CHAPTER 17 Reinforcement for Different Training Types
Can I use The 7 Principles for all types of training?” is a question we sometimes hear. Maybe you wonder the same thing. The answer is simple: “Yes.” However, each training type has need for a specific type of reinforcement program. In this chapter, we will discuss ten different training types and their specific reinforcement approaches.
TRAINING TYPES
Before you know how to reinforce your training, you have to know what type of training you’re providing your learners. Here is a quick overview of common training programs:
Soft skills.
Technical/knowledge.
Cultural programs.
Awareness training (such as safety).
Certification.
On-boarding.
Coaching.
Refresher training (retraining).
Educational (such as MBA).
Compliance training.
Compare yours training types with this list. Are any training types you use missing? Look at Table 17.1 to understand each training type. Table 17.2 shows where you should focus your attention in the reinforcement program for each type of training.
Soft skills are a cluster of productive personality traits that characterize one’s relationships in a milieu. These skills can include social graces, communication abilities, personal habits, cognitive or emotional empathy, time management, teamwork, and leadership traits.
Technical/Knowledge
Technical training teaches the skills and knowledge needed to design, develop, implement, maintain, support, or operate a particular technology or related application, product, or service.
Cultural Programs
Culture training is mostly focused on awareness, accountability, and culture change. Implementing and adopting positive culture change often aligns with high-level business goals.
Awareness Training
Awareness training increases learners’ understanding of the importance of a certain topic and the adverse consequences of not implementing it.
Certification
Training and a formal procedure by which you assess and verify the attributes, characteristics, quality, qualification, or “status” of your learners. Attests to knowledge in writing by issuing a certificate.
On-Boarding
On-boarding is introducing a new learner to the organization and its procedures, rules and regulations, and the new job. It is often short and informative.
Coaching
Coaching is focused on the relationship between a coach and the person being coached. The coach is there to help someone meet a specific goal. Once the goal is met, the relationship is usually terminated.
Refresher Training (Retraining)
The purpose of refresher training is to acquaint learners with the latest methods of performing their jobs and improve their efficiency. Often used to avoid obsolescence or when newly created jobs are given to existing learners.
Educational
Education is all about learning theory. Traditionally, education may reinforce knowledge in which you already have a foundation. Training gives your learners the skills to do something, rather than just know about something. In educational programs the learners develop a foundation upon which to build skills
Compliance Training
Compliance training refers to the process of educating your learners on laws, regulations, and company policies that apply to their day-to-day job responsibilities.
Some of the reinforcement principles are better suited to some training programs than others. Table 17.2 offers suggestions for which principles to focus on as you design a reinforcement program for the training you’ve presented to learners. Where gamification and scenarios are mentioned, refer to the corresponding sections later in this chapter for an explanation of how to incorporate these into your reinforcement program.
Because soft skills can be very broad, spend enough time to determine the reinforcement objectives.
Technical/Knowledge
Spend relatively more time on knowledge components.
Provide your learners with additional learning materials.
Check regularly whether your learners are comfortable with their current knowledge levels.
Consider a longer reinforcement program (12 months) to guarantee technical updates.
Integrate a technical library.
Pay a lot of attention to Principle 6, “Follow the Reinforcement Flow.”
You can use gamification to drive engagement.
Cultural Programs
Spend at least 50 percent of your time on awareness.
Challenge the learner with the “Why?” questions.
Emphasize what the learners can do, and apply the new culture.
In Principle 2, “Close the 5 Reinforcement Gaps,” emphasize the Motivation Gap.
Use Principle 3, “Create Measurable Behavior Change,” to gain insights on opinions. Avoid building an assessment tool.
Use Principle 5, “Create Friction and Direction,” to inspire the learners to make connections across all culture topics.
This reinforcement program may be less suitable for gamification.
Use lots of scenarios for learners to reflect on.
Awareness Training
The reinforcement objectives can be topics that your learners may not use or situations that never occur. But if they occur, the knowledge and skills they learn must be accurate. Therefore, use lots of “what-if” scenarios.
If you use the scenarios, pay a lot of attention to Principle 6, “Follow the Reinforcement Flow.”
Consider a longer, more adaptive reinforcement program (12 months) and let the learners select topics of interest.
See also reinforcement suggestions for culture programs.
Use Principle 4, “Provide the Perfect Push and Pull,” to guarantee continued communication with your learners.
Is the organization culture suitable for gamification? For this reinforcement program a team leader board can be motivational. Keep the learners engaged and stimulate talking to each other.
Certification
In this reinforcement program, your focus is on assessments. Use Principle 4, “Provide the Perfect Push and Pull,” and focus on Pull.
No need to provide additional learning materials.
Create a continuous measurement program. Instead of one set of 25 questions all at once, spread them out over five weeks.
Use check questions to discover learners’ real knowledge levels. Avoid asking the same questions. If you do, you are not measuring knowledge, but whether learners remember the correct answers. Your reinforcement program should not focus on remembering.
On-Boarding
In this reinforcement program the percentage of time spent on awareness can be minimal. The program needs to provide information and an explanation.
Use additional information for your learners.
Consider a longer reinforcement program (six months) and let the learners continuously work on all topics.
Taper off the frequency after three months, but keep measuring.
Use Principle 4, “Provide the Perfect Push and Pull,” to track learners’ progress and understanding of all new items.
This program may be not suitable for gamification, but reward completion.
Coaching
This reinforcement program is not a soft skill program where your learners need to apply coaching skills. This is a program to reinforce a coach who coaches other people.
The frequency of your reinforcement messages can be less frequent. Perhaps one message every two weeks.
Close all gaps using Principle 2, “Close the 5 Reinforcement Gaps.”
Use Principles 3, “Create Measurable Behavior Change,” to let the coaches think and evaluate their roles and added value.
Use Principle 5, “Create Friction and Direction,” to let coaches think.
This program is not suitable for gamification.
Refresher Training (Retraining)
This reinforcement program is a good place for assessments and summaries of learning content.
Emphasize the Why? in Principle 1, “Master the 3 Phases of Behavior Change.”
Use Principle 4, “Provide the Perfect Push and Pull” to gain insights about what their current levels of knowledge are.
Pay a lot of attention to Principle 6, “Follow the Reinforcement Flow.”
The use of realistic scenarios will drive learner engagement.
This reinforcement program is suitable for gamification.
Educational
In this reinforcement program, you can use pre- and post-reinforcement.
Use Principle 3, “Create Measurable Behavior Change,” to measure how solid your learners’ “foundations” are before developing their skills levels.
Pay a lot of attention to Principle 6, “Follow the Reinforcement Flow.”
This reinforcement program is suitable for gamification.
Compliance Training
Emphasize the Awareness in Principle 1, “Master the 3 Phases of Behavior Change,” and explain the “Why?”
Close all gaps in Principle 2, “Close the 5 Reinforcement Gaps.”
Use Principle 5, “Create Friction and Direction,” to avoid a “check off” reinforcement program.
Consider a longer, more adaptive reinforcement program (12 months), and let the learners select topics of interest in addition to the required topics.
In this reinforcement program, you can use “what-if” scenarios.
Stimulate social friction while using Principle 5, “Create Friction and Direction.”
MOVING BEYOND THE PRINCIPLES
The 7 Principles are the framework on which to build your reinforcement program. They influence your goals, and you can help your learners to achieve your goals by engaging them through Principles 4, 5, and 6. In addition to the design of your reinforcement program, gamification and scenarios influence engagement. Here are some ways to improve learners’ engagement through gaming elements and suggestions for how to use the scenarios for maximum effect.
Gamification
Gamification is the process of adding game-like elements to your reinforcement program to encourage learners’ participation. Gamification is different from playing a full-fledged game. Rather, learners engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome and behavior change. As Kees says, “With jumping frogs or Tetris, you don’t change behavior.”
Gamification, on the other hand, uses elements of games such as points and leader boards, high-score tables that indicate an individual or team’s performance. Your learners can earn points that can be used to indicate status.
If you decide to use gamification for your reinforcement program, use elements that support the desired behavior change. As a reinforcement specialist, you know that reinforcement messages drive behavior change. Your gamification can focus on those messages. If your learners follow the series of messages you designed, they can collect points. If they don’t earn points, they lose, not only the game, but also when applying they concepts in the training.
Each type of reinforcement message has a certain impact on behavior change. A welcome message has less impact then a self-evaluation; a general knowledge question probably will have less effect than a specific question on a key element.
The process is simple: Give each of your reinforcement messages a score between 1 and 100. A score of 1 means less impact on the behavior change and 100 means maximum impact on behavior change. Keep the scoring structure the same across the messages. Use Table 17.3 as a guideline. Feel free to create your own measurement schedule.
Once you assign a weight to every reinforcement message, your “game” can start. If a learner completes an assignment within an acceptable time frame, let’s say 48 hours, he or she collects the assigned points. For example, let’s say you scheduled a quiz question with the weight of 80 points in the second week on a Wednesday. If a learner answers this question within 48 hours after receiving the message, he or she earns the maximum number of points, in this case 80. If he or she completes this question after two weeks, fewer points are awarded, in this case 20.
The points that a learner receives are based on Principle 6, “Follow the Reinforcement Flow.” The better a learner follows the design, the higher the score. For the “game,” all scores are added up and you can reward the learner with the highest score, who followed your design best. You can also add bonus points if a quiz question is answered correctly or if a learner completed the assignment within 24 hours. All is driven by that series of messages you create based on The 7 Principles of Reinforcement.
If you have multiple learners who follow your reinforcement program and all of them collect points, you can set up a leader board. This allows you to rank the learners or to combine scores and rank teams or departments. Based on this ranking, you can appoint winners and give prizes or incentives. This type of leader board can drive participation.
Reinforcement programs with a gamification strategy motivate learners and drive more engagement. We see that three out of four learners in a gamified environment are motivated to invest more effort in learning and applying what they learn. However, make sure that the gamification you select fits the organization culture. Not every culture or function is suitable for gamification. On the contrary, it can be counterproductive.
Scenarios
Scenarios are used in many reinforcement programs and can be very effective, especially in Culture, Awareness, or Compliance reinforcement programs. Simply telling your learners what to do does not always work. Learning from real-life examples maximizes learner engagement and knowledge retention.
Learners often retain information better through a story or a scenario that they can relate to than from lectures and speeches. Stories inspire and motivate learners, who then try to emulate the characters in the stories. Scenarios or role plays place your learners in realistic situations and urge them to use skills and information they have acquired to respond to what is happening.
If you consider using scenarios, your will need to do two things:
Write concrete scenarios that are both believable and effective.
Use questions that are effective for your reinforcement program.
Use the following guidelines to create believable and effective scenarios:
Understand your learners: You must understand your learners and know their needs and expectations. Know the skills they already possess, the extent of challenge that can be given to them, and the outcome that they want. Not understanding the learners might result in a scenario too boring or too complex to achieve your desired results.
Create relevant situations: A scenario is essentially a story with characters and situations, usually accompanied by questions that challenge your learners to respond. Make your scenarios as real as possible. Unless the learners find them believable and relevant, they will not relate to them. Only a realistic situation can engage learners and help them retain useful information.
Follow reinforcement flow: If you follow the reinforcement flow, your scenario should motivate the learners to action. A scenario must pose a problem for your learners to respond to by recalling their previous knowledge. Thus, an effective scenario motivates learners to believe that they have the necessary knowledge and skills to overcome any problems they encounter.
Challenge learners: Only when learners face some sort of challenging situation and must think of a solution will a scenario be effective. The best way to write scenarios is to present a problem, provide some clues, and then provide the challenge. Your challenge should not overwhelm your learners or they may not put any effort into finding a solution.
Use the S.A.F.E. method: As for your reinforcement messages, use the 8th-grade reading level, average of 15 words per sentence, and use an average of 1.6 syllables per word. It also makes a scenario interesting and informal, so learning happens in a natural way.
Employ visual graphics: A scenario becomes much more effective when it is presented with visuals. Use mnemonics techniques, for example.
Now that you have created believable scenarios, write questions you can use to challenge your learners. Remember to use questions they cannot find answers to online. “What-if” questions are effective, such as:
What if. . .?
What might happen if. . .?
What could you do to. . .?
How can you. . .?
What is the result if. . .?
Follow the Focus element of the S.A.F.E. method from Chapter 16 to draft strong scenario questions.
Knowledge vs. knowing
In Table 17.2, I emphasized knowledge in the reinforcement programs for Technical, Certification, and Refresher trainings. I used knowledge—not knowing—in the table intentionally because there is a difference between knowing and knowledge.
Knowledge is being able to talk about a topic for an extended period of time using complete and logical sentences. Knowing falls more into the memory category. For example, I know what the weather is like outside, but I can’t have an in-depth conversation about weather.
You want to measure knowledge, not memory, in your reinforcement program. For that reason, don’t use the same questions that were used in training to prove knowledge retention. Use different questions to measure learners’ level of knowledge.
