not only informative, but also engaging and interactive?
I typically break training down into three areas.
1) Make it relevant.
This means it's aligned with your organizational strategy. So what is it that your organization is trying to achieve? And then what do people need to be able to do to help you achieve that goal.
It's also aligned to the learner’s job. So it's relevant to what they're doing now or what you need them to do in the future. And then related to that, it's actionable. So you're focused on the action or the behavior that you need your learners to take.
The entire experience is created around that behavior or that action rather than on knowledge itself, because knowledge doesn't equal behavior change. So when I say make it relevant, those are the things that I'm talking about.
2) Make it meaningful.
That means that it's not just strategic, but it's compassionately human centered. So really tapping into your learner's experience.
What is their day to day experience?
What goes well for them?
What's challenging for them?
What barriers do they face?
What skills and experiences are they bringing to the training and how can you leverage those and build on those?
How can you use the learning experience to meet deeper human needs, like connection, like trust, like psychological safety? There's often ways to do that within a synchronous experience. And that's also part of making it meaningful.
3) Make it fun.
Everybody has a different definition of fun. So I don't use that word lightly. But what I mean by this is to do the unexpected. People remember things that are unexpected.
So virtually, this could look like turn cameras on, turn cameras off activities. This could be improv, or play-based training.
I have two great episodes on this:
Episode 07: Do THIS and You Will Never Have a Boring Virtual Training Again with Melissa Dinwiddie
Episode 36: How Nonprofit Learning and Development Leaders Can Use Play to Create Organizational Change
This can be done in person or this can be done virtually. There's always an opportunity to do something unexpected. It makes it so that people remember.
What strategies can you employ to make it not just informative, but also engaging and interactive, make it relevant, make it meaningful, and make it fun?
To hear the full conversation I had on the Learning for Good Podcast, scroll all the way up and tune into episode 49.
The Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective
Do you wish you could connect with other nonprofit learning and development leaders?
I know what it feels like to want someone to bounce ideas off of and to learn from, someone who really understands you and your work. Imagine if you could have a simple way to meet people in the field, ask questions, and share information.
That's why I created the Nonprofit Learning and Development Collective – so nonprofit L&D, talent management, and DEI leaders can connect with each other quickly and easily in a virtual space.
When you join this community, you will walk away with a new, diverse, and powerful network – and a sounding board for your staff development needs.
So if you're ready to exchange ideas and collaborate with your peers, come join the Nonprofit L&D Collective.
