Wednesday
Oct262005
367 - Self-Service Learning Case from CLO of Cathay Pacific
October 26, 2005
Learning TRENDS by Elliott Masie - Oct 26, 2005.
#367 - Updates on Learning, Business & Technology.
51,598 Readers - http://www.masie.com - The MASIE Center.
Learning 2005: Oct 30 - Nov 2 - Orlando - 5 Days Away!
1. Self-Service Learning Case from Graham Higgins, CLO, Cathay Pacific.
2. Halloween Reception - Learning Trick or Treat for UNICEF.
1. Self-Service Learning Plea from CLO, Cathay Pacific: Here is a passionate case for the concept of Self-Service in Learning from Graham Higgins, the CLO of Cathay Pacific Airlines, the winner of our Learning Pioneer Award. He posted it this morning on our LearningWiki blog for the Learning 2005 Event:
(Hong Kong - October 26th)- Cathay Pacific and my team are honored to receive the Learning Pioneer Award. I would like to offer some thoughts on this whole self help culture topic though, the following have helped us navigate our way though this over the past decade.
It's not the trainer's fault. I hear a lot of criticism going towards trainers who cannot stop training and therefore get in the way of learners working on their own agenda, at their own pace and taking responsibility for themselves.
It's not their fault, we hire, train, and reward trainers to do that; more significantly the environment they come into is geared up for programmes, batches and imparting what is known already.
So let's look at environments for self help.
Babies do not normally need training to move around, the environment they come into is built to encourage that kind of development. As long as they are not tightly wrapped to prevent movement they will experiment and discover for them selves how to move. Then when sideways movement can't reach the thing they want they will develop the forward option. When they see that the really interesting stuff is up out of reach then standing is gained, it also helps that people around them are showing those kinds of capabilities already. Babies help themselves to develop capability because the environment is designed for that development. So what does your environment at work encourage?
Are your people tightly wrapped with protocol, rules, authority levels, and access to opportunity?
It's not just about training and learning.
In Cathay Pacific, as I'm sure in many other organisations, we have taken every employee touch point we can and redesign it for self-help. Choice and self-selection of benefits, on line paycheck, self serve personal information updates, personal responsibility for creating your appraisal form, planning tools to work out your career direction, on line rosters for crew, eBuy system for purchasing goods etc etc, it's about the whole employee experience.
The environment needs to offer challenge and support! In the home the newly mobile youngster discovers the stairs - a stretch goal with some risk. Smart parents remove the barriers and lay out some cushions when they decide that some support in trial and error is better than protection from failure. Challenge without support can be experienced as abandonment, support without challenge builds a �mother knows best' environment. I still meet adults who can't swim or ride a bike because it was deemed to dangerous, and I still meet adults who are waiting for the company to decide when they are ready for promotion.
So how to move forward?
We started in the mid 90s with self help flexible benefits, you choose how to spend your benefit dollar value. From those who preferred to be looked after we had open hostility, we had taken away our care for them. 2 years later it was just the way we did things and it was smart, convenient, and gave people some control that they valued.
Self-serve however if it is on line needs to be designed with the same insight and investment as a commercial website. I have been in conversations with software vendors where they reassured me that the interface is not that intuitive but they will provide user training to make it work. No No No.
That really is abandonment, if your customers feel that your site is hard to use they wont use it, why make it difficult for employees to self help.
If customers feel that your site is there to push your choice of product they will go elsewhere, why should we design employee processes that don't give choice, control and ease of access. Oh yes, its because we prefer to train people in the things we want them to know when we want, how we want, and at the pace we want.
The biggest shift to move forward is from training to assessment of capability.
A couple of years ago I was asked to put together a plan to put 10,000 employees through seminars on our new government legislation on data privacy. The key questions were of course about what we wanted to get across, how many people would be in a batch, and how we would record attendance.
Hmm, perhaps a better approach was possible.
Someone senior had heard of eLearning so suggested that it would be more effective to automate the instruction with a self teach package.
Hmm, right direction but not quite. Automating a poor process can make it cheaper but it's still a poor process.
The step forward was to agree that if someone could take an assessment and demonstrate the capability to apply the new knowledge to his or her job, then it was not necessary to show that they had attended a seminar or completed the package.
How they got that knowledge didn't matter, we provided access to self teach tailored on line learning options for different work streams, copies of the policy, descriptions of cases, links to external websites, and email access to the in-house experts.
10,000 employees, and we hit 96% success within a couple of months. The main failure points? Some people could not remember their login in Ids and used their friend's, no track or trace for them. Back to the design of easy access.
So, build an environment that gives access and offers people the opportunity to stretch into self responsibility. I can still go back to crawling if I want to, and on a bad day that has real attractions.
Graham Higgins, Cathay Pacific
2. Lunch with CLO's & Halloween Reception: In just six days, we start Learning 2005. Normally, all of the events would be "fixed" months before, but in an Extreme Learning model, good opportunities come around days (or even hours before the start of the learning experience and you adapt with velocity!). Here are 2 elements that we just added to Learning
2005 (Oct 30 to Nov 2):
* Lunch with Chief Learning Officers: We have had a flurry of last minute registrations from Chief Learning Officers and we wanted to provide an opportunity to build an interaction between them and our 1,500 participants. So, at Tuesday's Lunch, we will be interviewing a half dozen CLO's of corporations and government agencies about their views of the future and the role of the learning function.
* Halloween Reception and Trick or Treat: On Monday afternoon, our Learning CONSORTIUM will be hosting a Halloween Reception for all of our registrants with drinks, food and festivities from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. And, in the spirit of the event, we will have the children present doing a Trick or Treat for funds for UNICEF.
While we know the time is closing in on the event, in our just-in-time world we are getting dozens of additional last minute registrations every day. There are inexpensive flights, hotel rooms and we have a Learning BackPack ready for you. Come join us at Learning 2005 on Sunday. Go to http://www.learning2005.com
#367 - Updates on Learning, Business & Technology.
51,598 Readers - http://www.masie.com - The MASIE Center.
Learning 2005: Oct 30 - Nov 2 - Orlando - 5 Days Away!
1. Self-Service Learning Case from Graham Higgins, CLO, Cathay Pacific.
2. Halloween Reception - Learning Trick or Treat for UNICEF.
1. Self-Service Learning Plea from CLO, Cathay Pacific: Here is a passionate case for the concept of Self-Service in Learning from Graham Higgins, the CLO of Cathay Pacific Airlines, the winner of our Learning Pioneer Award. He posted it this morning on our LearningWiki blog for the Learning 2005 Event:
(Hong Kong - October 26th)- Cathay Pacific and my team are honored to receive the Learning Pioneer Award. I would like to offer some thoughts on this whole self help culture topic though, the following have helped us navigate our way though this over the past decade.
It's not the trainer's fault. I hear a lot of criticism going towards trainers who cannot stop training and therefore get in the way of learners working on their own agenda, at their own pace and taking responsibility for themselves.
It's not their fault, we hire, train, and reward trainers to do that; more significantly the environment they come into is geared up for programmes, batches and imparting what is known already.
So let's look at environments for self help.
Babies do not normally need training to move around, the environment they come into is built to encourage that kind of development. As long as they are not tightly wrapped to prevent movement they will experiment and discover for them selves how to move. Then when sideways movement can't reach the thing they want they will develop the forward option. When they see that the really interesting stuff is up out of reach then standing is gained, it also helps that people around them are showing those kinds of capabilities already. Babies help themselves to develop capability because the environment is designed for that development. So what does your environment at work encourage?
Are your people tightly wrapped with protocol, rules, authority levels, and access to opportunity?
It's not just about training and learning.
In Cathay Pacific, as I'm sure in many other organisations, we have taken every employee touch point we can and redesign it for self-help. Choice and self-selection of benefits, on line paycheck, self serve personal information updates, personal responsibility for creating your appraisal form, planning tools to work out your career direction, on line rosters for crew, eBuy system for purchasing goods etc etc, it's about the whole employee experience.
The environment needs to offer challenge and support! In the home the newly mobile youngster discovers the stairs - a stretch goal with some risk. Smart parents remove the barriers and lay out some cushions when they decide that some support in trial and error is better than protection from failure. Challenge without support can be experienced as abandonment, support without challenge builds a �mother knows best' environment. I still meet adults who can't swim or ride a bike because it was deemed to dangerous, and I still meet adults who are waiting for the company to decide when they are ready for promotion.
So how to move forward?
We started in the mid 90s with self help flexible benefits, you choose how to spend your benefit dollar value. From those who preferred to be looked after we had open hostility, we had taken away our care for them. 2 years later it was just the way we did things and it was smart, convenient, and gave people some control that they valued.
Self-serve however if it is on line needs to be designed with the same insight and investment as a commercial website. I have been in conversations with software vendors where they reassured me that the interface is not that intuitive but they will provide user training to make it work. No No No.
That really is abandonment, if your customers feel that your site is hard to use they wont use it, why make it difficult for employees to self help.
If customers feel that your site is there to push your choice of product they will go elsewhere, why should we design employee processes that don't give choice, control and ease of access. Oh yes, its because we prefer to train people in the things we want them to know when we want, how we want, and at the pace we want.
The biggest shift to move forward is from training to assessment of capability.
A couple of years ago I was asked to put together a plan to put 10,000 employees through seminars on our new government legislation on data privacy. The key questions were of course about what we wanted to get across, how many people would be in a batch, and how we would record attendance.
Hmm, perhaps a better approach was possible.
Someone senior had heard of eLearning so suggested that it would be more effective to automate the instruction with a self teach package.
Hmm, right direction but not quite. Automating a poor process can make it cheaper but it's still a poor process.
The step forward was to agree that if someone could take an assessment and demonstrate the capability to apply the new knowledge to his or her job, then it was not necessary to show that they had attended a seminar or completed the package.
How they got that knowledge didn't matter, we provided access to self teach tailored on line learning options for different work streams, copies of the policy, descriptions of cases, links to external websites, and email access to the in-house experts.
10,000 employees, and we hit 96% success within a couple of months. The main failure points? Some people could not remember their login in Ids and used their friend's, no track or trace for them. Back to the design of easy access.
So, build an environment that gives access and offers people the opportunity to stretch into self responsibility. I can still go back to crawling if I want to, and on a bad day that has real attractions.
Graham Higgins, Cathay Pacific
2. Lunch with CLO's & Halloween Reception: In just six days, we start Learning 2005. Normally, all of the events would be "fixed" months before, but in an Extreme Learning model, good opportunities come around days (or even hours before the start of the learning experience and you adapt with velocity!). Here are 2 elements that we just added to Learning
2005 (Oct 30 to Nov 2):
* Lunch with Chief Learning Officers: We have had a flurry of last minute registrations from Chief Learning Officers and we wanted to provide an opportunity to build an interaction between them and our 1,500 participants. So, at Tuesday's Lunch, we will be interviewing a half dozen CLO's of corporations and government agencies about their views of the future and the role of the learning function.
* Halloween Reception and Trick or Treat: On Monday afternoon, our Learning CONSORTIUM will be hosting a Halloween Reception for all of our registrants with drinks, food and festivities from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. And, in the spirit of the event, we will have the children present doing a Trick or Treat for funds for UNICEF.
While we know the time is closing in on the event, in our just-in-time world we are getting dozens of additional last minute registrations every day. There are inexpensive flights, hotel rooms and we have a Learning BackPack ready for you. Come join us at Learning 2005 on Sunday. Go to http://www.learning2005.com