Listening Alone is Not Learning

Dave Smith has been an Industrial Maintenance Electrician since 1975. He has taught maintenance, troubleshooting and safety courses to thousands of electricians in mines, mills, refineries, factories, plants, power stations and offshore platforms throughout North America and the Middle East. Dave is a hands-on guy and teache...

March 10 2010
By Dave Smith

We often conduct courses where out-of-town students bring their spouses and, well, it’s obvious their intent is not to learn but to enjoy themselves and their “break”.

As an employer, you send your people on courses to learn, not play, and while instructors are determined to teach, they cannot force anyone to actually learn. When your employee has been busy shopping and dining with his spouse, visiting long-lost friends or boozing, then your training dollar has been wasted.

Learning occurs when information is assimilated, understood, remembered and put to use. Good instructors will tell their students to take notes and ask questions, as this moves critical information from short- to long-term memory and, afterward, into understanding. Some students ignore this process and just watch and listen, respond to questions when they have to, and participate minimally.

Were we able to learn and gain understanding by simply watching or listening, we would all be geniuses after watching a little television or listening to the radio. The best auditory learners only retain 18% of what they hear; for the rest, information really does go in one ear and out the other—continuously flowing into, and spilling out of, short-term memory.

Some students return from a course to say they learned nothing. The person who has spent days in a classroom with a dedicated instructor—a subject-matter expert with years of experience—and learned nothing should be ashamed of himself.

Were this non-learner ever injured, you would have to prove he was qualified for the work he was doing. Qualification is a measurement of competence, and competence is a combination of knowledge, skills and experience. You send your people to training courses to become competent.

Certification means that a subject-matter expert from a certifying body has evaluated your person and is certain they are competent
and qualified for their work.

The path to certifying your employees must start with this clear expectation: you expect them to learn. Any good student knows the notes they scribbled over the course of the day must be refined; perhaps during the quiet of the evening, when they can absorb and assimilate the information they’ve received as they make sense of their notes.

Putting a subject-matter expert in front of a class is incredibly expensive but, done properly—with both effective instruction and learning—your return on investment will be measured in months, possibly weeks. Both training dollars and time are too valuable for either to be squandered by poor effort.

Students are usually asked to rate the training they received upon returning to work, but rarely is there an audit of the students. They should be expected to show their managers the notes they took. When a student’s notebook is blank, his mind will also be blank.

Try writing this into your company training policy: Upon returning to work, the student will give a 20-30 minute report of everything he learned at the course. Not only does this policy provide evidence of learning (or non-learning), but you will experience a quantum leap in your return on investment.

This may seem like a tall expectation, and some of your employees may complain they already work hard enough as it is. However, when that knowledge will protect them from injuring themselves or someone else—or is going to help them perform a task correctly—then you have to be as rigid with your learning policy as you are with your overall safety policy.

Upon developing this policy, a far greater percentage of the knowledge and skills you need for your endeavors will be attained and put into effective use and, more importantly, the investment you made into training your people will give your enterprise a distinct and measurable competitive advantage, including a safer workplace.

Until next time, be ready, be careful and be safe.