The Employee Training program is a program which purpose is to improve the overall effectiveness of the university’s enrollment and marketing management team. It is designed to achieve the following outcomes: increased time efficiency, profitability, low turnover, better teamwork, and job satisfaction. The program seeks to raise the employees’ marketing and enrollment skills to a higher level. Thus, the target audience will be the enrollment and management team.
There are several methods and approaches distinguished for meeting the program objective: work in small (3-10) and large (51-100) groups. The assignments for both are also various. The only problem is that approaches and assignments are effective while small group training cannot be applied to large ones and vice versa. The reason for such diversification consists of goals and objectives of learning tasks. Thus, the objective of small-group learning is to help employees translate their theoretical knowledge into practice. The educational conception for the large group is to make teamwork of employees more effective and beneficial. The role of the facilitator in group managing varies as well. In the small group, he acts as an academic advisor, in the large group facilitator fulfills the task in a collaborative format.
As the program seeks to improve the teamwork in the firm as well as to improve the decision-making and problem-solving skills, the only effective way to align the learning tasks with the learning objective is to choose appropriate training assignments and approaches. For small groups different kinds of practicing from on-the-job rotation or shadowing to role-playing are applicable. For a large group, another kind of tuition can be considered: the form of lectures with the use of audio-visual methods and PowerPoint presentations. Two last mentioned variants are additional but advisable. The specific character of tuition by means of the lecture has its own pitfalls: it does not allow to be ensured that all provided material would be remembered and applied into practice as it is required. Moreover, for effective training program outcome, several types of learners (those, who give preference to visual aids, such as graphics; auditory learners; reading-writing learners, and tactile learners) should be taken into account.
Of course, chosen learning tasks have their strong and weak sides. The use of role-playing and demonstration are strengths for a small group. As those two approaches are the most efficient, the weakness of learning tasks in a small group is ruled out. Considering the same question relating to a large group, it should be mentioned that the strength of the learning task here is learning more through the usage of various tuition techniques and appliances. The weakness consists in the impossibility of total control for the training process and the complicacy of training process organizing: all additional video and audio materials should be provided in doc. or HTML format.
The practicality of learning tasks to the outcomes and objectives is evident. For example, job rotation aids in developing an appreciation for the collective jobs of an environment. It also is a good way to see how the decisions made in one department affect the decisions of another department. I could use the job rotation as a way for teachers and administrators to understand the roles of each job. For example, a teacher could be Assistant Principal or Principal for the day. A principal could teach a class for a day.
This would foster a sharing of ideas as well as an invaluable look at the strengths and weaknesses of each position.
When decisions are made it will be based on knowing the environment in which people work. A learning contract is also a good tool that can be adapted because it helps with accountability and strategies for improvement.
In conclusion, I would like to say that any training program is effective if it is aimed at result.